Main Dishes

PART 1 I came home from my brother’s funeral at eleven at night with seventeen hours of road in my bones and the smell of Thunder Bay clay still on my shoes. I let myself in through the side door, the way I always did, quiet as a tenant, and I’d just gotten one boot…

PART 1 My wife handed me divorce papers on a brightly lit stage in front of two hundred people, and the most devastating part was that she smiled while doing it. She stood there, radiant in the glow of hanging Edison bulbs, and called the end of our thirty-year marriage the very first contract of…

Part 1 The night before the Ashford Foundation Gala, my stepmother Marion crept into my bedroom with kitchen shears. She didn’t knock. Marion never knocked. She just appeared in the doorway, her silhouette backlit by the hallway’s dim nightlight, and said, “Sit up. Your hair has been a disaster for weeks.” I sat up. Not…

PART 1 The smell always arrived before the trucks did. It was a living thing, that scent. By the time I pushed open the screen door and stepped onto the back porch that sweltering summer morning, the air hanging over the South pasture was already suffocatingly heavy with it. It was a thick, fermented sickness….

Part 1 The first thing I noticed that evening wasn’t my daughter’s smile. It was the violinist’s fingers trembling on the strings because the air conditioning had been cranked too high for her antique instrument. I remember thinking, *I’ll have someone fix that.* I remember straightening my cufflinks, scanning the ballroom, and feeling a quiet,…

PART 1 “You know what, old timer? Why don’t you sit this one out before you embarrass yourself in front of all these people?” The words hung in the West Texas air like smoke. I was standing near the registration tent, close enough to see the old man’s face when Travis Hartwell said it. Travis…

Part 1 The frost bit through my leather vest like a million needles, and the wind off Route 12 screamed like a dying animal. My knuckles were frozen white to the handlebars, my vision completely blinded by the whiteout. Behind me, four of my brothers were losing the fight against this sub-zero highway hell. We…

Part 1 I had been riding for three weeks, trail dust and sweat caked into my canvas shirt. Crossing the ridge overlooking my sister Clara’s homestead, my chest went completely cold. Six horses were tied to her fence, and six men stood like vultures in her front yard. They had dragged a heavy pine coffin…

PART 1 The cold did not just seep into my bones; it settled there, heavy and sharp, like shattered glass in my joints. I sat on the very edge of the narrow, sinking mattress, pulling my faded blue overcoat tighter around my shivering shoulders. Next to me, my husband Harold stared at the frosted bedroom…

PART 1 The October wind came cruel across the Panhandle that morning. It cut through my best Sunday dress like I wasn’t wearing anything at all. I remember standing on the porch, my hand wrapped so tight around the railing that my knuckles had gone white as bone. The cold had teeth, but I couldn’t…