Heinrich had always thought there was something German about her, the yellow hair, the clear blue ice of her eyes, but Americans were never Germans. Americans were mutts, all of them.

Franny had her arm around Leo Posen's waist as she steered the course between the dark icebergs of her tables.

Now here he was, as thin and as quiet as a knife.

But when the toilets stopped flushing and the showers went dry, well, that was intolerable. Everyone agreed the water bill had to be paid on time.

It was after Cal died that her mother finally lost her freckles, as if even they had abandoned her.

Without the buzzing overhead lights the sunlight fell down the walls and across the linoleum tiles, collecting in watery pools around their feet.

Albie's bicycle was an amalgamation of so many different replacement parts it could no longer rightfully be called a Schwinn.

When he arrived at his destination, he lifted his bike onto his shoulder like it was his younger brother and carried it with him into the elevator.

He was a living skeleton with his black tattoos and his thick black braid, like Death himself had come for them, ready to ride them out on his handlebars.

All those stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn't listen to, won't remember, never got right, wasn't around for.

She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night.

By the time the plane landed at Charles de Gualle she had aged twenty years. Prosecutors should insist the trials of murderers and drug lords be held in economy class on crowded transatlantic flights, where any suspect would confess to any crime in exchanges for the promise of a soft bed in a dark, quiet room. Off the plane, stiff and slow, she shuffled into the river of life: the roll-aboard suitcases trailing behind the cell-phone-talkers like obedient dogs, everyone walking with such assurance that it never occurred to her not to follow them.

She eased her heels out of the backs of her shoes even though she knew it was a mistake. Her feet would expand like bread dough and she would never be able to cram them back in.

Teresa looked back and forth between Bert and the pretty ring on her hand and thought she must be emitting light from her entire body she loved him so much.

"For the vast majority of the people on this planet," Fix had said, "the thing that's going to kill them is already on the inside."

Franny, half asleep on top of the bedspread beside her husband, was unable to map out all the ways the future would unravel without the moorings of the past.