This is a collection of short stories which illustrate the fickle and sometimes downright cruel flavor of life, including stories like:
Willing
A failed Hollywood actress realizes that she's wasted her forty years. Believing she's missed out on love, family, and success, she moves to Chicago. She lives in a Days Inn full time and starts dating a mechanic she meets there one day. They don't have a healthy relationship because she's really just using him as a warm body. Having given up on love, she has no real interest in this person and thinks he's a dupe for falling for her. Eventually he leaves, yet she still blames and resents him for it.
Dance in America
A dance teacher decides to travel around the U.S. teaching her craft at schools. She comes from Pennsylvania Dutch Country. During her travels, she decides to visit a friend from college whom she hasn't seen in some time. She discovers that her friend's son has Cystic fibrosis. This interaction takes a difficult emotional toll on the narrator as she determines to teach this boy to dance.
Beautiful Grade
An odd couple forms when a middle-aged law professor begins to date one of his students. Nobody approves of the affair, and it falls apart quickly. The professor heals from his heartbreak and gets back in the dating world again only to have a woman (closer to his age this time) cheat on him with his best friend. Hopeless after these failed love affairs, the professor writes a glib essay which he entitles "The young were sent to earth to amuse the old. Why not be amused?" in which he describes his suicidal depression and its origins.
People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babblign in Peed Onk
A young couple receive a diagnosis for a cancerous brain tumor in their baby. They have to learn how to look after one another when their life suddenly is changed completely because of the disease. In the world of "Peed Onk" or Pediatric Oncology they discover a thriving community of other parents, sick kids, and medical professions who all participate in helping one another through their most difficult seasons.
Terrific Mother
The protagonist has been told repeated by her friend, who is a mother, that she would make a "terrific mother," so when this same friend asks her to babysit she agrees. While the infant is in her care, the woman accidentally allows the baby to die. Immediately she is consumed by shame. She spends the next seven months in her apartment in the attic without leaving. Her struggles through grief and forgiveness are recorded.
