At first, the descriptor “Unemployed, Age 34” had sounded almost like a criminal charge, but I’d gotten used to it soon enough.

“I said, you know, thank goodness it’s not autism,” Jenny said, so exuberantly that it took Marion a moment to register the joke.

On day fifty-one, a person on the radio said, For many Americans, this is the defining crisis of our lives, but all I had done that day was eat sugared mango slices and write a list.

There’s no end to the woes that mothers face come summer vacation.

When I learned of his transgression I threw myself into Dante and Shakespeare, seeking to understand the world that I had failed to see.

When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet.

Heft of fur and polyester, heft of muscle and blood. Noises commingled, that syncing of bodies real and otherwise.

It might have all begun days or weeks before that morning in early summer when the cigarette and the newspaper vendors at the train station reported that the soldiers were coming home.

That summer we had decided we were past caring.