WHAT’S COME OVER YOU?

Love and loss form myriad combinations in these quirky, funny, ironic, and heartbreaking tales: a third collection from storywriter and novelist Thurm (The Clairvoyant, 1997, etc.).

A rabbi’s wife of ten years announces in front of his entire congregation that she’s leaving him, but when a new woman tempers his desperate yearning, the wife calls to ask for another chance. This dilemma, posed by opening story “Moonlight,” is merely a teaser for the stunning work that follows. “Earthbound” shows Walter grappling with his love for 19-year-old daughter Sunny, who has two children by a high-school sweetheart and now dates a loser who works in a pet shop. Mothers and daughters go at it in “Passenger” (12-year-old Lacey leaves her teacher/cab-driver mom to visit her dad and his new family in California) and in “Jumping Ship” (11-but-looks-14-year-old Noelle cares about nothing except calling her boyfriend while she and her single mother are visiting the grandparents in Florida). Mrs. Sugarman has paid for “Housecleaning” to welcome her asthmatic husband home from the hospital, but the odd couple she’s engaged arrive with their precocious child, fight bitterly, and reveal the most intimate details of their lives, forcing their employer to face her deepest desires. In “Personal Correspondence,” Sam hires lesbian Honey Rose to write thank-you notes after his wife leaves and winds up applying for the position of fathering her child. Thurm finds love everywhere and embraces all relationships: among parents and children, husbands and wives, friends, strangers, and lovers. Her protagonists are bad luck Charlies, likable and empathetic, fumbling through seemingly ordinary lives that Thurm’s deft hand raises to the extraordinary.

“Love the One You’re With” could be the theme song for these poignant, multilayered, pitch-perfect slices of life filled with humanity and hope despite frequent betrayals and abandonments.