The garage door was standing wide open. A radio was playing somewhere inside. George Strait, low and scratchy. The whole place smelled like fresh cut pine and paint. I stood at the edge of the gravel drive in my good shoes and my good blouse, the one with the little blue buttons, and I couldn’t…
I married Jonah for two thousand dollars a month while he was serving twelve years in prison. I told myself it was survival, not love. I was twenty-seven years old. I was raising my little brother, Owen, by myself. And that morning, there had been a bright orange notice taped to our apartment door. FINAL…
The Warm Spot Part One: Four Years Old I raised my grandson, Kevin, after his parents died in a car accident. He was only four. It was a Tuesday in February. Ice on the roads outside Dayton, Ohio. My son, Michael, and his wife, Rachel, were driving home from a church potluck on Route 35….
Black and Paid For Part One: The Hayfield Dustin had just dropped a bale out the back of the baler when Shane’s silver sedan pulled up at the field edge. It was the second week of June. Late afternoon. Hot and still, the kind of Tennessee heat that sits on your shoulders like a wet…
My grandmother’s engagement ring was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t expensive. A small round diamond, maybe a quarter of a carat, set in a thin band of yellow gold with tiny engraved roses running around the sides. My grandfather bought it in 1956 from a jeweler in Allentown,…
Kids Eat Last I was pulling the second pan of rolls from the oven when I heard her. “Kids eat last in this family, sweetheart.” The kitchen was so hot the window over the sink had fogged up. Fourteen people in a three-bedroom ranch house in Dubois County, Indiana, on Thanksgiving Day, with the oven…
Co-pilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras died in the plane crash in Florida on Sunday alongside eight others when the private plane crashed. The investigation is still ongoing, but now, just days after the fatal accident, Filgueiras’s family says they are planning to take legal action. Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras was just 20 years old when she died…
On the last ordinary morning of my marriage, I made my husband coffee in the mug that said BEST HUSBAND. I’d bought that mug eleven years ago at a gas station in Ohio, on the drive home from our honeymoon. It was cheap white ceramic with red letters, the kind of thing you buy as…
Four in the Morning It was four in the morning when I started. The stars were still out over the east ridge, hard and white, the way they get in Tennessee in June before the humidity rolls in. The field was black and silver. Every blade of grass held a drop of dew, and when…
Credit: Getty Images A legendary singer has left us. Tony Butala, acclaimed singer and co-founder of the iconic group The Lettermen, died at age 85. The Lettermen were once one of the biggest vocal groups in the United States. Now, their founder and lead singer, Tony Butala, has died. The group announced his death in…