Fiction

The summer I was fourteen, I went to stay in a small house in Connecticut with my grandmother and grandfather. My mother sent me there, she told me years later, because I was driving her crazy, coming home late, shirking my chores, smoking my father’s cigarettes. She wanted me out of the house, she said,…

Traveling alone, Martin Grant came to a place on the coast in the rain. A place much as he had imagined-green and balmy, with bright splashes of winter flowers and fruit trees and tall palms that rustled in the wind. A place so far from the frozen cornfields of central Iowa that it made him…

A man walks into the gallery on a sunny afternoon carrying a fistful of golf clubs. I’m aware that there’s been some kind of traffic thing going on outside for the last few minutes, but I haven’t gone to the window to check it out-happens all the time around here. The softening silence of the…

Deborah set about making herself useful from the minute she woke up, and most mornings she was first in the household to rise. She pushed off the bedcovers, slipped into her robe, and washed in the bathroom, dressing cautiously and wincing if a zipper or button clanked against the closet door; her bed was in…

I was fourteen that summer. August brought heat I had never known, and during the dreamlike drought of those days, I saw my father for the first time in my life. The tulip poplars had faded to yellow before September came. There was no rain for weeks, and the people’s faces along Eleventh Street wore…

The outer Cape in mid-October. A new tilt to the earth and its altered angle to the sun make for a suffusing clarity. Hopper’s light. With the tourists gone, the beaches have been reclaimed by gulls, and the road that traverses the peninsula is bare. At this time of year, delays occur behind school buses….

Finding things had always been her greatest pleasure. She was not systematic, not one of the ones who bought the local paper and mapped out a route between all of Saturday’s yard sales. What she loved was driving down the road and coming upon the sign-a rough paper bag tacked to a telephone pole, or…

Daniel was already home. “Hi,” he yelled from the kitchen as Em wrestled her overcoat onto a hanger in the overfull front closet. What the hell was he doing? Breaking rocks on the counter? “Hi,” she yelled back, unwinding her scarf. “Annie call?” Wham. Wham. Wham. “No,” Daniel called back. Wham. “What are you doing?”…

Zip’s getting married,” Chase tells Marianne, coming into the bedroom and shutting the door behind him. “Oh. Who’s the woman?” “Her name is Flora Ritchie.” “And when is the baby due?” He narrows his eyes at her. “December.” He pulls his shirt off. “But it was still a bitchy thing to say.” “Sorry.” She watches…