So Late in the Day: Stories of Men and Women

by Claire Keegan

there must be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of women who smelled the same.

how, if things have not ended badly, that they have not ended.

When the water reached her ribs, she took a breath, rolled onto her back and swam far out. This, she told herself, was what she should be doing, at this moment, with her life.

a man who often said the opposite of what he felt, as though the saying of it would make it true,

All she had needed, tonight, was what every woman sometimes needs: a compliment – a barefaced lie would have sufficed.

“I’m the loneliest man in the world,”

“I know your type,” he said. “You’re wild. You’re one of these wild, middle-class women.”

“Pretend you’re America,” she said. “I’ll be Columbus.”

rolling her r’s the way they’d taught her in Spanish class,