The Road to Tender Hearts

At the Pondville nursing home, an orange therapy cat named Pancakes has an unsettling gift: he always curls up next to the resident who will die next.

At the Pondville nursing home, an orange therapy cat named Pancakes has an unsettling gift: he always curls up next to the resident who will die next. When the local paper runs the story, residents panic. When the cat starts visiting the nursing home director's office, the terrified man dumps Pancakes at the animal shelter. Pancakes picks the lock, slips through a cracked window, and walks through the Massachusetts town at night—past the church and the cranberry bogs, past a memorial bench for a drowned teenager, out to the town border where a sign promises safety. The cat knows better. No one is safe anywhere. This isn't a story about cats. It's about the terrible things that happen to people, and whether anyone can stomach raising children in a world full of disaster.

PJ reads an obituary that reignites a forty-five-year crush

PJ Halliday is sixty-three, a former mailman and scratch-off lottery winner, spectacularly alone in a house packed with junk. Every morning he walks to his ex-wife Ivy's place for breakfast. Ivy still cuts cruelty from the newspaper for him—his heart can't take bad news after three heart attacks. Her boyfriend Fred, a retired judge and bird-watcher, has shown PJ a diamond ring: he plans to propose in Alaska, where the couple departs tomorrow. He asks PJ to be best man. Left behind and bereft, PJ lingers over the obituaries and spots his old friend Gene Bartlett's death notice. Gene's widow is Michelle Cobb—PJ's first love from a 1969 high school dance, the girl who got away. PJ sends roses to her retirement community in Tucson and begins imagining a cross-country drive to win her back.

A mother's murder plot destroys the family she meant to save

Three streets from PJ's house, Elaine Meeklin has been poisoning her husband Frank's coffee with Visine eyedrops—odorless, tasteless, deadly in large doses. Frank is a violent cop having an affair. But nine-year-old Ollie, trying to be brave enough to report his grandfather's abuse of his sister Luna, steals his father's coffee for courage. Frank collapses at a flower shop and is run over by a distracted driver. At school, Ollie gets violently ill. When the nurse calls Elaine, she realizes her son drank the poison. A miscommunication with a teacher makes Elaine believe Ollie has died. She writes a hasty will naming her estranged uncle PJ Halliday as Luna's guardian, then shoots herself. Luna, age ten, finds the body after school. Ollie survives. Their parents do not.