When Travis got home his mom was putting dinner on the table. Aunt Beatrice had improved enough that she could leave her bed and sit at the table with them. She and his mom talked and didn’t seem to notice that Travis was quieter than usual. When he’d fin...
Winterset, Iowa is a small town thirty seven miles southwest of Des Moines. Mary Ann McCree was born and grew up there. After graduating from high school she took a secretarial course so that she could learn shorthand. Her typing was excellent, and she fe...
When I met my wife, I fell in love immediately. I loved the way she looked, the way she thought, her character. I felt her parents had done a great job of raising her. We dated, I met her folks, with whom I got along with very well, we got engaged and wit...
Curtis Cigarette wasn’t his real name, of course. He’d been christened Curtis Christoff but in his late teenage years he was always asking anyone, “Got a cigarette?” At one point someone said “Uh-oh, here comes Curtis Cigarette,” and the name stuck. Curti...
My grandmother had some definite ideas on the naming of her babies. I guess she thought the name she hung on them would somehow make her wishes come true. She gave them all names that meant handsome or beautiful. She started with Bella, who is my Mom. M...
There was only one town on this, one of the smaller islands in the northernmost reaches of Puget Sound, hard by the Canadian border. There were no beaches on this side of the island and the town sat above the huge rocks on which the waves crashed below....
When Elena was seven years old her mom and dad said they had a big surprise for her: She was going to have a little sister. They didn’t sense it, but Elena wasn’t thrilled with this news. She didn’t want a little sister. She knew a little sister wasn’t...
September in Southern California is often the hottest month of the year, easily outstripping July and August. The sky can be devoid of clouds with the start of the rainy season still a couple of months in the future. The heat will be dry, any wind coming...
Emma Luca was a middle-aged woman with a sixteen-year-old son and a bad need for a husband, or so she felt. She wanted security for herself and, of course, for her son. She was determined to find a man who could provide what she needed, even if it meant f...
Life in Paris for the past four years had been horrendous under the Nazi occupation. Guy LaSalle and his family had managed to scrape by and remain one of the families the Germans had not prosecuted. However, between the walls of the house they occupied,...
When we’re young we do some really stupid things that we regret for many of our adult years. When I say “we” I’m talking about myself, of course. I don’t like to think that I was a bully, but I’m sure that’s the exact word people would use. In my defens...
Natives of the west coast usually have a right to be smug about their weather. The climate is mild with snow usually falling only in the mountains, the unbearable heat confined to the deserts, an ocean breeze caressing the coast, and little change among t...
Kamil and Karim had been blessed many times over. They were tall and handsome with fit, well-formed bodies. Kamil, who was twenty-four and a student at the university, had a beautiful girlfriend who he planned to marry upon graduation. Karim was three yea...
My first marriage was simply a mistake. And as with many of the mistakes we make, it took a while before we owned up to it. After producing two kids, we decided we shouldn’t do that anymore and divorced. We stayed in touch so that the kids would know they...
Sabra was twenty-eight and filled with a quiet panic every day. She was convinced that if she weren’t married by the time she was thirty she would be single for the rest of her life. It wasn’t that she hadn’t had suitors in the past, but that none of them...
