Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore: A Novel

This was the land of potato chips and oil leaks and bathroom keys screwed to blocks of wood. Reality—that’s what this was

just not now. Never now.

puttering in the right lane with the truckers and the poor,

like her child in a playpen in a distant part of the house, occupying her heart but not threatening to interrupt her dinner party,

watching the rolling digits of an outdated pump,