Peter Orner explores the impact of life's essential moments, those brief but far-reaching occasions that haunt his characters. The discovery of a crime, a theatrical performance in a small town, or the recollection of a cruel wartime decision are equally affecting in Orner's vivid scenarios. Esther Stories is divided into four distinct parts, each with its own momentum. The first half of the book concerns the lives of unrelated strangers, and the second introduces two Jewish families, one on the East Coast, the other in the Midwest. These stories cover considerable geographic ground - from Nova Scotia to Mississippi, from Fall River, Massachusetts, to Chicago - but the real territory is emotional. As the narrator of the title story tries to piece together his late aunt Esther's life from the fragments of stories told about her, he remembers what she told him in a dark kitchen when he was a child: "You pay for everything. When you think you're getting something for free - remember this - you'll pay later." All thirty-two wide-ranging pieces - funny or sorrowful, urban or rural, simple or innovative - are welcome additions to the art of the story.
Peter Orner is the 2002-2003 winner of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection, Esther Stories, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award, and winner of the Samuel Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction. Orner holds both an MFA from the University of Iowa and a degree in law. His work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and has appeared in a number of national publications, including The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review. Orner currently lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University.
Initials Etched on a Dining-Room Table, Lockeport, Nova Scotia The girl was young when she did it, and she didnt live there. This was in 1962. She was eighteen. Shed been hired to tidy the place. It was three, maybe four years before anybody noticed. The letters were so small, and they always ate in the kitchen. And when they did discover them, she was already gone to Halifax. By that time the girl had a reputation to escape from. So when they put two and two together and figured out it was she that did it, they werent surprised. Of course shed be the one to do something like this, they said shameless girl, not shocking at all.A cod fisherman, a captain, lived in the house with his wife, one of the original Locke mansions on Gurden Street overlooking the harbor. They never had children, but dust collects nonetheless in a house so huge. The girl had never been in a place that grand. At least thats what they told each other when they found her letters. RGL. That shed wanted to leave her mark in the world, something that would last, something that would stay. The family still lived in town, her father and brothers sold hardware, so they could have held somebody accountable for the damage if theyd wanted to. But the captain and his wife talked it over and decided not to mention it to anyone. Not that they approved Lord no. It was defacement of property. Vandalism. Of course it was an heirloom; it had belonged to her mothers mother, a burnished mahogany drop-leaf built in York in 1844. They could never approve. But they were quiet people; they kept to themselves in the hard times, and even in the good times they held their distance. Besides, what could anybody do about it now? What was done was done. Still, that didnt mean the captains wife didnt watch more carefully over the other girls who came to clean, and it didnt mean the captain didnt sometimes think of her sugar breath, that morning, the one out of a thousand when he was home and slept late hed startled her in the kitchen. Captain Adelbert! I didnt have any idea you were home, me banging the pots down here to wake the dead. His only intention was to touch her sweater (Lucy was out, still teaching school then), but he couldnt stop and kissed her, her hands at her sides. She didnt resist or desire, and that had made him a fool for years.Yet over the longer years when the fish became scarcer, when theyd long since failed their vow to fill that house with children, when the silences between them sometimes lasted hours, when the captains wife no longer paced the house, waiting for him, or word of him an odd thing. They still talked about the letters. RGL became a part of the table that had always been too good to eat on, as important as the deep swirls carved at the top of the legs. She. The simple fact of her once among them, among their things, dusting, opening closet doors, tracing her finger along the frames of the paintings in the front room. Taking a needle she must have used a nee
Excerpted from Esther Stories by Peter Orner
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