Palindrome: Stories

A carpenter does verbal battle with God over his son's early death. A young man haunted by his cousin's suicide has an opportunity to redeem himself of his former negligence; an alcoholic reunites with the man who ruined his marriage, and discovers more than he bargained for in the child he may or may not have fathered. A mother attempts to comfort her daughter after her son-in-law drowns in the Gulf of Mexico and finds herself strangely implicated. After a school shooting, a college professor becomes obsessed with vengeance, but not for the first time. A veteran tasked with driving his daughter to an abortion clinic is forced to acknowledge painful truths about his own history of love; a woman recalls night-hikes to a rescue zoo with the troubled boy who shifted the arc of her life; a widow has the foundation torn out from beneath her when she discovers her husband's long-term infidelity. And in the title story, a pair of cousins flee the Vietnam draft only to find that there is no escape from what they most fear. The characters in Palindrome find themselves boomeranged into situations for which they weren't prepared, and they have no choice but to confront their emotional and spiritual challenges if they wish to move forward with their lives.