Dead Girl

Outside the funeral home I heard a boy say that she had fallen off the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Broken her neck. She never knew what hit her, he said. I was 13. The dead girl had been a junior in high school.

The line to see her snaked around the building. Boys with long hair, wearing ties they’d borrowed from their fathers, and girls with thick blue eyeshadow smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. Someone passed a bottle of Jack. There were no adults there, just very old kids.

She almost looked like she was sleeping, except that she was too still. There was a puffiness to her face that didn’t seem quite right. They had dressed her for the prom; the crinoline sleeves of her gown like poofs of pink cotton candy. Some kids prayed, but I couldn’t. I just stared at the roses in her corsage.

Corner Store

When you walked into Rocco’s the first thing you noticed was the smell. All Italian stores smell this way, at least the real ones, like warm cheese and cured meats. These smells still transport me to my old neighborhood, where the houses stood just feet apart and mothers hollered from their porches.

Rocco’s was owned by an older couple, originally from Sicily. Their son was a doctor and they had a newspaper clipping about him under glass at the counter. Sometimes on weekends you’d see him there, wearing a stained white apron at the deli.

The freezer was in the back. There were rabbits wrapped in thick butcher paper, whole chickens, veal and geese. But the best things were the ices: little cardboard cups of joy that came in a rainbow of flavors. For a quarter you could get one, then sit out front eating it with a wooden spoon.

Cat in the Wall

“How’d he get in there?” said Amy, peering into the opening in the basement wall with her hands cupped around her eyes.

“Got me,” I said, taking a look. Barney, our 18-pound Maine Coon, peered up at me with his yellow eyes. The cat had squeezed his massive frame through an opening in the wall that an animal half his size would have had trouble with. He was trapped.

“What are we going to do?” said Amy. “We can’t just leave him there.”

A metallic aroma, the scent of panic, perfumed the damp cellar air. She was right. We couldn’t leave him. But we wouldn’t get him out without tearing down the wall, and we were only summer tenants.

The cat let out a mournful meow.

“Barney’s going to die!” Amy cried.

So I brushed the tears away from her little cheeks and grabbed the hammer from the toolbox.

Magic Show

“Come on! It’s starting!” Greg, my neighbor, hollered from the sidewalk.

“What’s starting?” I said. Behind him, groups of kids hurried down the street.

We’d moved to the neighborhood just weeks before. I was shy; a bookworm, waiting for school to start. Greg was the only kid I’d met.

“The magic show!” said Greg, exasperated. “At Mr. Hale’s house!”

At the end of the Hales’ dirt driveway, rows of kids were seated on the grass.

White-haired and very thin, Mr. Hale wore a black top-hat and tails. In his hand he gripped a wand, producing doves from an urn. He asked for a volunteer to be sawed in half. I raised my hand. No one breathed.

“Just relax,” Mr. Hale whispered. “There’s nothing to it.” I got into the box and held my breath.

A collective gasp went up. And when I emerged in one piece, I was a star.

Ice Cream Truck

You still see them in the mill cities: ice cream trucks trawl the neighborhoods like hulking beasts seeking kids with loose change. Their knife-sharp melodies perforate our thick summer evenings like an ice pick passes through butter.

When I was a kid, that music was a call to run, to beg your mother for a dollar and hurry into the street. Today hardly anyone comes.

Our ice cream truck is yellow. Cheerful decals decorate its sides. The driver, a slender Vietnamese man, speaks little English but smiles as he passes. The speakers on his truck blare “Silent Night” and “Easter Parade” because he’s unaware, or perhaps doesn’t care, that the songs are out of season. We joke that he got the soundtrack cheap, but in our neighborhood those tunes have become the soundtrack of our after-supper-time summer nights.

Alone, our Asian ice cream man rolls on, sometimes long into October.

Crazy Ed

Usually when you saw him he was pushing a battered grocery cart loaded with cast-off pine boards and cardboard boxes down the sidewalk. He always wore a skirt, and sometimes women’s shoes: doubly odd when you considered his men’s flannel shirt and full beard.

Back then we didn’t know about post traumatic stress disorder or cross-dressers or mental illness, so we just called him “Crazy Ed.”

“Hey look,” someone would say as Ed’s cart squeaked past, “Crazy Ed’s got an old fender from the junkyard!”

Ed didn’t make much sense when he talked, and sometimes kids were mean, but he never seemed to notice.

He’d go to the coffee shop downtown and slap his $0.50 down, mostly pennies and nickels, telling anyone who’d listen about the people he knew in the Army. Then, instead of a tip, he’d leave a matchbook or a few pebbles and be on his way.

Old Boy

His smile is more yacht party than business meeting as he greets me with a loose handshake, the mild crinkling around his blue eyes the only evidence of his age. My senior by at least a few years, the way he runs his fingers through his sandy hair reminds me of a self-conscious boy.

We talk business—he’s in charge after all—but the conversation quickly drifts to his children’s prep school and his own days at Deerfield. They just put a new roof on the family house on Nantucket.

