In this story “of love in a time of violence,” the narrator never reveals his name; he’s an octogenarian who reasonably expects that “terrible, powerful, soulless people are coming to kill me.” Yet his own soul is at peace. He loves the “hum of Brooklyn roads, the muffled roar of the BQE, and the sound of air whistling through the steel weave of the bridges…” Brooklyn is “embraced by the ocean, the harbor, the East River,” and its deep blue sky is a rhapsody that calms the heart. Yet with rhapsody comes tragedy. The narrator recalls with melancholy his wife, Clare, their son, Charles, and the joy they all once brought to each other. But Charles died fighting in Iraq and Clare’s own violent passing nearly strips the narrator’s life of meaning. The couple—he once a rich investment banker, she a lawyer—enjoyed long walks from Brooklyn into Manhattan until one day a crazed man wielding a machete began butchering people. The narrator, then a 70-something Vietnam veteran, killed the attacker, but at a heavy and permanent cost. The ensuing events are nothing he could have anticipated, which is much to the readers’ benefit. A few years later, he saves a friend from the clutches of a drug gang, and he knows the gang is now coming for him. But he feels he’s lived his life and isn’t about to skip town to escape his likely death: “Emily Dickinson stuck like a limpet to Amherst,” he says. “Brooklyn is good enough for me.” The narrator reflects deeply on the family and possessions he once had, on his love of his family and his city, and on the ghosts to whom he owes allegiance. Had he known what was going to happen, would he have interrupted the machete attack? He and Clare could have kept walking, but they didn’t, and he is forever haunted by the consequences.