My sister is a strange person. I should know. I've lived with her for thirty years, ever since my son Charlie was born. Hester took us in when my husband ran off, leaving me with a new baby and no money...
My mother and father got married the day the Hindenburg fell from the sky in flaming fragments, May 6, 1937. I was born a month later and shortly after that the marriage burned up just like the Hindenburg. Life was difficult for my mother and me. The Depression was on and work was hard to find, especially for a young woman with a baby...
Everybody said they were such a lovely couple. So when they took her away in a body bag and put him, handcuffed, in the back seat of a police car, I knew, as I have always known, that things are never what they seem...
I was in the supermarket the other day when I saw someone wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a woman slapping her forehead and the words "Oh my god, I forgot to have children!" written on it. At first I chuckled, but it made me think about my own two kids and whether or not I should have had them...
Whenever I think of Melinda, I wish I could wake up and find it was all a bad dream. It's been more than twenty-five years and she still creeps into my thoughts when I'm least expecting it. Like, I'll be clearing the table after dinner and suddenly I'll see us, both of us, in our white uniforms and little blue aprons, clearing tables in the big dining room of the lodge, wishing we hadn't signed on for the whole summer...
This is the kind of stuff James M. Cain wrote. Spare. Clean. Essential. He wrote in the vernacular of 1930s California, the common man's idiom that his readers understood and related to on the most basic level of craft: story and dialogue. And when he was good, his writing approached poetry...