The birth of the solar system, the demise of the dinosaurs, the melting of the polar ice caps: haunting cosmic mysteries emerged from my grandfather Zolly’s mouth in a tone of grave wonderment. In the early fifties, when I was in the second grade, he’d tell me—sitting on a black leather club chair in his living room, puffing on a hand-rolled cigar, a cut-glass ashtray balanced in his lap—that the nighttime sky was sprinkled with diamonds, God’s diamonds. When I was in the fourth and fifth grade, a time when boys my age were busy building plastic Nautilus...

When I was nineteen my father went out for a pack of smokes and never came back. My mother and I were in the dining room, sitting around the walnut drop-leaf table on what would have been my sister Dinah’s sixteenth birthday. We were watching a news special about the hostages in Iran and licking envelopes and postage stamps for Jimmy Carter’s second presidential campaign when my father left, to buy some Pall Malls, he said. He’d been drinking tequila and crushed pineapple out of a canteen while he rolled joints and lectured us about how he was all for...

For weeks I imagined I could see him coming off the plane, carrying souvenirs. In my mind he looked the same as the day he left—broad-shouldered, trim, deeply tanned. The picture of him they printed in the newspaper, one of those sawtooth-edged Brownie snapshots that always made the day appear gloomy, had been taken years earlier, on Utah Beach, a few days after the invasion of Normandy. Behind him, on the sand, you could see the rows of dead soldiers covered with ponchos.

My father came home from Korea when I was fourteen. Not exactly Korea, but San Francisco,...

From what Judah Landau could see, there was only one dish of charlotte russe left in the revolving pie carousel. Tracking it, he swept a saucer of marmalade aside. “In my opinion,” he said, jabbing his curved thumb in his chest, “Florida’s going to the dogs. Every snowbird in Sheepshead Bay is moving down these days.” He smacked the table with his other hand, scattering lemon slices, Equal packets, a thin pot of white horseradish in a cruet. His shaved cheeks were grooved with raw scabs.

Leaning forward, Zucker gave him an imploring look. “Pinkie—again with your wife’s boyfriend?...

When I picked up the phone early this morning, Charley Palestine’s voice sounded very distant. “Bad connection,” I told him, clearing the sleep out of my throat. “Let me call you back.”

“Lou’s dead,” I thought I heard him say.

I smacked the receiver against my palm. “Who did?”

“Exactly,” he muttered.

For months now I’d been having my doubts about Charley’s plan to move to Florida. He was seventy-five, and in poor health. Zandy, my wife, was losing patience with both of us. “You don’t even notice the changes in him,” she said to me with accumulated irritability one...

The forbidden quarry was no more than a brisk two- or three-mile walk beyond the dusty apple orchard in back of the local chapter of the Monroe County Elks Club. Although our mothers warned us not to, my friends and I ate the mealy green and yellow apples off the ground and then chucked the wormy cores at blue jays and magpies and mangy dogs. A hand-painted billboard, nailed crookedly to a telephone pole across the pitted asphalt road from Ditenhafer’s Ice & Dairy, announced to travelers that they had just entered the limestone and applesauce capital of the world. (The...