In Majorca, jet-lagged at the airport, Nathan bought a one-liter bottle of Tanqueray, and then, after an hour’s drive, their van stopping in a small, possibly medieval town, a second bottle of gin, soda water, limes. They drove farther, another half hour, the sea beside them, before reaching the house. The house was isolated, far from town, on the side of a cliff that plunged into water so clear that from the terrace Nathan could see fish swimming at the water’s base.

There was a woman waiting for them. She took them through the house, each room all sparse white walls, wooden beams across the ceiling. She had all seven of them cram into the bathroom, where she demonstrated flushing the toilet. It was how one usually used a toilet. She said, “This is very important. One flush.” The woman lingered, untrusting, then left them keys.

They had rented the house for a week, after which they would fly on to Tel Aviv, arriving on the second day of Pride.

I don’t care how nice you are, becoming a mother grants a certain capacity to take action, like a hot holiday chestnut cracks open inside you.

Michael, the weekend guest, was to spend the night in one of the twin beds in Herbie’s old room, where the baseball pictures still hung on the wall. Lou Epstein slept with his wife in the room with the bed pushed catter-corner. His daughter Sheila’s bedroom was empty; she was at a meeting with her fiancé, the folk-singer.

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Then she stepped out to the edge of the diving board and looked foggily into the pool; it could have been drained, myopic Brenda would never have known it. She dove beautifully, and a moment later she was swimming back to the side of the pool.

“You’re a real one for opening your mouth in the first place,” Itzie said. “What do you open your mouth all the time for?”

A taut woman, Edith Leon was of necessity a methodical woman. She could not abide the world to float about her as it chose. Mysteries, ambiguities, exacerbated her. So she retaliated. She marshaled the world into patterns. 

On All Saints’ Day, 1940, Grandfather went to the cemetery with his daughter Marthe, whose firstborn son lies under a bed of white gravel, a tiny Flying Dutchman sailing into the uncharted mists of the beyond,

New York in June was a place to visit, not a place to live in, but it was the place where Fielding had first fallen in love and he was held to it as to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield,

“We are going to have a bad night of it,” said our Captain Fracken Cockernony, ciborium of parental chandlery and solecisms. “The Wind will most likely haul round, mutually supersaturating,

Three times a year, the National Public Radio show Weekends on All Things Considered holds a fiction contest in which listeners from across the country submit ­stories that can be read aloud in less than three minutes.