Excerpt from After the Parade by Lori Ostlund, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Walter looked out the window for what seemed a very long time. "I saved you, Aaron," he said at last. His head sank onto his desk, heavy with the memories it contained.

"Yes," Aaron agreed. "Yes, you did. Thank you." He could hear the stiffness in his voice and regretted—though could not change—it. This was how he had let Walter know that he was leaving.


Walter had already tended to his "nightly ablutions," as he termed the process of washing one's face and brushing one's teeth, elevating the mundane by renaming it. He was in bed, so there seemed nothing for Aaron to do but retire as well, except he had nowhere to sleep. He had packed the guest bed, a futon with a fold-up base, and they had never owned a typical couch, only an antique Javanese daybed from Winnie's store in Minneapolis. Winnie was Walter's sister, though from the very beginning she had felt more like his own. Sleeping on the daybed would only make him think of her, which he did not want. He had not even told Winnie that he was leaving. Of course, he could sleep with Walter, in the space that he had occupied for nearly twenty years, but it seemed to him improper—that was the word that came to mind—to share a bed with the man he was leaving. His dilemma reminded him of a story that Winnie had told him just a few weeks earlier, during one of their weekly phone conversations. Winnie had lots of stories, the pleasure—and the burden—of owning a small business.

"I'm a captive audience," she had explained to him and Walter once. "I can't just lock up and leave. People know that on some level, but it suits their needs to act as though we're two willing participants. Sometimes they talk for hours."

"They are being presumptuous, presumptuous and self-involved," Walter had said. Walter hated to waste time, hated to have his wasted. "Just walk away."

Aaron knew that she would not, for he and Winnie were alike: they understood that the world was filled with lonely people, whom they did not begrudge these small moments of companionship.

The story that Winnie had called to tell him was about a customer of hers, Sally Forth. ("Yes, that's really her name," Winnie had added before he could ask.) Sally Forth and her husband had just returned from a ten-day vacation in Turkey, about which she had said to Winnie, pretrip: "It's a Muslim country, you know. Lots of taboos in the air, and those are always good for sex." Sally Forth was a woman impressed with her own naughtiness, a woman endlessly amused by the things that came out of her mouth. The first morning, as she and her husband sat eating breakfast in their hotel restaurant and discussing the day's itinerary, her husband turned to her and requested a divorce. Winnie said that Sally Forth was the type of person who responded to news—good or bad—loudly and demonstratively, without considering her surroundings. Thus, Sally Forth, who was engaged in spreading jam on a piece of bread, reached across the table and ground the bread against her husband's chest, the jam making a red blotch directly over his heart. "Why would you bring me all the way to Turkey to tell me you want a divorce?" Sally Forth screamed, and her husband replied, "I thought you'd appreciate the gesture."

Winnie and Aaron had laughed together on the phone, not at Sally Forth or even at her husband but at this strange notion that proposing divorce required etiquette similar to that of proposing marriage—a carefully chosen moment, a grand gesture.

Sally Forth and her husband stayed in Turkey the whole ten days, during which her husband did not mention divorce again. By the time the vacation was over, she thought of his request as something specific to Turkey, but after they had collected their luggage at the airport back home in Minneapolis, Sally Forth's husband hugged her awkwardly and said that he would be in touch about "the details."

Excerpted from After the Parade by Lori Ostlund. Copyright © 2015 by Lori Ostlund. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.