Excerpt from Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The woman seems disappointed; she isn't as effusive, as excited, as she should be. "Those are free," the woman says, "the best barbeque sandwich in town."

She thanks the woman again and tells her she'll definitely use them.

 "If you're not going to use them, just give them back."

 "I'll definitely use them," she repeats, as she closes the door and locks it. She draws the blinds, turns on all the lights.

She throws the coupons away. She doesn't like barbeque, how everyone is always talking about the best barbeque in the city. She has never waited in a long line at Franklin's, surrounded by people in lawn chairs sipping from to-go cups, or driven miles and miles out into the country to go to some obscure shack for something more authentic.

She scoops out the litter box and feeds the cats, studies the drawings again—if she's reading it correctly, her boyfriend feeds them four times a day, a steady stream of food in their shared bowl. Tomorrow she'll do better. At the bottom of the paper there are hearts—six of them—and three Love You's . . . She considers the difference between Love you and I love you. Love you is what she tells her friends when she has to get off the phone abruptly or cancel plans. In this case, she feels he used Love you because it looked better, which is something her boyfriend is always conscious of—everything carefully considered and thought out. She decided a long time ago she didn't want to be a careful person, that she didn't want to live her life constantly worrying about what other people thought of her. Of course she does worry, she does nothing but worry, and all her lack of care amounts to is that she offends people constantly and tests them with her inappropriateness and expects them to love her for it.

She drags around a feather on a stick, turns to look at the cats: they stare at her without blinking or averting their gaze. She puts the feather in the male's face, drops it to his nose, and he paws at it a few times before giving up. She kneels and crooks her finger at them like her boyfriend does. They come forward to bump her with their foreheads and she gets into bed, feels the small hairs tickling her face. They climb around her purring, louder and louder, and she wonders if she could put them in her car and take them to her apartment. Cats don't travel well, she recalls her boyfriend saying. They scream and shit everywhere.

She has no pets, has never had a pet, and her boyfriend was sorry for her when she told him. She didn't tell him that her family was poor, that she'd collected frogs and snakes and turtles from her backyard, which she'd let die in jars and shoeboxes. She'd once put half a dozen frogs in a dollhouse her mother had bought at a garage sale, closed it up and watched them through the windows. Of course he knows she grew up poor. When you grow up poor, even if you do everything thereafter to be not-poor, there's no way to shake it completely. She likes to read about lottery winners, how desperately they go about losing everything so they can get back to the state at which they are familiar.

She looks at her open suitcase on the floor, her purse and backpack and tennis shoes. Her MacBook Pro, only a few months old. The other times she's been at his apartment without him, she was waiting for him to come home—he was going to show up at any minute and they would have sex and watch movies and scratch each other's backs. They would talk and laugh.

She walks over to his closet and takes out the leather coat that cost him seven hundred dollars, tries it on. It barely zips. Her boyfriend is small. She puts her hands in the pockets: empty. She's always asking him how much things cost, how much he paid, and he hates this about her. She knows he hates this about her but it only makes her do it more.

Credit line: Excerpted from Always Happy Hour: Stories by Mary Miller. Copyright © 2017 by Mary Miller. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved