Excerpt from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

We arrive at the little blue clapboard cabin in Port Clyde in midafternoon and go to the general store to order the propane for the morning and buy groceries. John wants us to get up early again tomorrow to get out to the island as soon as possible. He'd go this evening but by the time we got the house sorted out and the food put away we'd still be making beds by oil lamp. And besides, the children like this mainland cabin too, playing on the granite boulders that jut from its sloping lawn, dashing up and down the aluminum bridgeway that runs over the tidal flat to the jetty. I watch them at it as I get supper ready.

They sense, without noticing, the new world about them, the salted air, the clear light we don't get farther south until autumn, the brightly painted lobster boats reflected in the rippling mirror of the bay. These are not things to pause over for them, the objects at hand always being what matter most—the chain Michael can put across the bridgeway to try to block the others from coming down, the bushes they hide behind, the tall grass they climb through, which will have Alec and Michael wheezing soon enough.

After supper, Michael and Celia are allowed to stay up for another hour reading. Though he has a room to himself at home, Alec doesn't like being on his own when he imagines the other two are still conspiring together somewhere in the house. But tonight it's okay because his father's telling him a story. John never reads them books. He makes the stories up. I don't have the energy at the end of the day for that, or his invention. He makes a ghost out of tissue paper, a king out of a wooden block, and Alec will be quieted to the point of trance, by the story, but also because his father's attention is pouring over him, and only him, like the air of heaven. And when John leans down to kiss him good night, Alec will reach up to feel his double chin again, chubby and warm and a little scratchy, and he'll be content in a way I can never make him because I am never the exception.

I disappear for twenty minutes into Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier while John does the dishes, fighting past my initial irritation at all the class nonsense and how no one will say anything of significance to anyone else because it's simply not done to be explicit. Like in James or Wharton. Those novels where you're screaming at characters to go ahead already and blurt it out, save us a hundred pages of prevarication. But my pique wears off and I sink into the allure of the Ashburnhams at Nauheim, idling on the notion of how someone could so distort his life around an obsessive love, when John comes in having forgotten the dish towel still over his shoulder, and looks across the disarray of the room for the newspaper somewhere in the tote bags. He wouldn't be able to remember where he stowed it to save his life. I reach into the side pocket of his briefcase and hand it to him.

"Did you call Bill?"

"Yes, we're all set," he says, already scanning the headlines, settling into the chair opposite me beneath the standing lamp.

I'm pleasantly tired enough to trust he got the dates right when he spoke to Bill Mitchell. Why it couldn't be settled a month ago I don't understand. I just have to assume we have our two weeks (they arrived a day early one year and we had to check into a motel). John's absentmindedness is chronic and infuriating. Whereas I remember the dates for everything. It's embarrassing actually to admit how much I still store in my head: our first visit to John's parents (April 5, 1963), the day he bought his Morris Minor (March 10, 1964), and on and on. I remember the anniversaries of these events too, but I don't mention them to people because unless it's a birth or death or wedding I get quizzical looks, as in, Why have you bothered to retain such trivia, why does it matter? (I tell the children instead; they have no idea what I'm talking about and don't really listen, but nod anyway before asking their next question.) It was sixteen years ago last month, for instance, that John appeared unannounced on my doorstep with a car already packed with food and wine and drove us all the way to the Highlands, to a friend's house he'd been loaned for the weekend.

Excerpted from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Haslett. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.