Excerpt from Grendel's Guide to Love and War by A. E. Kaplan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Minnie lived next door with Allison McArdle, who'd been her partner for thirty years, the last two of which had been legally recognized (I was at the wedding; they both wore purple and huge hats). Anyway, Minnie and Allison had like twelve cats, which were always getting in the way when I was mowing the lawn, even though cats are supposed to be afraid of lawn mowers, even manual ones. So I was trying to push one of these idiot creatures out of the way with my foot when I stepped in some cat poop, which was massively annoying because (a) it stinks like the devil wrapped in goat cheese, and (b) I'd just bought the shoes I was wearing the week before.

I stopped mowing, and Mr. Boots, the fat one, came over and started rubbing against my leg while I wiped the sole of my shoe on the damp grass. It was July, and July in Virginia is sort of damp and disgusting. The air. The grass. My sweat-­coated body. You didn't walk through the air so much as swim through it.

So I was trying to rub the poop off my shoe and fend off the attentions of Mr. Boots when Allison came hobbling out the front door with her walker.

"Sorry, Mrs. McArdle," I said. "I'm almost done here. I just got a little hung up in some, uh, cat feces."

Allison always fancied herself very modern. "You can say shit to me, Tommy," she said. "It's okay."

"Yes, ma'am."

She took a long look at me while I rubbed the sole of my shoe on her grass, then sighed. "I don't suppose you heard about Minnie."

I stopped the business with my shoe and looked up. "No, ma'am, I didn't. Is she all right?"

"She passed away this morning," she said.

You would think that living on a street where I was one of two people under the age of seventy (the other person being my father), I would get used to hearing that people have died. I mean, Minnie's was not the first death I'd heard of in the last year, or even in the last month. Lake Heorot was something of a retirement mecca, recently developed and mainly populated by women long since collecting Social Security.

So I shouldn't have been shocked or particularly upset by Minnie's death, but I was. She'd been my friend, and she told great stories, some of which might even have been true. She had afternoon barbecues twice a year that I was always invited to, and she took good care of the flowers in front of her house, which made my father unreasonably happy. There was a vase in my dining room full of Minnie's zinnias, which, I think, reminded him of my mother, though he'd never actually say so.

"I'm so sorry," I said, which was a stupid platitude, but I never know what to say when somebody dies. No matter what comes out, it's never enough, and the harder you try, the worse you seem to do. I grabbed hold of the mower. "I really shouldn't be bothering you with the lawn mower today," I said. "I'll just pack up—­"

"You aren't bothering me, honey," she said. "Minnie was always so fond of you. Come inside now, won't you? There's something I want to give you."

I followed her inside, which took about ten minutes because that's how long it took Mrs. McArdle to get her walker turned around and back up the porch, and she sat me down in the living room, facing Minnie's teapot collection in its glass case.

"Wouldn't you like some tea, dear?" Allison had a particular penchant for chamomile tea, which I hate. But my father told me years ago that when an old lady offers you tea, you had better accept it.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

From my perch on the couch, I could hear Allison puttering around in the kitchen, and I thought about the fact that Minnie Taylor was lying deceased in the bed upstairs, when she'd been outside in her unbelted dressing gown and her vast granny underpants only half a day earlier. Death is like that, I suppose. One moment you're feeling the breeze under your clothes, and the next it's all over.

Excerpted from Grendel's Guide to Love and War by A. E. Kaplan. Copyright © 2017 by A. E. Kaplan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.