“I love you,” she said.
“You look so comfortable,” he said. “I’ll sleep in Percy’s bed.”
“No.”
“There’s not enough room for me.”
“There is,” she said.
She rearranged her legs and A.B. stretched out atop the covers at her feet, his back to her, knees drawn up like a little boy. They were quiet for a while, nothing to hear but the children drawing breath and the grandfather clock at the bottom of the stairs ticking faintly, steadily toward the hour. Finally, her husband began to speak. He told her what had happened in the kitchen after she left and they rehashed those awful minutes before they knew how the night would end. It was, in its way, the story of their life together. The comfort she took in his presence, the comfort he took in hers. His voice lulled her drowsy and she let her eyes drift shut, felt lifted out of herself somehow, rising, dreaming, rising, saw what she believed was a strange and powerful vision of the future. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. She saw a dog sniffing the air for the scent that would lead him home. She saw a girl she’d never seen before tangled up with a pale-skinned boy, a second girl filled up with wonder at the sight. She saw a woman sleeping with a baby in the dark. She saw her house, this house, rent asunder, which nearly made her gasp, but then she saw her children all grown up and beautiful and in motion, Angus by sea, Percy by land, Doodle climbing a flight of stairs. There was darkness in the vision, the tumult of a storm, but such was life and she took heart in the fact that her children were drawing closer to her rather than away.
acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent, Warren Frazier, and to my editor at Grove Atlantic, Elisabeth Schmitz, two excellent friends who have been in my writing life for so long now I’m not sure I would know how to proceed without them. Thanks to everyone at Grove Atlantic, especially Katie Raissian, Deb Seager, and Julia Berner-Tobin, for all their hard work on this book. Thanks to Morgan Entrekin for his continuing faith in my fiction. Thanks to Jim McLaughlin, impossibly generous and long-suffering first reader. Thanks to Shannon Burke, Margaret Lazarus Dean, and Chris Hebert, all of whom read very early, very different versions of this collection. A special thank-you to Allen Wier, the most thoughtful close reader I have ever known. Many thanks to the journal editors whose insight and support helped these stories become their best and final selves—Emily Nemens, Ladette Randolph, Peter Ho Davies, M. M. M. Hayes, Aaron Alford, and Adam Ross. Every word of fiction that I’ve ever written has been shaped by other, more talented writers in one way or another. For some reason, I’ve always resisted the impulse to thank them by name, though I have often been tempted to do just that. In the case of Eveningland, some of my favorite writers are directly referenced in these pages, others alluded to in purely personal ways, still others visible in the fingerprints of their influence, and I want to thank them here. Thank you, Walker Percy. Thank you, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thank you, Flannery O’Connor. Thank you, James Salter. Thank you, John Cheever. Thank you, Alice Munro. Thank you, Peter Taylor. Thank you, Donald Barthelme. Thank you, Sherwood Anderson. And of course, thanks to my wife, Jill, and my daughters, Mary and Helen, for their patience and understanding and for providing an endless array of distractions from the inside of my head. Finally, thanks to my colleagues and students at the University of Tennessee—there are too many to name—for making it such a pleasure to come to work. Thank you all.
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