Required Reading: Kiki DeLancey's "A Good Six-Two"

I was talking to a friend the other day, and she said she was trying to remember the last time she had been feeling hopeful. "Then I remembered," she continued, "it was before the election."

Much has been said about the recent election, and a lot more still will be—history, felt at the most personal level for so many of us, will refuse to become history. For me, the election has changed my interaction with characters, in other people's stories and in my own. When I published a story—one set in the Obama years—after the election, I asked a question I had not asked while working on it: for whom did the heroine cast her ballot? The question prompted me to look up the data. The character lives on the West Coast now, but in her home county in Iowa, Donald Trump won solidly by fourteen points.

Recently I reread Kiki DeLancey's story, "A Good Six-Two," with this new perspective. It was originally published in A Public Space in 2011—a different era, when many questions didn't seem so urgent.

Kiki DeLancey may not be a familiar name for general readers. She may not even be known to most people in the literary community, and one can't find much of a digital presence for her, which is a rarity. DeLancey grew up in a coal-mining family in Ohio, the fifth of six children, and she worked for fifteen years in the coal industry, as a permit clerk at first, and later as the executive vice president of a coal company. In 2002, Sarabande published her collection of stories, Coal Miner's Holiday. The title is industry jargon for forced layoffs.

Stories from the collection, set in coal-mining towns along the Ohio River, are not only about the workers in the mines and the history of that industry, but also about immigrants and the history of America—people from elsewhere come to settle down, with a vague idea we call the American dream, which rarely survives harsh reality. These stories should be required reading for anyone running for president of the United States. Politicians and researchers and pollsters may have forgotten that every region, every generation, and every individual has a story of their own. Oftentimes it's the forgotten that alters history.

I first learned Kiki DeLancey's name, and became interested in her work, because of a line in the acknowledgments for her collection—"Thanks of the most humble kind to William Trevor"—a sentiment I share for the writer nearest my heart. DeLancey's characters, like Trevor's, appear to ask little from life and are granted even less. Their dramas are muted ones; their restraints mask their vitalities.

"He was big, but fragile." Thus opens DeLancey's story "A Good Six-Two." It's a story about a lifelong bachelor who for the first time has met a woman he wants to invite to share the rest of his (and her) life. A love story of the late-blooming kind, we could say, but it's also a story about how not to become the casualty of a life that defies understanding.

The fragility is hard to explain. He would be looking at a box of macaroni on a shelf in the grocery when another customer would reach around him, and that simple motion of a stranger's hand would undo him. He'd abdicate the space to whomever it would be, closing his eyes and whispering. In this way he hoped to vanish.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to claim that space, to never have to surrender it and vanish? Why is this man—a good six-two, "country big"—in danger of erasure against his will? Like many of William Trevor's characters, the main character in DeLancey's story trudges the terrain of loneliness that is neither choice nor fate. So much of a person's internal landscape is inexplicable. So is history.

Decades pass in the story, two generations of stories, yet DeLancey's expository...