Hold Off the Night

'Hold Off the Night''s twelve stories find people wrestling with the difficulties inherent in composing a life, navigating change, and salvaging relationships. These stories explore the difficulties of life inherent in families and relationships, complicated by class and faith, fear and loyalty, and longings that resonate with the broader human experience. Evelyn runs away from her fracturing life to a forgotten refuge while Jennifer finds herself in danger with a student's father who is not the charming man about whom she's fantasized. A musician strives to resolve his relationship with his father, complicated by his mother's mental illness, on the holiday that broke the family apart. Nine-year-old Jessie's loyalties are tested when "Daddy" returns to the roadside motel she runs with her mother in Texas. A mother in a claustrophobic home awaits news from her son in Afghanistan in a world that's forgotten the war. A homeless man causes a young mother to chafe at the edges of her narrow life and behave in surprising ways while ten-year-old Toni is made to understand class on her troubled family's camping vacation. After being laid off from the Ford plant, Bill sets off across country in search of his ex-wife who ran off with his son and finds truths about himself in the bargain. A widowed father tries desperately to connect with his troubled daughter. Joan struggles to emulate her patron saint while balancing her resentment and compassion toward the troubled foster child who's invaded her too-crowded home. Finally, a Jack Mormon is visited by missionaries who try to pray her back into the fold, forcing her to confront her place in a church and a family she believes complicit in her terrible loss.