When I bring the subject back to the matter at hand he reclines in his chair. He’s clearly comfortable in his blue blazer. His shirt is unbuttoned at the neck.

He seems preoccupied for a moment and says, “I’ll have Ann draw up the papers. Let’s get some lunch.”

I realize then that he had intended to agree all along.

Tattoo Artist

When he finally stands I notice that he’s hunched in the shoulders, his tall frame bent inward from decades of huddling over living bodies. An elastic bandage circles his wrist, its tendons long ago frayed by the vibrating gun. Like slender roots, strands of gray invade his long beard. Only his eyes, clear and smiling, betray his cleverness.

The walls of the tiny shop are covered with his artwork: powerful Samurai warriors holding aloft drawn swords, magnificent lotuses, birds-of-paradise on the wing. An air conditioner gurgles above the front door. The scents of stale coffee, wet ink and fresh blood hang in the air.

He returns smelling of tobacco. As he contemplates my arm, the music of an unknown concerto drifts from the radio, and for the first time I understand that it’s not a tattoo he’s etched into my skin. It’s part of me I didn’t know was there.

Farm House

When I step onto the porch I can tell that things haven’t been well. Peeling paint and sagging floorboards are all that’s left of the spot where we once had so many good times. Inside, the kitchen walls are worn away, revealing slats of wood and crumbling plaster.

My friend stands at the stove frying potatoes, her toddler son clasped to her hip. It’s been too long since I’ve seen her.

The dog is gone, the yard choked with weeds, the old truck a rusting hulk in the driveway.

“So how have you been?” I can’t think of what else to say.

My friend smiles a crooked smile. She sits down at the kitchen table and lets out a heavy sigh. “Things could be worse,” she says, pointing to the fireplace where several bricks have come loose. “By the time the bank takes it they’ll have to knock it down.”

Junk Man

Jimmy “Two Wheels”—a name he’d picked up in the Army that he couldn’t seem to shake—inched his orange Dodge pick-up down Collier Street. Lined with stately old homes, it had the some of the best picking in town come trash day.

Bob, Jimmy’s retriever, sat in the passenger seat, upright like a person, as Jimmy pulled over at number 629. Out front was an old three-speed Schwinn, a 1960s model, with a black frame and white-wall tires. He’d had one just like it when he was ten.

Energized, Jimmy hopped out of the Dodge and snatched the old bike. The chain was rusted stiff but it didn’t matter. He had everything he needed to fix it.

Jimmy tossed the bicycle into the back of the truck alongside the stacks of old hubcaps and bundles of wire he collected for scrap. He whistled a tune all the way home.

Orchard

Ellie hiked the grassy hill into the orchard, where she and her brothers played as kids. The leaves had gone with the November rain, the apple trees gnarled, black claws against the pewter sky. Under her left arm was the plastic box from the funeral home.

Bill wanted to spring for the urn in the catalog, but their father would have thought it frivolous. He’d asked Ellie spread his ashes among the Roxburys and Pippins, the antique trees he’d spent his last 20 years tending like infants.

At the crest of the hill Ellie saw the entire orchard, all of it hers and her brothers’ now. Inside the house the lights flickered on. The funeral guests had gone, leaving behind lasanga and sympathy cards.

In the heirloom grove, Ellie pried off the lid. Like gray sand, she spread her father’s ashes around the trees like fertilizer, nourishment for his apples.

Coffee House

A university couple sat on recycled kitchen chairs at Martin’s Coffee House—once an old machine shop—studying Russian literature. Their heads bowed toward one another’s cups.

He’d be graduating soon, just weeks, and she hadn’t yet told him: every minute she spent without him drained her soul dry like Mohave sand.

How could she say it? He was older. Brilliant. His girlfriend was stunning.

The tattooed barista steamed organic milk. She bit her lip. Across the table her friend—were they just friends?—looked up from his book and smiled.

Feeling courageous, she reached out for the back of his hand. She opened her mouth to speak.

The flyers on the wall fluttered when the door opened. One of his friends—out of breath—said he was late for something. He’d have to go.

Alone, she remembered his brown eyes.

“Dear, Charlie,” she wrote. And the barista steamed on.

Autocomplete

His mind racing, Martin stared at his laptop. A swell of nausea washed over his insides. He’d hit “send” without checking the address. His wife’s and Maria’s names both began with M.

His tie loose around his damp collar, Martin drove home from work, the radio too loud. He tried to imagine what might await him: boxer shorts strewn across the hedges, shards of China littering the hallway.

The late-day July sun blazed down on the highway blacktop, softening its edges. Rush hour traffic, always heavy, slowed to a turtle’s speed.

Behind him sirens wailed. In the far right lane was a red Toyota Corolla, its left side ripped away. The driver lay on the road covered with a plastic sheet.

Martin got out of his car and ran. Scorching waves wafted up from the asphalt. The last time he’d seen Melissa’s car had been that morning in their driveway.

Turkish Coffee

So there we were again, in that little Japanese place near Martin’s Square. Kenan orders sushi for both of us. He asks me if this is OK.

