Inside the split level on Maple Street in Anytown, USA, a wife sits in the dark, waiting for her husband to come home to confront him about the other woman.

Around the corner lives a boy who doesn’t cry when his father dies. Across the street a man tells the story of his mother saying goodbye to him before he left the nursing home that afternoon. “She’s never said goodbye to me before,” he says to his wife with a tear in his eye.

At the high school, a baseball coach shares a moment with his starting pitcher who found out he’s getting a scholarship to Penn State. Two days ago, the boy’s mother was told she has stage four kidney cancer.

A marriage in Anytown begins with a loving husband and his adoring wife. A marriage in Anytown ends when the couple signs legal papers to be a loving husband and an adoring wife no more.

Around the corner in the hospital, a proud man becomes a first-time father. His newborn son wraps his tiny hand around his dad’s finger and they bond for a moment that will last a lifetime. Back in Anytown’s neighborhood, another new dad lies on the couch with his baby daughter asleep upon his chest while her mommy can get some needed rest.

All that happens in Anytown, and this happens, too. Over at Summer Street, a man raging with anger soaked in alcohol, threatens his wife in front of their crying children and the police are called for the second time in a month. Living on the outskirts of town with her daughter, an elderly woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s has difficulty remembering her daughter’s name.

An estranged 50-year-old mother and her 30-year-old daughter refuse to let go of a seven-year-old grudge so they might become a mother and a daughter again. A woman over on Lilac Street hasn’t seen her three grandchildren in two years because her daughter-in-law forbids it.

In the bi-level on Sycamore in Anytown, a man and his wife watching “Wheel of Fortune” are about to be surprised by their son who’s coming home after a two- year Marine tour in Afghanistan.

Over on Main Street, a 12-year-old girl kicks a soccer ball into the net to win the game for her team. At about the same time down the block, a young man, who had kicked his drug habit a year ago, snorts cocaine off the bathroom sink.

One man and one woman live in that big house over on Walnut Street, the huge colonial with the four bathrooms. Three doors down, a single mother and her four kids squeeze by each other in a small Cape Cod with one bathroom that seems to serve all their needs.

The boarded-up ranch on Country Road last housed a family 25 years ago. They say when you drive by on a moonless night, you can hear children laughing from inside the dark and empty dwelling.

A guy on Forest Circle doesn’t know his best friend from high school lives six blocks away on Elm Street. A 90-year-old man living alone on Spruce thinks of changing his will because he hasn’t seen his son in years. A boy on Acorn Avenue was never told he has a godfather who’s been doing time in the state prison.

A family that never was that might have been is a 50-year-old blind woman in Vietnam who doesn’t know she has an American father, a soldier from Anytown, USA. He left when the war was over, unaware he had a daughter born nine months later.

A good man on Cherry Street is engaged to be married to a good woman from Peach Street. His mother doesn’t like her and her father doesn’t like him, so neither one is invited to the wedding.

At the corner of Mountain Drive and Valley Road, a mom and dad celebrate their daughter’s acceptance into Harvard; three years ago, they mourned the death of their son who hanged himself from the closet door.

A family in Anytown is a farm house full of foster kids, some nice, some not so nice. The boy stole money from his temporary parents to buy drugs and they will send him back to juvenile hall. Across the lawn lives a man celebrating his 35th birthday, and his parents still have not told him he was adopted when he was 3 years old.

On the avenue lives a black man married to a white woman, and when they take their kids to a restaurant, they get the usual disapproving stares from some of the locals.

At the junction of Willow and Pine, a mother sets the table for her three children and for another boy and girl who have come along with her third husband as part of the package deal.

In a small apartment lies a white-haired man in bed with his gray-haired wife of 60 years. They tell each other stories from a lifetime of love that keeps them laughing and crying all through the night.

At the bottom of the hill is a cemetery filled with families who have their own stories to tell, but no one comes there much anymore to listen.

These are the stories of you and of me and of everyone else who lives and dies in Anytown, USA.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.