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His Best Girl

My mother’s call came on a white December morning. I had forgotten to expect it. There was a time when I’d waited for it daily: the news that my father’s emphysema had finished him. He’d been given three to six months, and it was now five years after the prognosis. I was mystified by his survival.

The Moral Equivalent Of Wildness

I drifted in my kayak, listening for small sloshes and hushed voices behind me: the sounds of my college students launching their boats in the dark. The night was intensely quiet and dark, like a campsite after the fire goes cold, but the moon was preparing to rise over the mountains in the east, and the lake showed a slick of silver.

They Always Call You “Miss”

There’s more to waiting tables than you might think. It takes courage, for one thing. You walk up to a table, and everyone turns to look at you, as if you’re about to deliver the opening line of a play. You have to look happy all the time too.

The Shed Skin

I ask if I have cancer. Somehow this still isn’t clear to me. When the doctor confirms that I do, it is an odd relief. I don’t want to have to explain to people that the “architectural pattern of my breast lesion features an intraductal papillomatous tumor.” Saying I have cancer will be easier, except when I tell my mother.

The Rat

“Rat check,” my father would say when he came home from work. And we would run to the various traps to see if we’d caught the rat. We slept lightly, each hoping and fearing that we would hear the slam of the trap in the night and be the one to go running with the news that the rat at last was dead. But we found nothing, heard nothing.

Midnight Shift