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There was something odd in the way she said it. She stood there, her long neck and blond hair.

— What is it, darling?

She said nothing for a moment. Then she said,

— I want a give.

— All right, I said.

I don’t know why, I felt nervous.

— What would you like?

— I want you to sto…

The small things that could be overlooked at first but in time became annoying, we had a way of handling, of getting the pebble out of the shoe, so to speak. It was called a give, and it was agreed that it would last. The phrase that was over-used, an eating habit, even a piece of favorite clothing…

He was a poet, of course. He even looked like a poet, intelligent, lank. He’d won the Yale prize when he was twenty-five and went on from there. When you pictured him, it was wearing a gray herringbone jacket, khaki pants, and for some reason sandals. Doesn’t fit together, but a lot of things about…

She had more than sixty thousand dollars she had saved or made from an oil company one of her colleagues had told her about. If she wanted to, she could buy a car, a Porsche Boxter came to mind. She wouldn’t even have to sell the oil stock, she could get a loan and pay it off over three or four yea…

Leslie and Kathrin had been roommates in college and friends ever since. They had hitchhiked through Europe together, getting as far as Turkey, sleeping in the same bed a lot of the nights and, except once, not fooling around with men or, as it happened that time, boys. Kathrin had long hair combed…