Peter Orner is the author of Love and Shame and Love, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a novel set in Namibia and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Two books will be out in 2013, a reissue of his first book, Esther Stories, and a new story collection, Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge. Born in Chicago, Orner lives in San Francisco.
Marie and Frank were lifelong renters, and though moving their things out of a house was like unloading a ship, their old house didn’t sail away. It sat there, on the South Dakota plains, waiting—…