SHORT STORIES REVIEW: "Other Heartbreaks"

All nine stories in Patricia Henley's fourth collection have "limerence," being crazy in love, as their backdrop. Whether it's long past or in the present, whether it's between women, or between a man and a woman, or a tangled threesome, obsessive love with its accompaniment, lust, is at the center of these vividly drawn, often wise stories featuring offbeat Midwesterners who are mostly Catholic, serially married and down on their luck.

In "Sicilian Kisses," Barbara Tidd is newly wed and living in Echo, British Columbia, with her second husband, a blue-collar worker who likes nothing better than to participate in reenactments, the bloodier the better. She wants this marriage to work, but when Colin's off rescuing truckers and big rigs, she spends her time with her married neighbor Lucy Givens. Each afternoon, when her kids are in school, Lucy mixes up Sicilian Kisses, one part Amaretto to one part Southern Comfort, and she and Barbara steal away to share secrets their husbands don't want to hear. When they join the other Echo wives on a jaunt to Kamloops to participate in a belly dancing workshop -- free of husbands, children, responsibilities -- Barbara can no longer ignore the troubles in her marriage and her longing for Lucy.

In "Red Lily," 32-year-old Jenny Rogers has nursed her frustrated passion for Eddie Fox for the decade since he seduced and dropped her. She's made life difficult for Sharla, a co-worker he was dating. Now that Eddie's moving away and Sharla's flirting with the boss, Jenny sees endless new outlets for her spite.

In "No Refunds in Case of Inclement Weather," Ellen Winters returns home from a brief internship in Chicago and meets Claire Lowry, a classics professor, who's currently involved with Tommy Mattingly, the caretaker of a nearby state park. Twenty years her senior, Claire seduces Ellen, they become a couple, and for a few years, "it was a heady, lovely time." When Claire ultimately returns to Tommy, Ellen learns harsh lessons about love's fickleness.

In the collection's concluding triptych, "Other Heartbreaks," set in Pilsen, Chicago's Mexican neighborhood, the ardor Joe and Emma March had shared has long since cooled, and we see what has replaced it, first from his point of view in "Skylark," and then from hers in "Emma Compartmentalizes in Ireland." In the third of the three linked stories, "Ephemera," their grown daughter Sophie suffers a grievous loss, but is dimly aware of new possibilities for love in her future.

These are tough and tender stories that mourn the loss of the "deliciousness" of crazy love and ponder the inexplicability of lust, misspent youth, and the fate of aging "Boomers."

Kathryn Lang is former senior editor at Southern Methodist University Press in Dallas, where she acquired award-winning works of fiction and nonfiction for nearly 20 years.