Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

Lead:  My fall from suburban grace, or, more accurately, my failure to achieve the merest molehill of suburban grace from which to fall, began with a dinner party and a perfectly innocent, modestly clever, and only faintly quirky remark about Armand Assante.

Ending:  I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life.  Chaos, din, and beauty.  For a moment, I am still.  Then "Cornelia" cuts across the noise, and because one of them is calling me, I go.

What Dev would figure out very soon thereafter was that all that bluster and drama, that bad imitation of Robin Williams in one of his inspiring-mentor rolls stemmed from the fact that Mr. Trip was a self-important, histrionic, humorless jerk.  A class A windbag.

It was Saturday, the kind of tricky October Saturday that contains equal parts hot sun and cool air, so that you keep taking off your sweatshirt and putting it back on, taking off, putting on until, pretty soon laughing at yourself.

"Hospice," a strangely delicate, weightless word, Piper noticed, one that could be either whisper or hiss.

He could see how you could get used to the not-thinking, the haphazard floating through days, your brain lounging around like a tourist in a loud shirt, grasping nothing heavier that a magazine and a drink (umbrellaed, water beaded, pineapple hanging off its rim like an elephant ear), lulled by the sound of seagulls and ocean waves.