Phone. 4:45 a.m. Still dark out. Nobody calls with good news at this hour. Maybe somebody back east… Maybe something really great happened, so they know it’s okay to wake me up… Hope nobody died…

I was in my early teens when I met, for the first time, a book that didn’t like me.

“Should Ophelia trust Hamlet’s expressions of love?” Ms. Baker asked.
“No way!” Keena called out. Several others also shook their heads.
“Why not?” Ms. Baker pressed. “Mavis…? Are you with us? No? Tran? Don’t look at me. Look at the text.”

I met her for the first time at her father’s apartment just outside Washington, DC.

What I remember most about that hot and humid summer was the way fear took hold like a rip current.

People told me my mother was beautiful. By the time I was able to perceive her face, I only saw the mouth turned sharply down at the edges and a glimpse of wildness in her eyes…

I’m behind the wheel of my beat up Chevy Blazer, wearing a red and grey-striped softball jersey, with “Holden Electric” scripted in crimson across the chest…

Billy Baker lived down the street from me, near the dead end. I was ten and he was eight, but he had a way about him that made him seem older.

They say home is what your heart keeps returning to. But for some it’s an accidental place, an extension of someone else, not yourself, something you arrive to by association. That’s how it was for me.

I went to lunch with a man I was getting to know who suffered from depression but was disciplined and productive.