My father picked me up from college after my Acting II midterm. He passed me a smoke. It was spring break, which in Minneapolis meant old glacial dung clung to the curbs and sides of houses. Coarse, used snow lay scattered like margarita salt on the street. I was nineteen.

My father’s current car was a rusted-out Gran Torino station wagon. It was so big and dark inside it felt like driving around in someone’s little cabin. Fifth gear didn’t work, so he ground it in fourth the whole way home. Home was New Prague, pronounced like bag, which I’d...

Denise and Larry Butters were only two weeks into their new house in the Cherokee Bluff subdivision when the Hillbillies moved in next door. That’s what Denise had started calling the three brothers who’d moved in a few days ago—“the Hillbillies.” No sooner had they unpacked their U-Haul and pickup trucks then they were shooting off firecrackers at night, blasting up and down Splendorwood Court in their mud-caked ATVs, and letting their three big dogs poop in everyone’s yards without cleaning up.

On Friday evening, their third week in the subdivision, Denise had an idea. She went out to...

It all started when my sister Stella tried to convince me that frog legs would be the next big American food craze. “Trust me,” she said—she, an animal enthusiast to such an extreme that her freezer had become a pet morgue. “I predict that frog legs,” she said, hands on her hips, “will be to 2000 what sun-dried tomatoes were to the eighties! They’ll be to western New York what coffee shops were to Seattle! Like sushi in shopping malls. Think about it.” She paused to scratch her elbow; she was forever itching with rashes, bug bites, pet hair....

When I was nineteen, I fell in love with a big wrestler from Africa. He wasn’t Africa African, but a Midwestern white guy who grew up in Kenya, son of missionary parents. What impressed me about Matthew Knudson was not just his big barrel chest and trim little hips but his occasional spouting off in Swahili at parties just when things were getting dull. “What’s that you just said?” I asked him the first time we’d met. He said it again, in Swahili, and I shook my head. “No, no! In English. English, por favor!” I was a sophomore majoring...

This morning at 10:30, Angela Mayer’s husband died on his bicycle; he was wearing a helmet, in case any of you are wondering, though it hardly mattered. And Angela is doing all right, too, despite so many things beyond the obvious, despite the fact she lives so far away from both sets of relatives it will take them a day and a half just to get there. What comes next is how it went, what came before and what came after an event so circumstantial yet conclusive. What comes next is an account of how people steer themselves through tragedy...

Rob had seen it happen so many times since coming to Hawaii, he immediately picked up on the telltale signs: a handsome, sunburned young couple combed the beach hand in hand, the woman in tears, the man determined and morose. A sympathetic group of onlookers helped the two honeymooners search in vain through the damp, sparkling sand: a lost wedding band. Rob, a lean and stylish hairdresser with bleached white hair, waded out of the water with his big blue flippers flapping against the current. His snorkel mask gripped tightly to the top of his head like a small yellow...

The Whites’ room was in a hotel in Taxco, Mexico, which, until 1620, had been a monastery. Toby, Alice’s husband, had mentioned this several times. Once inside their room, Alice collapsed on the bed. Above her, large black beams supported a red clay ceiling.

“Do you think those tiles could fall on us?” she asked. “Do you think they’ve been up there since 1620?”

Toby emptied his pockets of loose change, keys, receipts, pesos. “Do you want some water?” he asked.

Alice sat up and marveled at the medieval cast-iron door latches. She imagined small Spanish monks pulling them open,...

I first started eating chalk when I was in kindergarten, and couldn’t keep my hands off the box of pastels, which reminded me of miniature colored marshmallows. My teacher, Mrs. Finch, who actually looked like a bird with her clipped little mouth and tight white nose, caught me gnawing on a pink stick behind the kitchen center. I remember trying to hide the mushy, grainy mess in the toy refrigerator, but she reached in and grabbed my arm like I was a criminal. Later, Mrs. Finch told my mother, who thought it was very funny, that she was merely afraid...

Because once I was washing a load of clothes and a midget walked in with long, blond hair that was almost silver and I realized when I looked hard that it was a man, not a woman. He walked right over to one of the big drum dryers at floor level—he had a Walkman on—and got in. He didn’t close the door but lay inside all curled up with his tiny feet ticking time against the metal. I was single then, and very young, and had only the one load to wash. I wore sunglasses to hide my...

That was the summer everything changed, and while I couldn’t know it at the time, it was to be a year of extremes. The August temperatures lingered for weeks in the high nineties, literally bleaching our new black roof shingles a charcoal gray. That winter, after an agony of months during which we did not know if my father would live or die, the same roof shingles became coated with so many layers of ice that, having nowhere else to go, the gradual melt crept its way through the shingles, down into the attic beams, through the floor, and finally...