REFUND

In these 13 stories, Bender (A Town of Empty Rooms, 2013, etc.) showcases families that "endure" in both senses of the word: suffer patiently and carry on despite enormous travail.

The title story—concerning a sublet in Tribeca that goes horribly wrong for both the struggling couple renting it out and the woman who takes it beginning in September 2001—epitomizes the high anxiety that permeates Bender’s stories. The New York setting is unusual, though. The book’s landscape is mostly drab fast-food– and mall-saturated suburbia, often in Southern states where displaced northerners, usually Jewish, have arrived under financial duress. In “Free Lunch,” two New Yorkers in North Carolina are as uncomfortable around a Hasidic rabbi and his wife as they are among their Christian neighbors; in “The Third Child,” an overwhelmed mother, distraught to find herself pregnant again, nevertheless acts generously toward a neighbor child, only to be viciously snubbed by the girl’s Baptist mother. Family and financial tensions often combine. In “For What Purpose?,” a woman whose parents died in a car crash experiences a brief sense of belonging with work mates until she’s let go. In both “What the Cat Said” and “This Cat,” the family pet becomes the metaphor, or scapegoat, for disappointment and dysfunction. “Anything for Money” offers the book’s only wealthy character, who becomes the most desperate when his daughter needs a new heart. The first two stories are among the least depressing. In “Reunion,” a woman goes off the deep end, buying a phony beach lot from an old boyfriend, but her marriage survives. In “Theft,” an aging scam artist and a jilted young woman forge a friendship that improves them both. And the volume’s gentlest story, “The Sea Turtle Hospital,” concerning a young teacher’s kindness to a kindergartner, takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting.

Although her tone can veer toward bitterness, Bender excels at characters on the edge of despair, particularly mothers who resent the children they love.