Chapter 14: Epilog A Happy Man October 2009 Amanda had everything worked out, she thought. She'd done a good job of convincing everyone that sacrifice was necessary, but she had not foreseen the pitfalls that presented themselves. No one could have. We were married in December, 2008. Mona and Patrick changed schools after Christmas vacation. Paige's pare...
Bill watches his new neighbor moving in with great lust. Having just seen her for the first time and without even knowing her name, he imagined her in heels and with her hair up. He imagined her escorting him to the Oscars. He imagined sitting with her at the 50-yard line while watching the Super Bowl. He imagined the two of them cruising to some remote, tr...
Of course, it was something that would happen: it was inevitable she would meet her new neighbour. They lived next door to each other, after all, admittedly in a part of suburbia where the houses were large and the gardens generous. They were not cheek by jowl. Perhaps he had knocked on her door when first moving in: only she had been out. Really, she should...
That same Saturday, Lisbeth and Grace were excused from the standard sport activity. Rose had decided it was better to keep the two sophomores separate from their peers. They didn't need the pressure of expectation from the other students. Besides, they had to be prepared to serve at the party that evening. In the afternoon, both the pupils were taken away...
"I know that this is unusual, but there have been complaints recently in the news about partisan meetings like this being held in the Capitol itself. I am Rep. Kara Peters of Oklahoma, the Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Sean Murphy of New York, the House Minority Whip, is here with me. He has an announcement of a serious matter fo...
Six months earlier. Thomas Dawkins drove his sleek BMW through the streets of Charleston, on his way to the wealthy white neighborhood where he had just purchased a large and expensive home two weeks earlier. He smiled to himself. Thomas Dawkins was a rich black man. At Harvard he was a champion weightlifter and his coal black skin stretched over an impress...
I'm not really sure what happened. The night before, I had fallen asleep, watching a rebroadcast of one of my favorite Sunday morning news shows. It was October 2008 and I was staying overnight in a hotel in North Carolina, having just finished a meeting with a tech company that my company did consulting work for. The next morning I found myself in the same...
Ram's friend Bahadur had called to say that his sahib would meet and interview Sunita on the coming Sunday. On Saturday evening, Bahadur had come over to Ram's workshop while she and Ram's wife, Anu, were serving tea to all the men folk. He scribbled his employer's name and address along with a mobile number and gave it to Sunita, telling her to be at that a...
There were no lift lines – it was simply too cold out for most people. Too cold to even think about getting out of a warm bed to go out and ski, especially when the wind was howling and a new storm was barreling in, especially when that bed was so nice and warm and your thigh muscles were still burning from skiing the day before. But even so, when all was...
This is a Valentine's Day contest story. Please vote. * Employer faced with laying people off in economic tough times, hires more people instead. "What am I going to do? I just don't know what I should do. What am I going to do?" After spending many sleepless nights troubled by his floundering business, ironically, it was Valentine's Day, 2010, when Edwa...