The Palace Thief

This is the only story in the collection to be written in third person limited point of view. Baseball-obsessed, 54-year-old Wilson Kohler entertains his 20-year-old visiting son, Brent, who is in Boston for a layover before he goes back to college in Oregon. Wilson looks forward to the visit, as he has been isolated since his wife, Abbie, left him three years ago for Tad Heinz, a vice president at his company. Wilson is devastated, and there is an incident where he encounters Tad in a parking lot and punches him.

When it comes to women, Wilson has a few misadventures with some he meets in random places—on a plane, after a traffic accident, and in Boston’s bar scene. However, in his heart, he feels “not only could he not replace Abbie, he still could not imagine what replacing her would involve” (135).

Wilson and Brent go to a Red Sox baseball game. Wilson longs to be close to Brent, but he is unsure of how to interact with him. Brent has changed significantly; he has a pierced ear and does community work during the summers, which has included volunteering with The Homeless Alliance in Brooklyn and ta The Sanctuary, a women’s shelter. Wilson teases Brent about his projects while being secretly “annoyed” about “Brent’s seriousness regarding the problems of strangers” (127). When Brent asks about his father’s love life, Wilson says that women like Abbie no longer exist. Brent retorts that “they do exist” (144), then affirms the importance of “listening" to women (145). This annoys Wilson, who sees it as self-righteous.

During the game, Brent spends a while talking to a woman named Margaret and insists Wilson should date someone like her. Brent ends up inviting her to dinner with them. At dinner, Wilson watches Brent and Margaret and is unable to help being “impressed with Brent’s conversational ingenuity” and her ability to ask questions (156). When Brent goes to the bathroom, Wilson and Margaret converse and confess that what they like about each other is that Brent likes each of them. Soon after Wilson sees Brent off at the airport, he and Margaret begin dating. Wilson even accompanies Margaret on a flight to Minnesota to see her father, who is dying of cancer.

Back at home, Wilson has the romantic idea of sending roses to Margaret’s house. As he calls the florist, he is overwhelmed by grief for his lost marriage because he used to send his ex-wife flowers from the same florist. He feels that “there seemed to be a part of him that he no longer controlled, a ruinous version of himself that brought up new memories of his old life as soon as he was ready to embark on a new one” (165). He drinks two scotches before meeting Margaret for dinner, then finds that, in her company, “his fears were unfounded” (166).

When Wilson thinks about marrying Margaret, he experiences nostalgia because “it was the first time since Abbie had left that he had shared Brent with a woman” (166). Then, it occurs to him that Brent has set him up with Margaret as a “condolence” (167) for never spending another summer at home. He stops his car by a place that might have been the woman’s shelter where Brent worked and feels the grief of his son being grown up and “gone” (167).