One of the greatest people I’ve ever known was a man called Theodoros Apostolakis, a poet and a dentist who came from Hydra. He worked very hard in both his professions, and furthermore he was the editor of a beautiful physical book called The Catalogue of Lost Things. Like so many of the most important and enjoyable things in life and art, this was unpaid. It was also fundamentally impossible. Still, Apostolakis was a ceaselessly optimistic man, and this didn’t upset him. He told me he was . . .
The defense attorney was unfailingly kind. Virginia reflected on that as she sat in his office, waiting. He was careful to explain the law, and never acted like she wouldn’t understand. He didn’t seem to judge her for her son’s situation. She could tell that her husband and her older sons made the lawyer impatient when they shouted in frustration, but he stayed calm, and waited them out. He was tall and thin, with sparse, gray hair. He must have been approaching retirement, and she wondered if he was tired of defending troubled people who’d . . .
When I got home, I ate some crackers and made some coffee. It was still early, and I didn’t have to go to work. My mouth tasted bad. I drank a glass of water over the sink, and some of it spilled onto the floor. I wiped it up with my socked foot, then took off the sock, along with its twin, and put them in the laundry.
Dan was used to me being out all night. It wasn’t reciprocal. If he didn’t come home before I went to sleep, I would wake up panicking, imagining him bleeding to death on our stoop, me unable to . . .
It was her fourteenth birthday, and the day proceeded as it always did: class, morning tea, class, lunch, PE, Prep. After dinner, she was presented with a square of vanilla ice cream from amongst the hundreds that sat wrapped in anonymous white paper in a ziggurat in the school’s industrial freezer, a single, blackened-wick candle pushed into the middle. The other boarders sang a desultory “Happy Birthday,” and as she lowered her head to make a wish she noticed the girl sitting across from her, Jacqueline, whisper something . . .