Single, Carefree, Mellow. Katherine Heiny

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Single, Carefree, Mellow - Katherine  Heiny


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       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

      First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC in 2015

      Copyright © Katherine Heiny 2015

      Katherine Heiny asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: ‘Once Was Love’, music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson. Courtesy of Cabin 24 Records © 2009.

      Selected stories in this work were previously published in the following: ‘The Dive Bar’ in the Saranac Review; ‘How to Give the Wrong Impression’ in The New Yorker; ‘Single, Carefree, Mellow’ in the Chariton Review; ‘Blue Heron Bridge’ in Narrative; ‘That Dance You Do’ in the Saranac Review; ‘Dark Matter’ in the Greensboro Review; ‘Cranberry Relish’ in the Chicago Quarterly Review; ‘Thoughts of a Bridesmaid’ in the Nebraska Review; ‘The Rhett Butlers’ in The Atlantic; ‘Grendel’s Mother’ in the Alaska Quarterly Review; ‘Andorra’ in Ploughshares.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at

       www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

      Source ISBN: 9780008105556

      Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008105563

      Version: 2015-12-03

       Dedication

      TO MY MOTHER,

       for more reasons than I can count

       And you don’t feel you could love me

       But I feel you could.

      —Paul Simon

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Epigraph

       BLUE HERON BRIDGE

       THAT DANCE YOU DO

       DARK MATTER

       CRANBERRY RELISH

       THOUGHTS OF A BRIDESMAID

       THE RHETT BUTLERS

       GRENDEL’S MOTHER

       ANDORRA

       Acknowledgments

       A Note About the Author

       About the Publisher

       THE DIVE BAR

      So picture Sasha innocently sitting alone in her apartment on a hot summer afternoon and the phone rings. She answers and a woman says, “This is Anne.”

      “Who?” says Sasha.

      “I think you know,” Anne says.

      “Well, I don’t.” Sasha is not trying to be difficult. She honestly doesn’t know. She is trying to think of possible Annes whose voices she should recognize. Is it someone she missed an appointment with? Is this the owner of that camera she found in a cab last month and kept—

      “I’m Carson’s wife,” Anne says.

      Sasha says, “Oh!” And even if she sat around from now until eternity saying Oh! every few seconds, she would never be able to inject it with as many layers of significance and wonder again.

      “I was thinking we ought to have a drink,” Anne says. And to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, Sasha does not know quite what to say. Should she meet her for drinks? Now what should she do? Well, what would you do if your married lover’s wife asked you?

      After the phone call, Sasha finds she is too agitated to stay in the apartment, so she calls her roommate, Monique, at work. Monique is just leaving, so they decide that Sasha will walk down Broadway from 106th Street and Monique will walk up Broadway from Thirty-sixth, and they will have a drink in whichever establishment they happen to meet in front of.

      Because Sasha is anxious, she walks faster than Monique and they end up meeting in front of a Taco Tico on Sixty-fourth Street, but they cheat slightly and go into an Irish bar next door.

      “Wow,” says Monique when Sasha tells her about Anne’s phone call. “That must have been so humiliating for her when you didn’t recognize her name.”

      Sasha


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