Five Tuesdays in Winter

This collection of ten short stories explores love, loss, family, desire, and the struggle for self-expression.

In "Creature," fourteen-year-old Carol spends the summer babysitting for the wealthy Pike family on Widows' Point while her father is in rehab in New Hampshire. She settles into a turret room and cares for Kay's two young children while reading Jane Eyre and writing letters to her friend Gina. After six days, Kay's younger brother Hugh arrives, charismatic and troubled: His marriage is collapsing. Carol develops an intense crush, filling her notebook with poems and drawings about him, which Hugh finds and reads. One afternoon, he follows her into an upstairs bathroom, locks the door, and gropes her, referencing what he read. When she tells him it hurts, he presses harder; she bites his shoulder, and he falls backward, hitting his head on the wall. Carol walks outside expecting to be arrested but later sees Hugh on the mansion's widow's walk, a railed rooftop platform, with a bandage on his shoulder. She puts on swim fins, jumps into the pool, and carries on.

"Five Tuesdays in Winter" follows Mitchell, a reticent, middle-aged used-bookstore owner in Portland, Maine, whose wife left him years earlier. His twelve-year-old daughter Paula works at the shop. Mitchell hires Kate, recently arrived from San Francisco, and finds himself drawn to her. Paula arranges Tuesday-evening Spanish lessons with Kate, and Mitchell discovers Kate's birthday falls on Valentine's Day. On the fifth Tuesday, Mitchell prepares a lasagna dinner. During the lesson, Paula gets her first period. Kate rushes to the pharmacy while Mitchell babbles through the bathroom door. When Kate returns, they wash blood from his late mother's quilt together. Kate touches his face. Paula interrupts, grinning, and leads them to dinner, where she has lit a candle and poured apple juice into wineglasses. Mitchell feels a sense of completeness.

"When in the Dordogne" is narrated by a man recalling the summer of 1986. He is fourteen, and his parents leave for eight weeks in France, hoping to aid his father's recovery from repeated mental health crises. Two college-age house-sitters, Ed and Grant, care for him. The narrator, who feels like an inconvenient late-in-life addition to his family, is transformed by their warmth. Ed discovers the narrator's crush on Becca Salinero and orchestrates encounters. One night, the narrator touches a bullet hole in his father's study wall where his father once tried to shoot himself; Ed follows him in and says what happened is gone. Through Ed's efforts, the narrator and Becca share their first kiss. In a coda from adulthood, the narrator reveals he married Becca. He has read all three of Ed's novels without finding any reference to that summer and notes, with surprise, that Grant was the one he loved more.

In "North Sea," Oda, a German widow and insurance saleswoman, takes her twelve-year-old daughter Hanne to a small North Sea island. Oda's husband Fritz was killed nearly two years earlier in a cycling accident. Oda hopes sharing a bed will prompt intimate conversations about Fritz, but each night Hanne shuts her down. When an Australian family asks Hanne to babysit and the parents return very late from sea caves, Hanne tells the anxious children their parents have drowned. She gathers them to her, unconsciously replaying the comforting role Oda tried to play when Fritz died. The parents return safely. Hanne, feverish on the sofa, says Mutti and falls into her mother's arms.

"Timeline" follows a young woman who moves into her brother Wes's apartment in Burlington, Vermont, after fleeing a painful affair with William, a married bartender in Cambridge. She had an abortion; when she saw William's wife visibly pregnant, she left. She begins dating Jeb, a college student. Below their apartment lives Stacy, a single mother who works the night shift. After a friend's wedding where William appears uninvited, the narrator returns to find William at her door, announcing his wife has had a baby. The narrator feels the bodily absence of her own lost pregnancy. Sirens arrive for Stacy's apartment; her ex-husband has brought police and child protective services to take the children. Wes races down to intervene but fails. Jeb leads the narrator to her room, where a timeline of human history decorates the wall, and she knows someday she will try to freeze all of this in words.

In "Hotel Seattle," an unnamed middle-aged gay man reunites with Paul, his former college roommate, at a hotel bar. He spent years suppressing his sexuality while secretly admiring Paul. When he came out, Paul cut off contact. Now Paul is disillusioned and unhappily married. Over dinner, Paul's questions about gay sex grow intensely personal. He pushes the narrator to the elevator and forces himself on him in the hotel room despite repeated protests. In the morning, Paul panics about having contracted AIDS and blames the narrator. The narrator dresses painfully and leaves. In the lobby, his partner Steve is asleep in a chair. Steve reads the whole story in his face and walks beside him, very slowly, all the way home.

"Waiting for Charlie" portrays a ninety-one-year-old man visiting his granddaughter Charlie, who lies in a coma after a skiing accident. He tries aromatherapy; when he holds aftershave under her nose, she opens one eye. A nurse explains this is a recurring reflex. Alone with her, he tries to pray but can only beg. As sleep overtakes him, his breathing falls into rhythm with Charlie's.

In "Mansard," Audrey arrives at her friend Frances's house for Friday bridge. Frances's estranged father, Ben Yardley, a former spy, has appeared unannounced. Ben and Audrey play brilliantly together. Before she leaves, he kisses her and says he lives on Graham Street in Portland, Maine, in a house with a mansard roof, a style marked by steep double slopes, above a hair salon. Over the following months, Audrey drives to Portland searching for the house. She never finds it but comes to enjoy the search, imagining the lit-up building waiting for her.

"South" follows Marie-Claude, a French woman in Baltimore, driving to Hatteras with her children, Flo and Tristan, nearly a year after her husband Robert left her. A confrontation builds: Flo accuses her mother of lying, then reveals Robert told her he had been unhappy since before Tristan was born and never knew real love until his new girlfriend. Marie-Claude admits Tristan is easier to love. Flo silently plans to get off at a bus station, but when the ocean appears beside the car, she forgets. Tristan wakes, sees the water, and asks his mother to tell him how he was born.

"The Man at the Door" presents a woman struggling to write her third novel during her baby Matty's morning nap. A stranger arrives holding a paperback bearing her name, published two years in the future. When she opens her pantry, she finds her father's bar from childhood. The man's face keeps shifting, and he makes hostile editorial pronouncements, crossing out her text: Women are unreadable writing about themselves; her violent ending is an atrocity. She tells him to leave; he refuses. In a surreal conclusion, she digs a hole in the backyard and buries him. She picks up the book, turns to the last chapter, and sees the red cross-outs have faded. It is a fine ending.