The theater tickets had been intended as a romantic gesture, a let’s-do-something-romantic-because-all-we-do-is-fight, and she’d abandoned him there, she’d left him onstage performing CPR on a dead actor and gone home, and now she wanted him to buy milk.

Did he actually date those women because he liked them, or was his career in the back of his mind the whole time? The question is unexpectedly haunting.

The Wendy’s was a low square building with the look of having been slapped together from a kit in an architecturally careless era, but it had a beautiful front door. It was a replacement, solid wood, and someone had taken the trouble to carve a row of flowers alongside the carved handle.

Time had been reset by catastrophe.

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

She hopes she isn’t as awkward to other people as she feels to herself.

“Everything happens for a reason,” she said. “This will pass. Everything passes.”

one of the things they have in common is a mutual distaste for sidewalk weepers and cell-phone screamers, for people who conduct their messier personal affairs in public—and

She hasn’t smoked in a while, managed to convince herself that smoking is disgusting, but it’s a pleasure, actually, more of a pleasure than she remembered.