That morning, while Mom had fought with Grandpa, Aunt Sel had asked me to bring her a glass of wine – it was nine in the morning – and when I’d delivered it she’d handed me a ten dollar bill and said, “I dislike children, but I do appreciate decent service.

Graciella’s frown was there and gone in an instant. He didn’t know how to interpret that. If they were playing poker, it would have telegraphed that she’d picked a bad card, and he would have bet against her. But in the game of Real Women, he was forever a novice.

She believed that people were captains of their own destiny. He agreed, as long as it was understood that every captain was destined to go down with the ship, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it.

It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of paint into his face, and the shade was named Blinding Pain.

Everyone develops a tolerance to happiness.

The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances.

The business travelers, however, were all business, from their business jacket to their business skirts and their skinny business shoes. They sliced through the crowd of civilians like business sharks.

What I remember are tentacles. Tentacles and teeth.

Then they were off again, across the unbroken sprawl of Chicagoland, a single city made up of interlocking strip malls, decorated at random intervals by WELCOME TO signs with defiantly rural names – River Forest, Forest Glen, Glenview – and enough dales and groves and elms and oaks to populate Middle Earth. The flatlanders had been especially determined to tag every bump of land with a “Heights” or “Ridge.” Pity the poor hobbit trying to find anything to climb in the town of Mount Prospect.

Poor bastard. Literally. His mom was broke, and his dad had abandoned the family years ago.