They were his wife’s hens, not his, he would tell anyone who listened. She was far too soft, mollycoddling any that became ill, lame, out-of-sorts. It made him jolly angry, if he ever thought about it too deeply or for too long, this attention that she gave them but not him.

With Joel playing Rip Van Winkle, I gave up on him. In the office, I dropped the mail on the desk. As I turned to go for a shower, my cell phone chirped. It was Ron Burkett, Kaufman’s publisher.

I’m happy to say I have a knack for selling furnaces and water heaters. I’m practical and mastered how to calculate how many BTU’s you need for the square footage you’ve got to heat. Where hot water is concerned, that’s a function of how people are in the house.

I left the bar feeling a unique kind of embarrassment, not that I didn’t belong in their world, but a humiliation of character for betraying Corey’s trust. Corey let me into his home and was the only one in Winter Harbor, or indeed in my life, who never seemed to judge me for my naive sojourn North.

I hold the glossy, red boots in my hands, and inside, I feel my seventeen-year-old self, twist and writhe. The last time I saw my mother, she was foaming hot curses from the mouth for my wearing these shoes. They sat in the top of her closet, absorbing the scent of plywood, collecting dust. In all the depths of my mind, I could not fathom her wearing them. Even now I cannot.

When I began, our images in the mirror transformed too. Reflecting back were two girls wearing purple dresses inlaid with gold, hemlines scraping the sand. We had a diamond stud each in our noses and copious bangles. Once, I’d overheard a family friend describe me as plain. My mum hadn’t denied it. But here, in this mirror, I was something else.

She was extremely sensitive to this particular raag. A simple mistake in its rendition which escaped the notice of a regular listener – a minute deviation from Shuddh Rishabh while ascending or from the Komal Rishabh while descending, for example – would cause genuine physical harm to her body.

He was older than her, but she was maternal toward him, nonetheless. “Dear”, “sweetie” and “honey” littered her conversation. But he had grown tired of her kindnesses. She has always been good to him and Caroline, but kindness turned to sympathy upon Caroline’s passing.

She wears a pink shirt and a floppy straw hat but you can see her eyes, big and brown. She smiles wide, not shy at all like you figure you’d be if you were in her country and a Mexican stranger waved at you from her Mama’s car on the side of a road. Mama is already driving again.

In years past they had had larger holiday gatherings. She had grown up living next door to her favorite cousins, her mother’s sister’s family. Christmas Eve and Christmas morning were always with her cousins, both girls, the same ages as she and her brother. To her, they were like sisters. Early Christmas morning, they would open stockings at one of their houses, then their uncle Kip would show up dressed like Santa Claus with a huge box of gifts for all of them.

Ammi has become thin as a bamboo. Her eyes bulge out like a Tiddi. She coughs all day. I cannot tell whether due to lack of food or if she is heartbroken. Still, we are safe. Do not be anxious about us.

All I got to know was that the bride’s name was Madhubala, even though I preferred Vaijanti Mala’s magical moves and Sadhana’s chic haircut.

I pulled my shirt down, opened the door, and rushed out, with Kaira following closely behind, having hastily buttoned up her oversized shirt.

She hugged her knees to her chest and thought about what one of the newscasters said, that O.J. might have been framed. She thought about all the people in the street around his house, about whether they thought he did it, about whether they cared.

She sat down, anger gone. Dissipated. Like a promised storm that never lands after the clouds are blown away by the wind. Alina didn’t go to Hira’s funeral. She would never open that chat again. After her phone broke, she didn’t throw it away. She packed it in a box, tissue paper at the edges and put it away in a drawer.

The shelves with Tarot books were so densely packed that I wondered if magic prevented them from collapsing. The books ranged from huge to small with covers from muddy brown to flaming yellow. I saw one that said it was the complete guide. I flipped through the pages and thought my mom might be dead before I got through the first half of the book.

I rushed to the living room, my feet carrying me with a sense of urgency that I had never experienced before, with a sense of anticipation of something sinister and something quite uncanny. I saw my mother kneeling beside his cursing body as he held her by the hair, her vitiligo white skin stained by his blood.

He smiled with a calm demeanor. When I looked at Sandeep, I saw that he was at peace with his thoughts. Here’s a man satisfied at making decisions with his heart. The sun was setting at the horizon, and his soft features were bathed in the twilight. I envied Sandeep.

Most of them were women. Sometimes a man would join them, if he had known the deceased. This was always exciting; most of the women were widows. Mary’s husband was the latest to go, last July sixth. His name had been Carl, and his funeral was a good one.