"A masterful rumination on routine, dependency, and openness to new experiences." — KIRKUS REVIEWS
"Featured in the June 2026 Kirkus Reviews Magazine" — Kirkus Reviews
Jeb eats meatballs without pasta—a ritual unchanged for eleven years at a small-town California buffet. His best friend Kev, a retired philosopher with failing eyesight, has never mentioned it. This "not-mentioning" is the bedrock of their friendship.
While Kev’s world has contracted to a chair and a Thursday night booth at Sizzlin' Meats and Salads, Mae is the infrastructure holding them together. She drives. She keeps the books. She knows where the phone is at 2:00 a.m.
But when Mae decides to take Kev somewhere uncomfortable—somewhere with tentacles—she sets in motion a chain of events that are anything but small. Featuring a 1987 fax machine, a red kazoo, and a man writing on a $249 word processor, this is a story about what friendship looks like after sixty.
"Comparable to Stewart O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster." — BOOKLIFE
If you loved the emotional resonance of Arrival, this is a book for the people who show up when the world gets quiet.
"A masterful rumination on routine, dependency, and openness to new experiences." — KIRKUS REVIEWS
"Featured in the June 2026 Kirkus Reviews Magazine" — Kirkus Reviews
Jeb eats meatballs without pasta—a ritual unchanged for eleven years at a small-town California buffet. His best friend Kev, a retired philosopher with failing eyesight, has never mentioned it. This "not-mentioning" is the bedrock of their friendship.
While Kev’s world has contracted to a chair and a Thursday night booth at Sizzlin' Meats and Salads, Mae is the infrastructure holding them together. She drives. She keeps the books. She knows where the phone is at 2:00 a.m.
But when Mae decides to take Kev somewhere uncomfortable—somewhere with tentacles—she sets in motion a chain of events that are anything but small. Featuring a 1987 fax machine, a red kazoo, and a man writing on a $249 word processor, this is a story about what friendship looks like after sixty.
"Comparable to Stewart O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster." — BOOKLIFE
If you loved the emotional resonance of Arrival, this is a book for the people who show up when the world gets quiet.
Chapter One: The Drive There
They didn’t decide to go to Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads.
Afterward, Mae tried to reconstruct the evening in as she sometimes reconstructed evenings, not out of suspicion or regret but out of the mild forensic interest of a woman who likes to know how she ended up where she ended up. They hadn’t discussed it. Jeb hadn’t said let’s go to Sizzlin’s. Mae hadn’t suggested it. Nobody had picked up a phone or checked a menu or made the series of small domestic negotiations that typically precede a Tuesday evening out.
Jeb had been in the garage doing something to the F-150’s tailgate latch that he’d been meaning to do for three weeks. Mae had been in the kitchen not particularly thinking about dinner, which was unusual for Mae, who generally had dinner’s entire biography planned by 4:30. At some point (neither of them could pinpoint when) Jeb had come inside, and Mae had been standing by the counter with her keys already in her hand, and Jeb had said “you want to—” and Mae had said “yeah” and most residents of Peculiar would feel that was enough said between two people who’d been married that long.
The F-150 started on the first try, which it didn’t always. Mae drove. She drove because she always drove when they went out, because Jeb had a tendency to narrate traffic patterns as though they were evidence of something cosmologically significant, and the narration was easier to tolerate from the passenger seat where she could look out the window and let it wash over her like weather.
Jeb was quiet tonight, though. He had the window down. The air was doing what California air does in the early evening: cooling in a way that feels less like temperature dropping and more like the day exhaling. He had one arm out the window in the posture of a man who has no particular place to be and is getting there at exactly the right speed.
