Maile Meloy, Half in Love

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Half in Love, a collection of short stories by Maile Meloy (Scribner, 2002).

A few highlights:

"Tome" (from Best New American Voices 2000) For eight months, I had been telling my client he had no tort claim. . . . Sawyer had worked active, outside jobs all his life, and suddenly he could do nothing. It seemed to be the idleness, more than the brain damage, that made him crazy. He couldn't read, because the words came out scrambled, and he could barely sit still to try. He phoned me three times a day. My secretary stopped putting his calls through, so he came to the office, on foot because they wouldn't let him drive. He was a big, graying, blond-bearded man, my father's age, muscular but getting fat without his work. He treated me like a daughter, scolding and cajoling me. He wanted to sue, demanded to sue.

"Aqua Boulevard" (from The Paris Review, winner of the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction) Tati gave me the leash, a long orange strap, and the children kissed Oliver good-bye and went out the door. . . . I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, "This is the happiest day of my life." Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.

"Kite Whistler Aquamarine" (from Witness) Then the temperature dropped overnight to twenty below, and a Thoroughbred filly was born at our house, early, before we expected her.

"Last of the White Slaves" In the house in Saudi Arabia they employed two Arab servants, Eugénie said: a cook and a butler, both discreet and understanding about the sleeping arrangements. It was an embassy house, marble-floored against the heat, with a wing for the servants. The cook, a widow, kept to herself. An older man named Ahmed was butler and valet; he had worked for the old ambassador, and Miles considered him a friend. But Christopher disliked the old man, and finally threw a fit about the way the laundry was done.