When Harry says hello, he means for now. He means let’s see how the evening goes. He means he might or might not have something else come up and he will have to leave.  When Harry says I brought you flowers he means this is still not an engagement ring. It will never be an engagement ring, so don’t even ask.  It’s a good thing I speak Harry. There are subtleties that only a trained ear can pick up.  When Harry says, I’ll put these flowers in a vase, he means these flowers …

Back in San Francisco, I would press up behind Leon on his Harley, curving up Market Street and the Portola. When he’d told me it was over, I bawled his name into the night air. To stop making a goddamn fool of myself, I soon accepted a blind date with a Wyoming native who lived in Los Angeles. His being from Wyoming was one of my favorite things about him. He wore cowboy boots and owned a truck. Soon we were engaged.  Leon tracked me down. I agreed to meet him at an Italian place in …

1. I Do Believe In Spooks The last time I thought about ghosts, I was in a McDonald’s. I had left my grandmother’s house in Des Moines at bedtime, assuming my children would fall asleep in the car, but an unnatural energy possessed them all the way across Iowa. No matter how steadily the engine hummed or how smooth the ride was, no matter what boring talk radio station I tuned into, they did not fall asleep. Eventually they even got hungry. I saw a billboard on I-80 advertising a 24-hour …

Krista has the personality of supermarket cereal—an aggressive love of color and cartoons, easily swayed by sweetness. I make myself indispensable to her, knowing her weakness for chocolate tree stumps and peach chews and Costco tanks of jellybeans. She came over like usual and I unwrapped each candy for her until plastic flossed my teeth. We kiss during the commercials that try to sell us fate in flavors we have yet to taste: new Polly Pockets, grape syrup to help you sleep and sleep, girls …

Things go missing in the nursing home. Helen’s weighted blanket. A letter from her late-husband. An abalone button. A cassette tape of crashing waves she bought at Acadia National Park after she stepped into the ocean for the first time, age fifty-two. A cassette player. A scratchy afghan knitted by she-forgets-who. A photo of herself as a child, mummy-wrapped in jackets and scarves, taken the winter when snow fell so hard it vanished the mailbox, the garden gate, the rhododendron …

and the mother sees it as her job to chisel her out. To Michelangelo her. The tools are sentences like, “You look washed out without makeup” and “you should suck your stomach in.” At the daughter’s age, the mother had to use her fingernails to hollow out space enough to pound her tiny fist against the rock encasing her. That’s how she got out of her block of marble. Her daughter would benefit from the array of chisels the mother had picked up: the point, the round, the flat, the claw. The mallet …