Summary

In “The Family M,” the narrator lived alone in a large building. Because he had been there for so long, he could not understand why the other tenants were so unhappy.

One day, the narrator discovered a scratch on his car. Convinced a neighborhood kid was to blame, he stalked the lot, determined to discover the culprit. Over the next few days, he noticed two boys getting into repeated altercations with the other children. When he noticed the boys with a nail, he confronted them about scratching his car. The boys, Mark and Martin Meek, insisted they were innocent. When the narrator confronted their parents, they insisted their boys had been raised right and were respectful of others. The narrator had the urge “to shoot . . . and cripple them for life” (39).

One day, when the narrator saw the family getting into...