The Warden

There's a stain on the bedroom ceiling that Richie and his wife have agreed to watch and see.Richie sells brake pads out by the bypass. His wife Kathy guards a prison full of men who don't give her trouble twice. Five years of marriage, a beige ranch house, a slow leak under the fridge, a towel that gets changed out and put back down. Richie isn't a complainer. He goes to work and he comes home, and he has decided that has to count for something.Then Kathy decides to change her life. The weight comes off. The makeup comes back. Heads start turning. And one evening Richie comes home to a black Cadillac in the driveway and a distinguished gentleman in a charcoal suit standing in his living room. Warden Thompson — Kathy's boss — shakes Richie's hand, calls him Dick, and lays out the new arrangement, kindly: the Warden is moving in tonight. The upstairs belongs to him and Kathy now. Richie is welcome to stay — in the basement. The work-release inmates have already set up a cot.And Richie says okay.What follows is a year nobody in the house will call what it is, told entirely in Richie's own voice — plain, earnest, funny without meaning to be, and wrong about almost everything in exactly the way we are all wrong about our own lives. The Warden is a fable of self-erasure and self-repair: the lies a man tells himself to keep the evening the evening, how a life gets handed over an inch at a time, and what it finally takes to ask for your own name back.For readers of quiet, unsettling literary fiction — where the menace is domestic, the humor is deadpan, and the narrator is the last to know. Read more