Mae glanced at the arm. She did this sometimes. Not consciously, not as a policy, but as a woman who has been married to a man for thirty years occasionally checks on the parts of him that were once in question. Jeb had been born with a hole in his heart. A ventricular septal defect, the doctors had called it, which was a clinical way of saying that a wall inside him that was supposed to be solid had a gap in it, and the gap let the blood go where the blood was not supposed to go. The surgeons had fixed it when he was three. They had patched the hole with a piece of material Mae could never remember the name of, and the patch had held for fifty-nine years, and the cardiologist said “it looks great” at every checkup, and Mae believed the cardiologist because the cardiologist had data and Mae trusted data. But she still glanced at the arm. She still noticed when the color in his face changed, or when he put his hand on his chest in a certain way, or when he fell asleep in the recliner with his mouth open and his breathing went shallow. She noticed these things completely, without performing the noticing, without requiring the noticing to produce a conclusion. He had been born with a hole in his heart, and they had fixed it, and it was fixed, and Mae watched him anyway, because watching was what Mae did, and love was what the watching was for.
“You know what I haven’t had in a while,” Jeb said.
“Mm,” said Mae.
“The meatballs.”
Mae glanced at him. Jeb’s relationship with the meatballs at Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads was one of the foundational relationships of his life, ranking somewhere between his feelings about the gap in the back fence and his feelings about Mae herself, though he would never have said this and Mae would never have required him to. The meatballs were a constant. The meatballs were a given. The meatballs existed outside the normal framework of food preference and operated in a region closer to devotion.
“We’re going to Sizzlin’s,” Mae said. Not a question.
“Are we?” Jeb said, with the mild surprise of a man noticing something that had apparently already been decided.
“We’re on Route 7,” Mae said. “Heading south. Sizzlin’s is south.”
Jeb looked out the windshield as though the road might confirm or deny this. The road went somewhere without announcing where.
“Huh,” he said.
They passed Taylor D.’s place on the way. You couldn’t miss it. The house was set back from Route 7 on a lot that was bigger than it needed to be, the way everything about Taylor D. was bigger than it needed to be, the house, the barn, the man himself. The barn doors were open, which they usually were, and from the road you could see the shape of something being built in there, something large and skeletal and winged, lit from below by work lights that made it look like a cathedral for machines. A rented hangar outside Fresno held the real aircraft; this was the parts staging, the overflow, the place where components waited for Taylor D.’s hands to tell them what they were going to become.
The mailbox was a welded steel dragonfly, wings outstretched, mounted on an oversized post. Beneath it, in plain block letters: TAYLOR D. No period after the D.
Mae glanced at the barn as they passed. “He’s still building that thing,” she said, with the neutral observation of a woman who had opinions about how men spent their time but had learned that sharing those opinions with men who spent their time this way was like explaining weather to a cloud.
“It’s a biplane,” Jeb said. “He’s building a biplane.”
“I know what it is,” Mae said. “I’m noting that he’s still building it. There’s a difference.”
The dragonfly mailbox receded in the side mirror. The work lights in the barn stayed visible for another quarter mile, a warm glow against the evening, and then they were past it, and Route 7 was just Route 7 again.
Neither of them remarked on the fact that they had, without discussion, gotten into the truck and driven toward the one restaurant they actively avoided when Kev wasn’t with them. They avoided it not because they disliked the food (the food was, by their mutual and private assessment, excellent) but because Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads was Kev’s place. Had been Kev’s place since the original location opened eleven years ago with its inexplicable raccoon mascot and its five varieties of jalapeño and its all-you-can-eat buffet philosophy that Kev had immediately and permanently embraced as a personal belief system.
Kev insisted on Sizzlin’s. Kev always insisted on Sizzlin’s. If you asked Kev where he wanted to eat, the answer was Sizzlin’s, and if you suggested somewhere else, Kev would listen with the patient expression of a man hearing an interesting but ultimately irrelevant counterargument and then say “but Sizzlin’s has the buffet,” as though this settled matters at a level beyond mere preference.
