“I’m just not fancy like that. Do you wish I was fancy like that?” “Like what?” I ask. “Like those women,” Sadie says, nodding toward the bank of televisions on the opposite wall, “with their Derby hats, and party dresses, all frilly and foo-foo, high heels. I’m a jeans and…

“Do you ever wonder how you’re gonna live?” Sadie asks me, apropos of nothing, at least nothing as far as I can tell though Sadie’s mind works differently from mine, as we sit out back on the patio after dinner, the pork roast Sadie cooks in the crock pot every…

Sadie says we’re roommates. She says she loves me, and it’s fine otherwise, but that we’re just two people living together — we share a house and we share a bed but we come and go like roommates. “There’s no passion anymore,” Sadie says, the way she gets when she’s…

Sadie keeps a postcard of Key West on her desk, propped against her computer, among her Post-it Note reminders, and a dog-eared copy of the company directory, IT’s extension highlighted and underlined and starred, and the green rubber stress ball with the crooked smiley face she got at that trade…

Elvis in the parking lot of that sad motel in Pigeon Forge draped a pink nylon scarf over your neck and kissed you on the lips when we told him it was our anniversary, which I thought was bull shit but you motioned not to say anything, as if that…

“Everything is dead and gray and frozen,” Sadie says to me as we take a walk, down the street, to that little park at the edge of our neighborhood, the three-quarter-mile track that’s presently buried in slush and ice and snow, the stubborn remains of the winter storm that blew…

I’m not ready for this goddamn weather, as I sit in traffic, the expressway a parking lot, first snowfall of the year, a couple inches at most yet still enough to cause chaos, like no one has ever seen snow before in Louisville, a city that can’t decide if it’s…

“Our ship will come in soon,” Sadie says as she sips her Bloody Mary through a plastic straw. “Mark my words — I can see it on the horizon.” We are sitting at the sad bar down the street, at a high top table in the back against the rail…