

To be honest, until Cassie started calling, there were a lot of things that I hadn’t thought much about. I knew the basic facts, of course. I knew, for example, that my mother was thirty-two years old when she was sent to prison. She had given birth by that time to eight children…

In Pittsburgh, women carry large baskets of coins. They scatter the nickels, dimes, and quarters up and down the city streets, as if they’re sowing corn or oats or wildflower seeds. When they’ve finished, the women stoop and twist to gather the change back up again.

This morning the sky takes on the look of one of those inspirational calendars, all illuminated-edged cumulous with light rays stabbing through like purifying swords, His Glory in pastel script right about where my neighbor’s SUVs are parked out back, one black, one silver, miracles of engineering, collecting light and splotches of berry puree from…

In Berlin I said, look, this city was bombed and separated with walls and put back together and here we are, now, we should find the neighborhood in East Berlin where my grandmother lived with a doctor’s family, hiding, learning how to give injections, the place where she decided not to go to Moscow and…