So Jeb and Mae, who loved Kev and also loved eating at restaurants that were not Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads, had developed over the years a quiet practice of sneaking out to other places when the opportunity presented itself. The Thai place on Greenwood. The Italian joint that did the good eggplant. Once, ambitiously, a Korean barbecue that Jeb had found through a complicated chain of recommendations and that Mae had declared “worth the drive, actually,” which from Mae was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
Tonight they were going to Sizzlin’s. And Kev wasn’t coming.
Kev couldn’t come. This was the simple mechanical fact of the situation, and it had been the simple mechanical fact for about eight months now: Kev had turned in his driver’s license. The astigmatism that had been a running background condition for years, the reading glasses getting thicker in increments so gradual you only noticed when you looked at old photographs—had finally crossed the line from “manageable” to “sir, you cannot read line four.”
Kev had handled it with more grace than either Jeb or Mae had expected, which probably meant he’d been expecting it longer than he’d let on. He’d come back from the DMV, set his keys on the kitchen counter, and said “well, that’s that” in the tone of a man closing a chapter he’d already read the last page of. He didn’t dress it up. There was a time (Mae remembered this clearly, because she remembered most things clearly) when Kev would have reached for something mythological. The blind seer. Tiresias. The philosopher who trades sight for vision. He had a whole library of ways to make a painful thing feel noble, and he’d used them liberally for years, wrapping his losses in classical allusion the way some men wrap their losses in whiskey.
He didn’t do that anymore. He didn’t need to. Something had changed in Kev in the last couple of years, something quiet that neither Jeb nor Mae could quite name but both could feel. The mythology had fallen away. Not the intelligence—Kev was still the sharpest person in any room he occupied, and he still had the unsettling ability to say something offhand that would rearrange the furniture in your head for a week. But the performance of intelligence had gone. The decorative framework. He was just Kev now, a man who couldn’t drive and needed rides and had friends who gave him rides, and most residents of Peculiar would feel that was enough.
Jeb and Mae were his rides. They didn’t say this to Kev in so many words, because Kev could be insufferable on occasion and you didn’t want to give him too much emotional ammunition, but the fact was simple and structural: they were his legs. They drove him to Sizzlin’s, they drove him to the grocery, they drove him to the doctor, they drove him to the bookstore where he would spend forty-five minutes in the philosophy section and emerge with three books and opinions about all of them. They did this because they loved him, in as long friendships produce love: not as a feeling but as an infrastructure.
Tonight, though, Kev was at home. Probably reading. Probably squinting at something. Probably sitting in the chair by the window where the light was best, which was a sentence that meant something different now than it had a year ago.
And Jeb and Mae were driving to his favorite restaurant without him.
“I’m going to get the meatballs,” Jeb announced, as though this required announcement.
“You always get the meatballs.”
“And the taco beef.”
Mae said nothing. The taco beef was a separate matter. Jeb’s practice of combining the all-you-can-eat taco beef with the meatballs into what he called “the situation” and what Mae privately called “an act of culinary aggression” had been a feature of every Sizzlin’s visit since the first one. He mixed them together on the plate with a fork. He did not use the provided taco shells. He did not use the spaghetti. Just the meatballs and the taco beef, combined, consumed, and repeated until a line was reached that only Jeb could see.
He didn’t eat the pasta. He had never eaten the pasta. And this—this was the thing. This was the third rail.
Jeb and Kev had met at Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads eleven years ago, at the original location, back when it was one restaurant with a hand-painted sign and a raccoon mascot that nobody could explain. They’d bonded over the meatballs. Kev had been at a table alone with a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, the proper combination, the intended combination, the combination that the Pasta Station sign depicted and that God, in Kev’s apparent view, had ordained—and Jeb had sat down at the next table with a plate of meatballs and taco beef. No pasta. No sauce delivery system. Just the spheres and the beef, combined on the plate with a fork, like a still life painted by someone who had strong feelings about protein and no feelings whatsoever about carbohydrates.
Kev had looked at Jeb’s plate. Jeb had looked at Kev looking at his plate. Something passed between them, not hostility exactly, but a recognition that a philosophical boundary had been identified and that neither party was prepared to negotiate.
