Nevada Stories

An introduction to Nevada Stories: the history of Reno and its neighbors, told through fiction, one short story every weekday.

Claire Fitzgerald took the press row at a quarter to ten, which was easy, because the press row was a single folding chair now with a paper sign taped to it, and she was the only one who ever sat in it.

Gene Sorensen had spent twenty-seven years digging the hole, and on the morning they opened it as a lake he stood at the top of the bank with his hands in his pockets and could not find the bottom.

Domingo took his place at the long table the way he had taken it every night that winter, on the bench along the wall, with his back to the plaster and his face to the room.

The switchboard lit up all at once, the whole face of it, and Lucy knew before anyone told her.

Cliff had the basement to himself when the first returns came over the telephone, and for a moment he forgot to write them down.

They moved the house on a Tuesday, and Eliza stood in the side yard with her mother and watched it go.

Charlie had the north walk half graded when the wagons started coming up the hill.

Tom Fitzgerald had never in his life seen so many people in the Reno airport, and he had never seen it snow like this on a morning the whole world was trying to land.

The boy from the all-night garage banged on Clara Reinholt's door at four in the morning to tell her the river was in her shop, and she was dressed and in the car before she had finished being afraid, because there was no use being afraid in a nightgown.

Aaron Lichtenstein walked down to the corner of First and Sierra on a hot July morning to look at the building that was going to bury him, and found that he could not hate it, which annoyed him more than if he could have.

Frank Kellerman stood in a line on East Fourth Street a little before midnight and thought that he had waited longer than most of the men around him, and had less to say about it, which was usually the way.

Rafael Morales had ridden two days down out of the high country to see a thing his father did not understand the point of, which was men getting paid, or hoping to get paid, for work they did for wages every other day of the year.

The wind at Hungry Valley came straight down off the Pah Rah range with nothing between the mountains and the graded pad to slow it, and Verna stood at the edge of the new road holding her hard hat against her chest, because if she put it on the wind would take it, and watched the men line up behind the row of chrome shovels somebody had stuck upright in a mound of trucked-in dirt for the photogra...

The marker stood on a steel post on the north bank of the river, on a strip of mown grass across the water from the car museum, and the July sun had been on the bronze all morning so that Grace could feel the heat of it from a foot away, the way you feel a stove. There were maybe forty people on the grass. A folding table with a cooler of water.

The smoke was already a wall on the west side of the valley when Sophie turned onto her father's road, and above the wall the pale afternoon sun had gone the color of a bruise where it tried to come through and could not. She had left Reno the moment her phone said the fire had a name.

The girl on the scissor lift had been painting the wall for three days, and Jess Reinholt came out of her gallery each of those mornings with two coffees and stood on the Midtown sidewalk looking up at what had appeared overnight, because it was the best part of her day and she was not going to pretend otherwise. She was forty-six.

Benjamin Lichtenstein had read in the paper that the neon was finally getting a home, that the whole saved hoard of it was going into the old bowling stadium downtown where people could walk among it, and so at seventy-nine he drove himself across town on a bright cold afternoon to the warehouse where a man he had never met had kept the dead signs of Reno alive for thirty years.

Claire Fitzgerald drove north out of Reno on the Monday of Labor Day with a notebook on the passenger seat she was not sure she would fill, because the whole world already had this story and did not need hers.

The young man who was going to decide whether to hire her looked about the age of Diane Kellerman's youngest nephew, and he asked her to deal him a few hands so he could watch her mechanics, and Diane said of course and squared the cards and thought, thirty-one years, and I am auditioning.

Hector Morales had helped pour the concourse under the third-base stands on a morning the winter before, when the frost still whitened the rebar and his hands ached inside two pairs of gloves, and now, on the third Friday of April, he sat on top of that concrete with his family and watched a groundskeeper chalk the batter's box on a field he had watched come up out of the mud. He was forty-six.

The man who wanted to buy the motor lodge had flown in from California and he kept calling the street charming, which was how David Ah Lum knew he had never seen it any other way.

The willow came back where the fire had been, and Sophie had come up the mountain in the last warm week of the fall to cut it. She was forty-five, a professor of history down in the valley, but she had not come up as a professor.

On the Monday in May they opened the shelter, Marcus Westbrook stood in the back of the crowd on East Fourth Street and watched the mayor and the governor cut the ribbon in front of a building that was really a tent, a great pale structure the size of a warehouse thrown up on the old ballfield where the Governor's Bowl had been, and he clapped when everyone clapped, because he worked for the city...

Kay Whitfield had worked the floor of the distribution warehouse in the Sparks industrial park for nineteen years, long enough to know that the danger did not come from the river you could see.