In the final installment of the 2019 Summer Stories series, Jess Walter tells the tale of a teacher dealing with the parents of his worst student. Revisit previous entries in the Summer Stories series at spokesman.com/summer-stories.

“You know what the problem is, don’t you?” Paul leaned forward. It had been a sunny day, but evening settled in cool. It smelled like grass and hot concrete. Al knew this look, the tone. “Geez, Paul, can’t you wait until we start drinking?” He poured the scotch.

In the final month of her final summer working at Dairy Palace, Debbie Baker’s boss asked her to be the Dairy Princess in the end-of-summer parade. After three-and-a-half years of wearing a black-and-white cowhide-patterned paper crown while dispensing cone after cone of soft-serve every afternoon, it was finally her turn to wear a glittering tiara.

Tommy rolls another joint and hands it over the back of the bench seat to the hippie chick riding shotgun in the 1966 VW van that picked him up more than an hour ago hitching on Highway 80 across the southern Idaho desert.

All Jack wants for his 69th birthday is to celebrate the way the people used to: around the table, feasting with friends, everyone happy. Is that too much to ask? “A party in these times?” When Jack had apparated to his daughter’s place with the invitation, her husband, Bob, hadn’t even tried to hide his contempt. He’d smirked at Sunny, who shook her head ever so slightly. But Bob was never to be dissuaded from speaking his mind, especially when he had something negative to say, which was always. “Nabob,” Jack calls him under his breath.

Welcome to Summer Stories, The Spokesman-Review’s annual short-fiction series. For 10 weeks, some of Spokane’s best writers will share new, original works of short fiction based on a central theme.

Welcome to Summer Stories, The Spokesman-Review’s annual short-fiction series. This week Megan Louise Rowe gives us a loves story that goes to the moon and back.

In this week’s Summer Stories entry, Stephanie Oakes introduces us to Hannah, a woman who faces life on her own terms, even when it all seems predetermined.

In week two of “Summer Stories: Summer of ’69,” novelist Kris Dinnison tells the story of a family grappling in the face of the Vietnam War.