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this new edition of After the Fire in the spring of 2013. It’s thirty-three years since I went shopping on that fateful Wednesday morning. My marriage had failed, and I thought my life was over. I wasn’t dead, but I fervently wished I was. Now that my forty-sixth novel is due to be published this fall, good friends like to mimic that old Virginia Slims commercial when they tell me, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
    One last side note. My mother saved Gold Bond Stamps, which is probably why I gravitated to S&H Green Stamps. Unfortunately, trading stamps really did go out of style, but some people never change. Now, instead of saving Green Stamps, I am into frequent-flier miles. So are my daughters.
    DNA is like that.
THE COLLECTOR
    I like the green ones best.
    I count them up as any miser would
    And watch them grow with satisfaction,
    For they are the tangible symbol
    Of what is processed here—
    Toilet paper, lettuce, pork and beans.
    The taxes must be paid in cash.
    God knows there’s precious little of that.
    Some say trading stamps are going out of style.
    I’ll collect them till I die.
    At least it’s something I do well.

Conversation on a Front Porch
    Once my husband was out of the house, I thought that would be the end of it, but of course, it wasn’t. Every Saturday morning, around six thirty, he’d show up out front and beg me to take him back. “After all,” he’d say, “you said in sickness and in health. This is sickness. Take me back.” But by then I had finally figured out that if eighteen years of my loving him hadn’t fixed him, he wasn’t going to get well.
    People ask me why I moved from Phoenix to Seattle. I tell them, I was a refugee from a bad marriage and a worse divorce. The real reason I had to leave town was that I was weak and susceptible and every bit as addicted to my husband as he was to booze. Even waiting to meet him at a restaurant to discuss the terms of our divorce, I felt my heart rise in my throat at simply seeing the man walking toward me on the sidewalk. I was outraged that my body could betray me in such a fashion. He was bad for me. He had drained me of all joy and laughter, although I didn’t know how thoroughly for a very long time.
    Six years later, and a year into my marriage to my second husband—the nice one—we visited Phoenix. I took my new husband by the insurance agency office where I had once worked to introduce him to the people who had been my fellow employees there. None of the people in the office recognized me because, in all the years we had worked together, they had never seen me smile and had never heard me laugh.
CONVERSATION ON A FRONT PORCH
    He rings the doorbell. More distant
    Than a stranger, he stands on the porch
    Of the house that used to be our home,
    Begging me to come and talk,
    Just talk, he tells me, nothing more.
    Civility is difficult to put away,
    Especially after years of sharing lives.
    And so I go. It’s easier to go and listen
    Than it is to say no. Saying no requires honesty,
    A commodity that seems to be in very short supply.
    I listen as he reviews mistakes, hoping to find
    The key that will put things right again,
    But time for that has long since passed, and now
    Our only hope is to exit with perhaps
    A modicum of grace.
    At last I find a plausible excuse to go inside,
    Placing welcome distance between his rosary of blame
    And me. I will not go again to hear him tell his beads,
    To say a mournful requiem over something
    That has passed beyond all powers of resurrection.

Why?
    I probably should have named this poem “Collateral Damage” instead of “Why?”
    The kids were little when their father moved out of the house. My daughter was in first grade, my son in kindergarten. Since I was the one who had instigated the divorce, I was the one left to answer the children’s questions, and I did that as best I could. I sat them down and