They had never discussed it. Not once. Not in eleven years of friendship, not through the biplane incident, not through everything that came after. Kev had given Jeb the stank eye (the full stank eye, the one Kev reserved for genuine infractions against the natural order) and then he’d said something about the meatballs being good, and Jeb had agreed that the meatballs were good, and they’d talked for two hours about things that mattered, and neither of them had ever touched the pasta question again.
It was the third rail between them, and neither would touch it.
Mae knew about the third rail. Mae knew about most things. She had her own opinions about the no-pasta situation but had learned, through decades of marriage and friendship, that certain male arrangements were best observed from a respectful distance, the way one observes load-bearing walls: you don’t have to understand the engineering to know that removing it would bring the house down.
• • •
The Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads on Route 7 was the fourth location, opened three years ago. The chain had grown from one restaurant to eleven in the decade that Kev and Jeb had been coming, which nobody could quite account for. The food was good but not extraordinary. The jalapeños were admittedly exceptional. But five varieties of jalapeño didn’t, on their own, explain eleven locations in ten years.
Robbi was a raccoon. A cartoon raccoon, specifically, wearing a cowboy outfit and a bolo tie fashioned from what appeared to be the restaurant’s own napkins. Nobody knew why the mascot was a raccoon. Nobody knew why the raccoon was dressed as a cowboy. There were competing origin stories among the eleven locations, the original owner’s kid had drawn it; a raccoon had gotten into the first restaurant’s kitchen on opening night and the owner had decided this was a sign; the graphic designer had simply delivered a raccoon and nobody had questioned it, but none of these stories had achieved consensus and all of them circulated freely, like regional folklore.
There was also the raccoon situation.
Real raccoons visited the Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads dumpsters with a frequency that management described as “normal for the area” and that anyone who actually lived in the area would describe as “not even slightly normal.” The dumpster lids, which were the heavy kind with the locking mechanism, were found open every morning. Management maintained that the wind was responsible, which was an interesting position given that the prevailing winds in the area were rarely strong enough to move a locked steel lid and yet somehow managed it four to five nights a week, with a consistency that would have impressed a statistician.
Nobody connected any of this to anything. Why would you? It was a restaurant. It had a raccoon mascot. Raccoons came to the dumpster. The lids blew open. These were facts, and facts don’t owe anyone an explanation.
• • •
Mae turned the F-150 into the parking lot.
The entrance to the Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads parking lot came off Route 7 through a gap in the landscaping that the original architect had designed wide enough for two-way traffic but which felt, in the early evening light, like one and a half lanes of suggestion. Mae was halfway through her turn when it came from the left.
The Pacer.
It came through the gap in the landscaping fast, the way a car moves when it is either in a hurry or has an uncertain relationship with its own brakes. That was shaped like a fishbowl on wheels. It was a color, not a specific color, a color that had once been a specific color and had, through the accumulated patience of decades, become simply: a color. It had the largest rear window Mae had ever seen on an automobile, which was not a category she typically maintained rankings in but which this car had forced upon her by sheer visual insistence. The enormous rear window was reflecting the Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads sign in a wide, warped smear of neon.
Mae hit the brakes and the F-150 stopped with the abrupt authority of a truck that weighs considerably more than a 1975 AMC Pacer and knows it.
The Pacer swerved. Not dramatically—the Pacer did not seem like a vehicle built for drama, more for a certain philosophical acceptance of whatever direction it happened to be going, but enough. It passed within about four feet of the F-150’s front bumper, close enough that Mae could see, for one brief and well-lit moment, the inside of the car.
There was something in the back seat. Wooden. Angular. A strut, or a frame, or part of something larger that had been disassembled for transport. It stuck up at angles that suggested the Pacer had consumed something structural and not fully processed it.
The Pacer completed its trajectory into the lot, pulled into a spot near the entrance, and the engine died. Then it started again, briefly, as though remembering something. Then it died for real.
