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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC in 2015
Copyright © Katherine Heiny 2015
Katherine Heiny asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: ‘Once Was Love’, music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson. Courtesy of Cabin 24 Records © 2009.
Selected stories in this work were previously published in the following: ‘The Dive Bar’ in the Saranac Review; ‘How to Give the Wrong Impression’ in The New Yorker; ‘Single, Carefree, Mellow’ in the Chariton Review; ‘Blue Heron Bridge’ in Narrative; ‘That Dance You Do’ in the Saranac Review; ‘Dark Matter’ in the Greensboro Review; ‘Cranberry Relish’ in the Chicago Quarterly Review; ‘Thoughts of a Bridesmaid’ in the Nebraska Review; ‘The Rhett Butlers’ in The Atlantic; ‘Grendel’s Mother’ in the Alaska Quarterly Review; ‘Andorra’ in Ploughshares.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008105556
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008105563
Version: 2015-12-03
TO MY MOTHER,
for more reasons than I can count
And you don’t feel you could love me
But I feel you could.
—Paul Simon
Contents
HOW TO GIVE THE WRONG IMPRESSION
So picture Sasha innocently sitting alone in her apartment on a hot summer afternoon and the phone rings. She answers and a woman says, “This is Anne.”
“Who?” says Sasha.
“I think you know,” Anne says.
“Well, I don’t.” Sasha is not trying to be difficult. She honestly doesn’t know. She is trying to think of possible Annes whose voices she should recognize. Is it someone she missed an appointment with? Is this the owner of that camera she found in a cab last month and kept—
“I’m Carson’s wife,” Anne says.
Sasha says, “Oh!” And even if she sat around from now until eternity saying Oh! every few seconds, she would never be able to inject it with as many layers of significance and wonder again.
