From the novel Life Is Everywhere, which was published last month by Graywolf Press.

When I was in college, when my mother’s mother died, I did not know what to think. It took some time, the dying, and it happened mostly out of sight, in that large place called California. I considered it unimportant. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but I didn’t have much choice.

My mother, still recouping a certain gross emotional debt, mentioned, in an offhand way one day, that her mother had been discovered collapsed outside her home. I imagined the body, “discovered…