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You visit your hometown. You are driving aimlessly when you see the wall. You stop and slowly back up to the right-hand turn. It is built. There it is, all real and caked together with stones, and you feel a pang. You can get rid of everything else, the phone numbers and the photos, and still you w…

A year later you were both invited to the same wedding in a vineyard. You were smoking cigarettes and drinking bourbon and he had quit everything, which, no matter what had passed between you, you acknowledged as a very good and impressive thing. The two of you walked down rows of grapevines and he…

My relationship with Bob lasted a full year longer than it should have because Barack Obama was running for president and had so raised our expectations of what redemptive things were possible that we thought perhaps he could save us from the petty, insidious ways we’d been hurting each other. We, …

Frank led me downstairs and as he took off my shirt I said, “Wait!”

I’d spotted a giant sepia photograph of two people holding a baby, framed over the fireplace, and I asked who those people were, because they were beautiful.

He said that they were his parents, and that the baby was him, but …

It was years of family stories that hid the ways women knew in their blood what was wrong or right. Hid truth behind the scrim of romance or, worse, fate.