I have trouble sleeping in open spaces, I tell Saul. There is a blanket on the floor of my closet.

She didn’t spend her senior year serving soft serve and saving for a bus ticket to Los Angeles when she turned eighteen to end up riding a tandem bike around the park with some guy whose shorts were too short.

He had a few of the things that fooled the casual observer into thinking they were dealing with a grown man—useless gadgets, a five o'clock shadow, shirts with buttons on them—but in recent years he had given up the ruse and had reverted, at least internally, to the one thing that had made him happy as a child: baseball.

One summer morning, Lyle Condy was cycling down the steep, straight hill of Magdalene Road in the city of Cambridge. His bike had a bell in strict accordance with local ordinances regarding cycling. 

Months ago. Here it is me at the grocery getting flowers and deli meats and here’s the little boy with his face soft and fluffy and pink. 

He was at the window. I heard the tap-tap-tap.

After, we slunk back to Mema’s Alaskan Taco Hut and I crawled into a booth and ordered with two fingers like we were... more

Our language is rapid and hard but we’re young so we giggle, too. We’re loitering. We pool our change to buy chips from the machine. Someone is expecting us. We’re not free.  

“I don’t like how her flesh looks,” my daughter tells me. According to Phoebe, this woman has the flesh of a winter peach.

“We made out once,” my sister says. I thought “I was in love with him for a night.”

My daughter Lisbeth checks Missy’s gums for bleeders. “Sometimes the damage done takes generations to make itself known,” she says, nodding along with her words, agreeing with herself. 

By now Lena was supposed to be the version of herself at whom people looked twice, and whom Alec missed, at home, now that they lived together. But she was still just herself, in stockings and hoodie, her face half-done. 

At first Margaret went around whispering about the rape. The rape? Her rape? Did she own it? Did she have to keep it? Did she share it? 

Don’t know whether I was really desperate for weed or just plain curious about that dude, Duffy, but for whatever reason, I found myself back at his trailer, on the couch, watching TV and smoking his shit.

We move next door to a gas station. The town is small. No stoplights. Small enough that beer is delivered from a single brewery in a single form: light.

Molly liked that the Museum of Light was honest.  Inside every light is a seed of darkness, one interpretive sign began.  It is light’s job to prevent that seed from blooming.  

No one should become a new parent at my age.

1. you never wanted to be the kind of person who balked when people entered your home without taking off their shoes

No one even realized Plain could make such a comeback. Years before, it tapered off in grocery stores. Chips. Donuts. Even Coca-Cola. All were taken over by ranch, chocolate, lime. 

Out by the park, I say, I’ve got your blood in me, and you look at me funny, like you are waiting for this to be another mediocre joke, and it is, somehow, but I don’t know the punchline yet. 

“Isn’t there something called ‘Pizza’?” I whispered to my girlfriend one night, awake from a dream; she kissed my forehead, her breath heavy with the sweet smell of cilantro, and sent me back to sleep.

When I told you I wanted to file a police report for our missing love, you turned to me with your best impression of a blank page. 

My fiancée wants to have a threesome. He tells me this when he comes home from his new job and I wonder what it is about data analysis and interpretation that gets him going. 

One of the men I love’s pointing a gun—stainless steel, ecru handle--at his temple, and I tell him I’ll do anything if he puts down that gun. 

I feel blessed. I thank God with a capital G for my success.