EXCERPT: Reiner slid his screwdriver down the doorframe until he hit the deadbolt, pissed that he had once again given into his wife and was actually breaking into their neighbor’s house. The old widow, who had lived there alone, had died four months before, but yesterday evening, Beth had noticed a suspicious light.  “What if there’s a burglar in there?” she had said. “Or a crazy person? One tossed cigarette…” She didn’t have to say ...

On this June morning, however, Mr. Evans, still robust at sixty-two, sits across from a field of corn on the back porch of the house Mrs. Evans inherited from her parents, and has a revelation. Every year, this same fallow field valiantly shoots up stalks and crowns them with a profusion of golden tassels, only to lie strafed each winter.  Death, he decides, is his only way out. He certainly doesn’t have the courage to ...

I was a wannabe, a flat, skinny Protestant-Jewish mongrel, a girl without prospects, still attached at the hip to my exotic best friend, a beauty with full Sephardic lips and black hair. Conjoined since 3rd grade, we’d spent every spare minute swapping jokes, tears, and confidences. Yet those Saturdays felt like my heaven, too, as the big bus roared in us, opening the throttle to last weekend’s spin the bottle in someone’s cold basement, our ...

Mariam likes to get up before Cedric, just as the world is taking shape, and stroll in her nightgown and robe through their newly built home on Novato Ridge—her Shangri-la. Oh, how they soothe her, these rolling hills that stretch north and west beyond the tidy housing development  – like a pride of sleeping lions, she’s pointed out to Cedric – their tawny, muscular backs marked by scattered native oak and stands of towering eucalyptus. ...