Neil and Karen rise at seven, before their children and before his parents, and creep through the old beach house as quietly as possible, the sand on the kitchen linoleum sticking to their bare feet. On the porch, where no one will hear...
She came in late on a busy Friday evening. I wouldn’t have paid much attention to her if she hadn’t been blowing Gauloise smoke at me through sidelong, never-catch-me-looking-at-you kind of glances. I was pouring her Beam and Bud depth...
The idea was—when each of us boys in our family came of age—i.e., ten—my father was to take us on the Northcoast Limited back to Chicago and tell us the Facts of Life on the way.
I live alone 40 miles from Tucson and work at home translating movie scripts from German into English. Before this, for ten years, I worked at Farrar, Strauss in New York, handling German novels and film rights, which I parlayed into...
In 1979, when I was for two years an instructor at the University of New Hampshire, I had a student—a bright, anxious, but always attentive student—named Charles Fortunesky. He was taller than most of the others, and seemed to enjoy a comic...
he day Yolande ran away from home, never to return— never to return to Bellefleur Manor—was also the day of Germaine’s first birthday. But was there any connection between the two events. . . .?
The young man had just missed his previously-ticketed flight from LAX, but the ticket agent, a middle-aged woman with hair dyed a brilliant auburn color, managed to get him booked on the very next flight to Charlotte. The ticket agent wore...
