Trevor was farther away from home and his loving family than he’d ever expected to be. He’d only left the small town of Winston, Oregon, where he was born, twice in the past: once for a high school field trip to Portland and the other to visit relatives in Eugene. Before his high school graduation he’d applied to a dozen colleges, but his GPA and SAT scores were very low. Time after time he received letters with discourag...

  I got married at twenty and divorced at twenty-seven. It was a childless, loveless marriage. Why we got married I can’t even say, not now. I can only call it a mistake. I’d say a tragic mistake, but no one was permanently injured, so it was just a routine mistake. The reason it lasted as long as it did was that at that time I was just starting out and barely making ends meet. I was the proverbial turnip, and she’d gotte...

My sixteenth year was the most miserable of my life. In fact, I could say it was the only miserable year. I had just begun to realize that I was different than the other boys my age that I knew. There was a new boy in my class named Calvin, and I had a crush on him. Calvin was a country boy from Oklahoma who was a year older, having been held back a year. His family had had a farm that had failed, and his father had moved...

We all know that we should do good deeds, but not because we expect to receive a reward in return. However, if we do unexpectedly get back more than thanks, that’s a great bonus. And if our bonus reward far outweighs the small favor we did, must we repay it? My name is Thorne and I’m a regional manager for a national finance company. That’s probably all you need to know, and I could leave the rest up to your imagination,...

The life of a fisherman on Newfoundland would be considered by almost everyone to be rough and dangerous. Both the lobster and crab fishing seasons are controlled by a combination of the weather, the temperature of the water and restrictions laid down by the national government. On some years the short seasons overlap and become one even shorter season. To the fishermen, such as Ezequiel Stone, danger or not, it was just...

Casey and Emma had been married for thirty years. He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-five when they tied the knot, and it had lasted for all these years, through ups and downs, thick and thin. They had a daughter who, from age seven on, had been a handful. They’d never been able to control her. At the age of eighteen she had run away from home with a thirty-four-year-old man. That hadn’t lasted long, but she didn’t re...

Fearing the draft, Maxwell Braxton fled Colorado and migrated to Canada during the Vietnam conflict. He stayed there for five years until the war ended, and then moved back to the United States and settled in Seattle, where he married and raised a family. Alan Braxton was his second born. When he was sixteen he became aware that he was gay. He found no problem with this. Although unplanned, being gay was simply a part of...

  Andy wasn’t anyone’s idea of an Adonis. He was six-foot-three and exceedingly thin, and at the age of thirty-six it wasn’t surprising he also had a small paunch. His face was long and thin like his body. He had crooked teeth, a weak chin and bushy, black eyebrows. He wasn’t ugly or even homely. If he’d had only one of these negative characteristics it could have been overlooked, but the combination of them tended to def...

It was the middle of August and the summer heat hadn’t yet arrived. It was beautifully warm, and indeed, very warm if you were working, but the mind-numbing stifling heat that usually arrived toward the end of summer hadn’t yet made an appearance. Logan Ellison was a relatively young entrepreneur who believed in sustaining the past as he pushed ahead to the future. He’d bought this 1930 era house built in the style of Le...

I’d just entered high school when my mother died. She’d had breast cancer and hadn’t caught it in time. It had metastasized to other parts of her body, and although they fought it, there was no way there would be a different outcome. But no matter how prepared you are for the end, it is devastating. Both my dad and I were distraught, but each of us also tried to be brave for the other. I think that is what got us through...

      The house Elam had lived in all his life was built in a style called Craftsman, but it wasn’t a very good example of the true Craftsman style. Besides the living room windows that opened onto the wide front porch, there was a large picture-window on one side of the room. The only view from this window was the wall of the house next door. That was a two-story house clad in wood shakes, painted white. The wall facing...

My sister, who is a year older than me, always had good taste in boyfriends. I liked every one of them, but a few of them stand out. When I was sixteen she had one named Richard who was nineteen. Mom normally wouldn’t have approved because of the age difference, but she said Richard was a nice boy from a good family, which meant they had more money than us. Richard wasn’t nearly as nice as she thought, but he was gorgeous...

Many people said Abbott was a bad seed. Since he was a very small kid he’d gotten into trouble. He seemed to take pleasure in doing things he knew were wrong. His parents had given up on him, but that was probably a big part of the problem.They shouldn’t have been parents in the first place. They were ill-prepared to raise a child, and especially one who may have had some issues. Abbott himself, more than likely, didn’t k...

The house I was born in had belonged to my great-grandfather, then my grandfather and then my father. It had been a stately wood-frame house, but by the time I came along it had deteriorated and needed constant repairs. The neighborhood it stood in had deteriorated even more.What had once been a nice middle-class neighborhood with single-family homes and small apartment buildings, which had been built later, was now a run...

The last light of day was fading from the sky as the fire engine backed through the open door into the fire station, its spinning red and yellow lights ricocheting off the surrounding buildings. As blocked traffic began to move slowly down the street, the firefighters jumped down from the truck and removed their protective gear.It had been a long and difficult fire to fight in a used-furniture store, dry wood blazing and...