Quinn Green lives in the Midwest and goes for longer walks than she plans to. When she finds a shirt she likes she buys it in every color. Same for shoes. Her car always seems to need new tie rods. She doesn’t paint her nails. The art in her house clashes wildly, with itself and with the furniture. She has a lot of print books, but only reads on Kindle; she feels vaguely guilty when she has to dust them, then forgets her guilt until it’s time to dust again. Her electric skillet is her favorite appliance. She uses toilet bowl cleaner in the tub, as it gets rid of the rings without her having to scrub anything. She didn’t wear sunblock when she was younger and now her shoulders are darker than the rest of her, permanently, but you probably wouldn’t notice if you haven’t known her all her life, so she doesn’t worry about it. She doesn’t worry about most things. Other people tell her about worrying, about fretting and ruminating and picking at scabs, but she doesn’t understand, never has. She’ll listen, though, and ask meaningful questions. She’s never been one for stories lifted directly from life, so you won’t see your story in her work, but you’re there. Your way of worrying is there. The set of your hands is there. The pause you took before you started in about your grandmother’s deathbed confession (a secret affair in the 80’s) is there. Quinn was listening, even though she didn’t relate, didn’t have a grandmother, at least not one she knew. Has never had an affair. But when she listens it feels like she has, and she can imagine it, the love notes, the clandestine meetings in office kitchens or airport bathrooms or secret spots under bridges. The longing, when your grandmother was away from him, when she was peeling apples with her husband and thinking of the man from the train who she fucked twice a week for a whole summer back in 1987, the same year she lost her big toe to frostbite. She’s grateful she had the affair before the toe happened; she doubts John would have wanted her if she’d only had one toe. And so on. They’d planned to meet up again after he got back from Prague, but they didn’t, never spoke to each other again. Just stopped everything and got back to living, left the whole ridiculous mess behind, until she lay dying and wanted someone to know that she was a good wife and mother and grandmother but she had been scandalous once. Had done a wild thing without thinking it through, and needed those who’d inherit her house and her money and her old socks to know, to look down at her in her casket and think, there’s a good woman who did at least one bad thing.  Quinn understands this about your grandmother even though they’ve never met, can never meet, and she’ll leave the conversation with you wondering what she’ll reveal on her own deathbed, and who to.