“Of course,” I say. What am I supposed to say?

Kenan wears a gold chain around his neck as wide as a baby’s finger. He tells me about his wife, Christina—how she doesn’t understand him—as he slides his fingers along the back of my wrist.

When we leave the restaurant, the silky air of the June night envelops my bare shoulders like a veil. My sandals click against the pavement.

“We will get coffee,” Kenan announces as we approach a café. White bistro tables line the sidewalk.

His hand slips beneath my dress as he tosses back his espresso.

Christina makes him coffee like this he tells me. He drinks it at all hours. I have no idea how he sleeps.

Housekeeping

Melanie Parks rolled her steel cart, heaped with towels and complimentary pens, up to room 217. She slid her card into the lock.

In the twenty-four years she’d been a maid at the Greensborough Hilton, Melanie had seen almost everything, including a Vietnamese pig helping itself to the mini bar. Once she’d found a diamond ring in the shower drain. And although it could have ended most of her troubles she’d reported it to the manager.

Melanie opened the bathroom door, her housekeeper’s fingers grasping the brass handle. On the counter sat a brand new bottle of Chanel No. 5.

The glass was weighty and luxurious. Its contents shimmered like liquid amber.

She sprayed the perfume into the air, the mist filling the windowless room.

Unexpectedly she was nineteen again, waiting in the basement of First Baptist for her wedding.

She slipped the bottle into the pocket of her apron.

James

When I got to the rental house in Santa Fe, I slammed the car door. I hadn’t meant to. It just sort of happened, the way things do when you’re not sure of yourself. I’d just left my job back East for a year, to write a novel. At least that’s what I’d said. I hadn’t wanted to admit the truth. It was because of James.

I’d met him on a mountain in Vermont, a ski instructor with fantastic arms. He lived in the desert with two Labradors and a beat-up Ford pickup.

Come to New Mexico, he’d said in the email. I’ll teach you a few new moves.

But when I stepped onto the patio the Sandia Mountains rose up purple and auburn. James faded away like early morning fog in the hot sun.

In the kitchen I made tea. Then I unpacked my laptop and began to write.

Snowstorm

The wipers barely keep up with the snowfall as our van inches up, then down, another steep mountain road. No one expects heavy snow in October.

Ben is tired from hours of driving but won’t say so. There are eight people in the van, our college friends on a weekend reunion. I haven’t seen any of them, even Ben, for years.

The inn is a blessing. A fire roars in the lobby’s stone hearth. Ben sits next to me as we relax with drinks. His eyes sparkle as he talks. A small scar is etched above his lip.

“There’s a problem with your room,” the clerk tells me.

They are overbooked due to the storm. They can’t turn people away.

“You can share mine,” Ben says.

In the big feather bed we read aloud stories from the Times. We fall asleep with our legs entwined.

The snow piles up outside.

Evicted

“We have to move,” my husband said, taking off his jacket. “The landlord called and said that he sold the house.”

“When?” I said. We’d just moved in ten months before.

“Three weeks,” he said.

Our toddler son pulled at his shirt tail.

I’d had to stop working when Milo was born. There was barely enough money to pay for diapers.

The next day I walked Milo in his blue stroller. I pretended things were normal. The air smelled like roses.

When I got home there was a balding man banging a “For Sale” sign into the grass by the sidewalk. He smiled at the baby.

Later I went outside and pulled the sign from the ground. It was wooden and heavy, but it didn’t take much to throw it over the back fence into the river.

There’d be another sign, I knew. But it was all I could do.

The Defender

Ben Brady snapped his cell phone shut with a soft click, running his fingertips across his damp skull. The radiator in the corner hissed. He struggled to remain composed.

When the DA had shown the grisly slide show of the nurse’s swollen body to the jury, Willy James Lockheart had looked on with the rest, horrified, his giant hands resting in his lap. That day, and every other of the three-week trial, Brady would have wagered his partnership that his client was innocent.

But the voice still ringing in the attorney’s ears told him he'd been wrong.

The mailman had found her, beneath Lockheart’s portico. The police warned that there may be others.

Brady unlocked the center drawer of his desk and withdrew his shiny Smith & Wesson, never fired. He tucked the gun into his belt, beneath his suit coat, and told Margaret he’d be out for the afternoon.

The Host

I watch from the café balcony as Gianni strolls down the sidewalk. He is all man, like a 1950s Marlon Brando. His shirt tails are untucked.

We’d met once, at a wedding in Calais, two years before.

I don’t want to be caught staring. I talk with someone at the table, a teacher from Barcelona. But it takes too long for him to arrive. Hornets dance inside my chest.

At last, I spot Gianni at the top of the stairs and remember the clean smell of the sea the night he walked me to my hotel. The other guests shake his hand, embrace him. His laugh fills the room.

If only he sits where I can see him, it will be worth coming to this party, on an overcast Sunday night.

“Is this seat taken?” Gianni points to the empty chair next to mine.

“No,” I say. “Please, sit down.”