In the open side door of the school, Koenig leaned on his broom and watched the junior high children stream from the building at the sound of the bell. Line after line, they spilled through the front doors like cockroaches from the drains in the basement. He pictured a colony of roaches wearing yellow Star of David armbands and laughed . . .
The gateway drug is not the weed you smoke in a too-thin joint as a teenager. It’s not the beer you surreptitiously sip from your father’s fishing cooler while hunkered down in the garage. The gateway drug is escape . . .
The tractor-trailer lay dead, an overturned behemoth in the roadside brush, its refrigerated guts split open and littering the highway with frozen wolf carcasses . . .
He wanted to talk, and you know me—I’m no psychic. I didn’t know what he was thinking, and Jerry didn’t come out and say he was going to crawl into a garbage bag and off himself . . .
In her poky hotel bathroom, Sallie filled up a glass with water from the sink. It wasn’t until she’d swallowed the pill—some generic form of Valium—that she stopped to wonder if the water was okay to drink. Oh well, she thought as she stepped into her red bikini bottoms. Too late now . . .
Every day at 3:15 p.m. my son and I walk two blocks to pick his sister up from kindergarten. Every day he has a fit, a small tantrum, or decides to become sixteen months old and needs to be held the few blocks to school . . .
What other parents spent on music academies and study trips to New Zealand, she had spent on this little packet . . .
As a father, I don’t believe I have yet had my finest hour—and as a father of four little girls, I doubt I ever will. It’s not that I haven’t gently wiped away a tear or two, or bandaged a skinned knee, or made my share of macaroni and cheese and peanut butter sandwiches. I have. But it’s out in public where I mostly fall down . . .