“Consolation” was originally published in the March 19, 1990, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in The Fireman's Wife and Other Stories (1990). It is currently most readily available in The Stories of Richard Bausch (HarperCollins).

Consolation” is the sequel to Richard Bausch's exhilaratingly depressing story, “The Fireman's Wife,” though it stands on its own and reverberates with enough shock waves that you need not have read part one in order to be stunned by part two. “Consolation” is deliberately not a proper sequel, in which we would meet all the main characters again, but rather a kind of sidebar—a reminder that there are always more characters on the sidelines, and that they, too, have their stories, which inevitably impinge on the stories of the characters we know and, by implication, those we might yet meet. The stories are not exactly a one-two punch—Bausch is too adeptly persuasive a writer, too compassionate (a word George Garrett has aptly applied to Bausch's writing), ultimately, to hit you only in the gut—so although there are moments in “The Fireman's Wife” that make you feel physical pain, “Consolation” reverses the score a bit and is more concerned with phantom pain. Of course, phantom pain is more insidious, and dealing with phantom pain means that the writer has to haunt the reader—along with the character, of course—with what is not, rather than with what is. It's easy to jump out of a closet and scare someone. It is more difficult to make the reader imagine a closet where one doesn't exist, and for the dramatic jump to have transpired long before your story begins. Eudora Welty has dealt with ephemeral, missed moments that nevertheless can be brilliantly conjured up, through the pace of the story and through the writer's language, in “No Place For You, My Love,” in which she out Gatsbys Fitzgerald. Reynolds Price also comes to mind, with his long, brilliant story about grief, “Walking Lessons.” Actually, there is quite a bit of American literature that is about afterwards. Maybe it figures, because our country's identity is the identity of afterwards.