Rikers could make you deaf. For weeks after his release, he shouted. It turned his volume up. He somehow found himself in exchanges with other men on the subway or on the street who had passed through the jail as well. 

She had hardly done any writing lately—not that you got rich from writing plays, at least not the kind of plays she wrote. But something had happened to her writing. 

When I was nineteen years old, I dropped out of the Berklee College of Music, where I’d been studying guitar—the one thing I’d ever been halfway good at—to tour with a band that wanted a screaming lead player, and when that all got too stupid and wasted, I moved back in with my parents in Connecticut.

The name on the card was Clark: they were to meet in the ten-minute waiting zone just outside departures. But Clark was late and the morning frigid. McRae got back in his car, drove around, parked in the lot, and walked into baggage claim. 

It would have made me laugh in English, I think, the word he used for himself and that he insisted I use for him—not that he had had to insist, of course, I would call him whatever he wanted.

The last time we had sex, it was cold out and they said a storm was coming. My wife was shivering in fear, making a list to steady herself. For a while I was trying to cross things off—candles, eight gallons of water, move things away from windows. 

Mixed messages, my neighbor continued, as we approached the cove and started to slow down, were a cruel plot device that did sometimes have their counterpart in life.

A year after my wife died, I took a job at Offerings, a residential facility for adults with moderate developmental disabilities. They all came from wealthy families. They were slow, of course. 

He pulled over and walked back and waited for a pause in the traffic and got the phone. It was ringing. “Margaret tells me you won’t be coming home this weekend,” his wife said.

Alicia’s neighbor was a college student whose name she didn’t know. He had knocked on Alicia’s door and, when she answered, pointed to a black cat lying crushed in the parking lot next to a dumpster. Alicia ran outside in her nightgown and picked up her cat.