"This is before the accident. No one is dead yet. Blood circulates just as it should, two ounces per pump of the heart." So begins the extraordinary story of Carter Clay, a Vietnam veteran at loose ends. Drunk and driving a van down a Florida highway, Clay smashes into the Alitz family: Joe and ...
A Father’s Day hike in the desert. Not long before the fateful trip to Florida. A piece of gneiss lay on the ground, and Joe picked it up and pointed to the mountains of gneiss that rose beyond the desert floor’s prickly complications of creosote bush, ocotillo and cholla, opuntia, mesquite, palo...
Jenny’s adorable twin daughters—four-year-olds adopted from China—had stopped to mess with the spout of water that I knew for certain had overshot the drinking fountain’s basin for at least ten years. Jenny waved to me while she called over her shoulder, “Come on, girls!” then she twirled her rai...
Mrs. Scotty Hillis had given Oyekan the journal not long after his arrival in the U.S. A sweet lady. Right to this very room she brought the green journal and three baked yams in a yellow dish. “I hope you’ll be happy here,” she had said. Apple of my eye. The blond-haired girl who sat next to Oye...
The rowboat could spend the winter on the bank, upside down, but not the inboard. While the crew worked, Franny and Rosamund drove the inboard over to Moore’s ramp where Brick waited with a car and a boat trailer. The three of them then drove the inboard into Moore’s big, echoey warehouse for the...