This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Rebecca Curtis read her story, Satellites,

from the July 12th and 19th, 2021 issue of the magazine.

Curtis is the author of the story collection 20 grand and other tales of love and money,

and a winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award for Fiction.

Now here's Rebecca Curtis. Satellites

One day last July, my husband's friend Tony Tarantino,

A tall, good-looking, rib-eye-and-scotch-loving, thrice-divorced,

A-B- Negative Trump enthusiast, drove up from Virginia Beach to the Jersey Shore

to visit my husband, a retired banker, at his hulking nine-bedroom, eight-bath tutor in the town of Coda

by the sea. And after we'd all been chatting, Sands masks on the porch for a while, right after

Tony enjoyed an organic, grass-fed

marrow burger, I'd picked up for him from Kave, the excellent local paleo restaurant, his cell phone

rang. He said, hello? Then frowned and hung up. He blushed as he placed his phone on the table

next to his Mai Tai. My husband said,

Auto warranty about to expire? Tony shook his head. A woman who called him an asshole, he said.

Though, he added, he got the auto warranty call a lot too. My husband asked whether Tony knew who the

woman was. Tony held his hands out, palms up.

She hung up before he could ask, he said. Did she sound young or old? Not young, Tony told us,

but not middle-aged. I asked whether the caller could be Tony's wife. Tony's wife was in Virginia,

in the house he had bought for her.

...