Mae exhaled.
“Jesus,” Jeb said. He had one hand on the dashboard, which was where his hand went when Mae braked hard, a reflex that communicated both alarm and the implicit faith that Mae’s braking would be sufficient.
“Idiot,” Mae said, without particular heat. She said it the way you say idiot about someone whose behavior has briefly inconvenienced you and will now be forgotten.
The lot was half-full, which was normal for a Tuesday. She found a spot near the entrance, next to a Honda Civic with a cracked windshield. The fishbowl car had parked one spot over, still ticking as it cooled.
As Mae turned off the engine, the nearest parking lot light flickered. Just once, a brief dimming, as though the bulb had blinked, and then it was steady again. Mae did not notice. The light did not do it again.
“Smells like jalapeños already,” Jeb said, opening his door.
They walked past the Robbi statue. A child had placed a french fry in Robbi’s fiberglass hand at some point, and the fry had achieved a state of preservation that suggested it had been there for some time and intended to remain. Jeb did not notice this. Mae noticed it, assessed it, categorized it as “not her problem,” and continued toward the door.
The 1975 AMC Pacer sat in the parking lot behind them, right where it had parked after nearly taking the F-150’s bumper off. This was the one with the crack in the fishbowl window, a single line running from the lower left corner to approximately the center, sealed with something transparent and structural that Taylor D. described as “better than factory” without specifying what the substance was. The crack caught the Sizzlin’ Meats and Salads sign and split it gently in two, like a funhouse mirror for people who found funhouses insufficiently beige. The wooden something was still visible in the back seat, but the light was wrong and the window was large and the angle was the angle, and nobody was looking.
Nobody was ever looking.
Spoilers: Some books capture large moments. Characters dealing with politics, life transitions like birth and death, trauma, and sweeping changes. Some capture little moments concerning friendships, couples, and daily life.
That is the case with The Writing Writes The Writer: Taking Kev to Sizzlin' Meats and Salads by Kevin Cann. There isn't much in the way of plot but it's heavy in characterization.
The book mostly focuses on Kev and his best friends, married couple Jeb and Mae. Kev is legally blind and Jeb and Mae often drive him around. One of their favorite places to go is Sizzlin' Meats and Salads, the local eatery. It's just a few weeks of their lives punctuated with trips to Sizzlin.’
The three characters and setting are relatable and identifiable. Those who live in small towns will understand the comfortable routine found in a town like Peculiar, California. It presents a history of the town and how it got its, well, peculiar name. It's the type of story that townspeople know by heart and retell. Maybe celebrate it in historical reenactments and guided tours.
There is also recognition of the important locations that give the town character. In this case Sizzlin' Meats and Salads. It's a local mom and pop place where people arrive every week, order their favorite expected meals so often that sometimes even the servers memorize it before they order, and recognize co-workers, classmates, neighbors, or just the regular gang of diners. It's so beautiful because it's so familiar and comforting.
The three protagonists are the type of characters who depend on daily lives and routines. This is especially vital to Kev. An intellectual and writer, Kev hates being dependent on his friends but still relies on them to be his contact with the world outside his house.
He is such a devotee to this routine that he looks forward to it like a kid waiting for a trip to a theme park. When things get in the way like car trouble or a family issue, Kev makes them swear that they will go the following week and it's non-negotiable. Of course unlike most people, he doesn't have the luxury of going some other day because of his lack of transportation. It's just as aggravating for him as it is for them and the frustration is easily understood.
We also see Jeb and Mae as a couple that are comfortable with each other. They compliment each other with different personalities but a yin yang dynamic that recognizes each other's strengths and vulnerabilities.
They have shared memories, inside jokes, unfinished sentences that they answer. They know each other so well and treat Kev like another family member that's welcome in their lives and not an unwanted third wheel. It's a power trio that relies on warmth, familiarity, and connections as their strongest assets.
The Writing Writes The Writer is a simple book. But sometimes the simple books tell the strongest truths.