Things I Left Behind in Kalispell, Montana

The narrator of this ruefully funny short story about time and loss lists all the things he shed – by choice or otherwise – on a road trip to Kalispell, Montana. Haunted by his brother’s suicide, he copes poorly with a 1976 Honda Civic with engine trouble, his wife leaving him for a tow truck driver with an unfinished doctoral dissertation, and the dangerous idea that people die of heartbreak.