All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories
Lee K. Abbott
Language: English
Pages: 480
ISBN: 039306137X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Cheever's true heir, our major American short story writer."—William Harrison
Here are stories about fathers and sons, stories about men and women, and stories about the relationships between men by one of our most gifted story writers. The narrator of "The Who, the What and the Why," begins breaking into his own house as a sort of therapy after his daughter dies. In "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings," the main character realizes that his closest relationship is to an angel, who appears to him only to announce the death of loved ones. All Things, All at Once reminds us why Lee K. Abbott is to be treasured: his perfect pitch for tales of hapless Southwesterners, his way with sympathetic irony, his eye that skillfully notes the awkward humiliations—common heartbreak, fractured families—and records it all in lyrical, affectionate language. In tales new and from previous collections Abbott examines lived life and the lies we necessarily tell about it.
the land and the humans they were upon it—and she would have to get an answer out without stuttering like an idiot who’d only learned English the week before. “Fix me a drink?” she asked. He made her a Cuba Libre—too sweet, she would recall—and he told her about Cynthia. “Maiden name Lanier,” he said. “From Galveston, a bone fide heiress. Oil. A million cousins and uncles, mostly in Louisiana. A gruesome people. All named Tippy or Foot or Beebum.” “You hit her,” she said. The next second,
from silk and rope, not to mention considerable good faith in the fellow who’d packed it. And then—this is the genuinely spooky stuff—I was not thinking any longer. I was, in fact, not even me, not Bobby Patterson at all: as transformed as Jekyll was to Hyde, I was one Tom H-for-Harding Butters, a felon, a man with three ex-wives, a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his forearm, and passing ability to pluck the guitar country-style. I had drunk poison, the goo that chronic grief is, and I had become Tom
I had spoken, or blurted “uh” with shock, but I waved my arm to say it was nothing, and a part of me in the here and now watched a part of me in the then and there go limping slowly into the darkness. For a time after this, no one in me came to burgle at night. Summer rolled around with many parties to go to and many artworthy sunsets to shout about. Becky Sue was taking a course at UTEP—recertification credit, I think, more words and handouts about, hell, playground management or what to do
of mind Baptists have. More than luck, it is a peacefulness—whole as we think love to be—and, for a time, it is able to spread its shine to all you do thereafter. It is the way I felt, in the year this occurs, when I walked down the hall in my house to find my son, Eric, in the garage. “What’s the matter?” I said. Spread out, in a pattern that would make you say a Buell had done it, were dozens of parts from Ray Reed’s motorcycle. “It was misfiring pretty bad today,” Eric said. “Besides, it
“You got something to hear.” I was recently separated from a sweetheart I didn’t understand any more than I do hijinks in Hungary; I was a father who sought to cross the t’s and dot the i’s children are said to have need of, plus a taxpayer with a checking account big enough to pay for the minor disasters of bad weather and poor planning; but mainly I was a man wobbly in the departments our public moralists like to yatter about, and so, not suspecting that in exactly fifty-one days I would say