Excerpt from "Daddy's Home"

This is another story with Dale, who appeared in the triptych "Split-level with 3 bedrooms and 2-1/2 baths, rec room and den, cathedral ceiling, breezeway." It's 1985 and she's in her early 40s, divorced for five years, with a seventeen-year-old son who's spending the weekend with his father. Not having any plans, she gets in her car and heads off.

She thought she'd cruise around the neighborhood—only about a half hour from where she grew up, but almost the same, another New Jersey suburb shouldering alongside others, crowding like kids in the back seat, their grunts and groans and shoves and paltry complaints—new in the 1950s—routine now. She knew it all well, and wondered when or whether she'd start to hate it—you're supposed to hate the suburbs, right? Even more deeply than those who didn't live in them—because you knew its false promises and outright lies—at least that's what everyone tells you, and what you're supposed to tell yourself. Dale was not aware all this was going on in her head somewhere, or if it even was; she shrugged as if to say yeah it's all the same but so what it's all the same everywhere nothing ever changes while everything passes. Right now in the sunshine she couldn't be bothered. She was living topside, and in no mood to throw herself against more locked gates. Besides, when you're a Wanderer, she almost sang, you just roam around around around. As always, she would save for 3:00 am the balled fists and silent imprecations hurled at the ceiling, when the night is dark and the ground is cold. Right now she was like the man in the painting, a wanderer in a sea of fog—but not on a lofty peak: in a 1980 Chrysler LeBaron Fran bought her on his way out. It handled like a floating lead pipe, but she thought it was hilarious. A family car, a mid-level executive's car—not a New Yorker, but still swanky inside—designed as though a low-slung box was a sign of settled success. Big and dumb, but it took her places.