fiction

It is Thanksgiving, the great day of dinner, of Dockers and dress shirts and marshmallow-sweetened squash. This year we are forgoing our standard slow graze on the home front to spend the day with my sister and her boyfriend's family, meeting them for the first time—on this, a National Holiday. The whole situation has got my parents up in arms. My mother likes to do the cooking herself, and my father has been ranting about the traffic the whole way out to Long Island. I know the truth is that my sister is only home from college for the weekend and my parents would rather we have Carly all to ourselves.

The misunderstandings started on a Wednesday, a not-so-unusual, early-February Wednesday when I was supposed to make dinner, but time had gotten away from me, somehow, again, even though I had so much of it—even so, it was already six o'clock and I hadn't yet introduced the pot to the burner, and the kids were staggering around and moaning theatrically about their big hunger.

In Chicago, while taking the El from Wrigley Field to Evanston, Rudy O'Hara was certain he recognized the woman sitting across the train's aisle, but he couldn't place her.

I began reading Carol Shields' books many years ago, with The Box Garden. In that novel there's a passage that made me laugh so hard I thought I would do myself an injury. It's the chapter describing a mother with scant taste but a lot of energy, who spends her time like a down-market and rather crazed Martha Stewart, relentlessly decorating her modest house—papering and re-papering its walls, hand-painting its lampshades, dyeing its scatter rugs—much to the alarm of her adolescent daughter, who never knows what new, ferocious colour the house will be when she gets home from school.