Along with his six novels, his children’s book “The Cat’s Pajamas,” his recent memoir
“This Isn’t Going to End Well,” Daniel Wallace has steadily written short stories. This, his first collection, is comprised of 23 stories, brief and strong, some comic, as short as one or two pages. Wallace captures moments which seem ordinary, but are not, moments which MIGHT change the future if the protagonist chooses to see it.
Several of these are about, as is often the case, the eternal search for love, romance, affection, connection. My favorite is “Always,” which tells the story of a romance from start to finish in just over four pages. The couple have a coffee date, then real dates. They are inseparable, passionate, daily. He cannot believe his good fortune.
One evening she says, thoughtfully “It always starts off like this for me. With a bang.” He replies: what do you mean, “Always”? And they talk, communicate, which is what people are supposed to do. In a little masterstroke, Wallace tells us the young man’s thoughts. Don’t ask, he tells himself, don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, and then he blurts “how many?” And that is that. “You should probably go, she said.” Relationships, especially new ones, are fragile.
In “A Night Like This,” a divorced man, after an appropriate amount of time, becomes interested in a perfectly appropriate new woman. They get along great. On their first intimate night, she notices a photo on his bedroom dresser. “Who’s that?” she asks. “Nobody,” he answers, and then “my ex-wife.”
“It’s none of my business, she said, but I should tell you, you know, for the next time this happens to you. It’s maybe best not to have a picture of your ex-wife on display.” She leaves. They will not be together again, he knows, but Wallace turns the moment into hope. The young fellow realizes that he’s not ready yet, but, one day, ”next time,” he will make a true new start with a new woman.
The learners in those stories are virtuous young men. A fresh start becomes available to a not very nice fellow, in “Mending Fences: The Movie.” The protagonist is a con man, a thief. In a roadside Waffle Shoppe he is mistaken for a movie star, Dustin Evers, who had just starred with Julia Roberts in “San Francisco Nights.”
He allows the waitresses to believe this and in what starts out as a possible con—what can this get him? – he recounts the plot of his present film, being shot just down the road: “Mending Fences,” in which a man with a checkered past finds himself on a farm, helping a beautiful widow save the place, and atoning for his past rottenness. This fantasy, which he invents, is the road forward for him, if he can realize it and act on it.
