Our father was trying to leave us.
“But he always goes to work,” said the five-year-old.
“This is different,” said his sister, who was ten.
“You’ll see me soon, baby, okay?” said our father.
“After work?”
“Lucas!” said his sister. “This is different!”
Our father didn’t know what to do. There were four of us, the five-year-old and the ten-year-old and the two middle brothers sitting on the staircase, stunned. Our mother, still young, hovered in the hallway.
On a different day, in an alternate life, she’d have stepped forward. “Just go, Gary,” she might have...
Excerpted from the novel Fish Tales by Nettie Jones (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
I think we could say that I was feeling maudlin that early summer night. Six extra-dry vodka martinis with dilled Brussels sprouts and dinner alone in Detroit can make a monk feel maudlin. I was also tired of Little Harry’s cocktail pianist. That pianist was for sure not Bobby Short. He reminded me a bit of my piano teacher, Mr. Alpino. My mother had insisted...
Weeks into the new year I took myself to a diner outside the city. Folgers coffee served in thick ceramic mugs. Eggs and buttered toast for dinner. Mine was the table in back where teenaged servers pecked indiscreetly at their phones, and, in the booth to my right, a mother began to tell her daughter a story.
“It was the middle of winter,” she was saying. “And pouring rain. Nana had just died. I took...
