The woman sat on the train wrapped tightly in her coat. She stared at herself in the window and eyed the other passengers.

My therapist’s name was Sean. I remember that most of all because it was easy for me to say. The sound sh never caused trouble. I could curse or tell people to shut up all day long. But es caused a world of trouble. 

The fact of his wariness stops her; Viv gathers the remaining clumps of her hamburger, squeezes them between her fingers but no juice comes out. She stares at the clumps. 

No good relationship, if you could call it that, ever started in a bar.

I remember Ian saying I was not a novelist and I think, as much as it pained me at the time to hear this, he was correct.

She was walking through a quaint neighborhood of old Victorians and Craftsman houses and a few run-down ranches when she saw a note on the front door of one of them. 

I’ve gone and left everything.

I will watch you kill the cat.

She picks a bony honeysuckle blossom off the bush and sticks the stem under the elastic of her bathing suit bottom.

Kasper and I are smashing fluorescent light tubes on the ground behind the Dollar Tree, swinging them down like apes with clubs, the world itself our victim.

He stands so close I can make out the threads on his polo shirt.

She can't remember the important bad things. I ask her about the divorces and the dead dogs buried in the woods and the cracks in the bathroom tile and the negative, blood red balance in her checking account and her eyes go blank and she shakes her head like she's been overcome by some faint neurological chill. 

Quit telling your coworkers that you dreamt them last night.

“They were getting ‘the talk,’” Carmen says, pausing dramatically, “and in walks a huge nurse wearing a robe.”

Looking back, the efforts we made were desperate. We took walks. In bed, he fed me grapes; chilled, out of the refrigerator. We took... more

My perverse compassion had destroyed all traces of a once-in-a-lifetime trip. 

Do you remember everything I said last night? she asked. 

You mean do I remember you crying and saying you loved me?

She needs a quick blowout, so I comb and press her golden hair until is a sheer curtain fluttering around a face thrown open to love.

“I love watching you get dressed.”

“More than you love watching me undress?”

When I am not exercising or performing space walks or cleaning or developing vehicle software, I watch the sun rise 16 times a day.

Standing in the kitchen the other day, out of nowhere I became disoriented and unsure of where I stood.

This guy’s old school, Roselli says to me over the phone, real old school. How old school can you be, I’m thinking, in a sport that’s already run its course in just a few years.

Because of a few weeks folding scratchy polo shirts three Christmases ago, I know where the blank door off the hallway to the break room goes . . .

The woman on the train was sick. I could tell by the way she smiled. 

The wrong numbers were always men and they always asked for Gail.