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At last, Death is starting to listen. Almost nightly now, my father dreams of his dead brothers. My mother and I rarely figure in his subconscious. In the dreams, his brothers are still young: Emilio playing the sax; Joe a mildly powerful bookie; Frank on the front porch smiling and waving with his…

My husband and I still have sex. We still go on dates. We still take family vacations. Nobody could call us “estranged.” It’s just that for the past four or five years, significantly predating my emotional affair, we seem to speak different languages, that old feeling of connection refusing to clic…

Except, of course, that this male friend confessed to me a year ago, while I was in Kenya with my family, that I was the part of his day he looked forward to the most. I’ve realized that I’m a little in love with you, he emailed. _I hope that can be ok. Why can’t people sometimes be a little in l…

What I have not told anyone about my reliance on the white-noise machine is that I need it not only for my husband’s snoring, but for the sound of his breathing—a thing that never bothered me until the past few years. Even the sound of his mild sleep breath is enough to make me feel like clawing th…

At one time, my father would drive my mother to New York on dates just so they could get a slice of authentic cheesecake—even in my teens he was known to hunt for the best apple pie all over the state of Michigan, just because. He knew which bakery in Chicago made the freshest doughnuts and drove a…