The Gate on Puget Sound “Open the gate, Jasmine.” My sister’s voice came through the intercom the way it always had, even when we were children, pleasant on the surface […]
On the very first morning of our marriage, my husband hurled a greasy dishcloth into my face and said, “From this moment on, you’re the maid for my entire family.” […]
As the plane climbed, my phone would not stop vibrating in my hand. I let it go eleven times. Then I answered. “Claire! Where are you? You took our son?!” […]
My parents skipped my MIT graduation to watch my sister’s ballet recital. Not her final performance. Not a professional audition. A community theater recital in a converted Elks lodge, where […]
Three days a week, I gave my time to a hospice group, sitting with people whose days had grown quiet and small. Most of them were elderly or seriously ill, […]
What He Left Behind The accident happened on a Thursday. A drunk driver ran a red light on Garrison Avenue at four-seventeen in the afternoon, and what I remember most […]
The morning my husband asked me for a divorce, I was standing at the kitchen sink watching a robin pull a worm from the backyard mud with the focused determination […]
The old Cadillac was doing fifteen over the limit on a Tuesday morning when I had been on shift for exactly forty-seven minutes and had already had two coffees and […]
Final Approval Authority At my father’s wake, my sister pointed at my dress blues and ordered me to find a corner. I had paid his medical bills while mortars shook […]
Forty Lines My mother threw my grandmother’s forty one year old savings passbook into the trash and said, “That’s junk.” I quietly kept it. And thirteen months later, when I […]