A Good Location by John O’Hara, 1965
The magic trick:
A simple inciting event that spins out a life story
We close our 1960s John O’Hara Week with another good one, and yet another O’Hara gem built on a single conversation. In this case, it’s two co-owners of a service station in Pennsylvania. An elderly customer sparks memories of childhood, what could have been, what still could be, and what probably won’t ever happen.
It’s a great reminder that a life story can be told from any single inciting event.
And that’s quite a trick on O’Hara’s part.
The selection:
“I know, but we don’t put anything back in. You take your fifty, I take my fifty, and all we are is standing still.”
“Yeah, but if I come home at the end of the week with forty dollars instead of fifty, Mary would let out a yell you could hear in the next county.”
“Bess, too. She wouldn’t let out a yell, but she’d start crying, and that’s just as bad if not worse. They’re so used to the fifty, they never stop and think if the two of us put back five a week, inside of a year that’d come to five hundred and twenty dollars.”
“That’s right,” said Charlie.
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