Mauna walked around the park thrice before going back home. She stood in her balcony and watched families and bachelors lingering in theirs, scarcely meeting each other’s eyes. Dark and dry, the evening hung itself out like a roll of film, inverting everything into deep blue negatives.

Elder Steve was our neighbor – E.S. as we called him – and across the narrow street from our porch, he resided. We were 3 bro-migos in our mid-twenties, and E.S. was maybe 35 to 40 years our senior. A relic in the area like a rust covered beach cruiser, locked up and forgotten.

The next morning, he woke up at his usual, pre-dawn time. He cooked an egg and smeared butter on wheat toast. After washing the dishes and scrubbing clean the pan, he left his apartment, and started off down the street, on his way for his morning coffee, having forgotten all about the ill feelings of the previous day…

The book was an entertaining read, though it left Jordy thinking of Grayson basically as a player with a God complex, suckering people into doing his work for him and catering to his whims. Through the window, now, Grayson looks like a diminished replica. There’s a band of sweat collecting along his hairline and his leg has been shaking nonstop since the interview got underway.

Wasn’t that the story of her life? Currying favor that was never forthcoming? Jess at 13 buying lunch for the whole tableful of popular girls so they would let her sit with them for that day only. The same Jess who had refrained from seeing a divorce attorney; letting Bart—her adversary—draw up the settlement agreement and sell the house out from under her, splitting the equity she was legally entitled to.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved the word “striking.”  You see that word used about a lot of people now.  Red-carpet-baggers.  Grandstanding politicos.  Wheaties athletes.  Isn’t it weird, though, how it’s mostly only women and girls that get called striking?  Almost never men.  When its men that do most of the actual striking. 

Church bells rang out the noon Angelus. The ringing is automated now, someone told me. That’s not change. They still clang at their appointed hours. Two ropes used to hang down a long open chute behind a closed door in the sacristy. You could look all the way up the chute and see the clappers dangling in the bowls.
“Don’t let him get you in there,” one of the older boys told me the first time I served Mass with Byrnes.
I don’t pray anymore. That’s changed.

Learn to get just drunk enough in the morning that you have a headache by lunch time and cannot possibly eat a thing when the other wives invite you over for mediocre sandwiches and pilfered bottles of sweating cola.

He undressed for bed that night feeling reluctant to examine himself in the mirror. He couldn’t even muster the courage to look down at his own torso and thighs. Who knew what he might find? Some new bulge or wrinkle to prove how quickly he was closing in on his own death? Switching off the light he began to pull on his pajamas in the dark wondering how much Noreen’s intrusion into his life had caused these morbid, almost shameful thoughts.

A small concerto of dueling horns was sounding off more regularly now from various sections back in the drive-thru lane, and he’d likely have joined in if he wasn’t literally next to the checkout window and would have to look the cashier in the face once she reappeared. The young mom in his rearview mirror was back at it with her obstinate passenger, who appeared to be exploring the outer limits of her patience with the click-unclick game the mom was clearly losing.