November Storm

In each of the storIes in Robert Oldshue’s debut collection, the characters want to be decent but fi nd that hard to defi ne. In the fi rst story, an elderly couple is told that delivery of their Thanksgiving dinner has been canceled due to an impending blizzard. Unwilling to have guests but nothing to serve them, they make a run to the grocery, hoping to get there and back before the snow, but crash their car into the last of their neighbors. In The Receiving Line, a male prostitute tricks a closeted suburban schoolteacher only to learn that the trick is on him. In The Woman on the Road, a twelve-year-old girl negotiates the competing demands of her faith and her family as she is bat mitzvahed in the feminist ferment of the 1980s. The lessons she learns are the lessons learned by a ten-year-old boy in Fergus B. Fergus, after which, in Summer Friend, two women and one man renegotiate their sixty-year intimacy when sadly, but inevitably, one of them gets ill. The Home of the Holy Assumption off ers a benediction. A quadriplegic goes missing at a nursing home. Was she assumed? In the process of fi nding out, all are reminded that caring for others, however imperfectly-even laughably-is the only shot at assumption we have.