The Best American Short Stories® 2011 - Plot & Excerpts
Quarter-filled Mrs. Butterworth's bottle in living room, sandy sheets throughout, lingering smell. Or, Wanted: gullible tenant for small house, must possess appreciation for chipped pottery, mid-1960s abstract silk-screened canvases, mouse-nibbled books on Georgia O'Keeffe. Or, Available June 1—shithole. Instead, the posting on the website called the house at 55 Bayberry Street old and characterful and sunny, furnished, charming, on a quiet street not far from the college and not far from the ocean. Large porch; separate artist's studio. Not bad for the young married couple, then, Stony Badower and Pamela Graff, he thirty-nine, redheaded, soft-bellied, long-limbed, and beaky, a rare and possibly extinct waterbird; she blond and soft and hotheaded and German and sentimental. She looked like the plump-cheeked naughty heroine of a German children's book having just sawed off her own braids with a knife. Her expression dared you to teach her a lesson. Like many sentimentalists, she was estranged from her family.
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