Though fiction most commonly deals with outsized characters and events, the arcs of ordinary lives are usually governed by small, fleeting, sometimes imperceptible moments that can radically alter a person's fate. The lucky ones seize these opportunities when they arise, but others either remain paralyzed with fear or fail to know the moments' significance until long after it's too late to take action. Mona Simpson's heartbreaking novella Off Keck Road concerns two Green Bay women haunted by the regret and loss that settle in as their lives are permanently held in limbo. A slim volume at little more than 150 pages, Keck Road covers 50 years, which would seem to invite a more sprawling treatment. But Simpson's economic style gleans important information from minute descriptive details and expresses volumes in a single phrase. Consider a scene in which one of the protagonists, Bea, is alone for a second with her flirtatious boss, an older, married real-estate agent who confuses her with his "half-joke propositions." A virgin late into her 20s, Bea is led into her office for what she interprets either as a bump or a kiss, an awkward moment of intimacy that's broken by a ringing phone. Nothing ever comes of it, but 30 years later, she can still smell the tobacco on his wool jacket and remembers it "as a specific declension of spring." In just a few eloquent words, Simpson says more about this lovelorn woman than a lesser writer could in reams of labored description. She's no less adept at rhyming passages between Bea and her other heroine, Shelley, another small-town spinster who never got over the loss of the grandmother to whom she was devoted as a child. Unlike her counterpart, Shelley successfully seduces an older, married man and sustains a dangerously casual 13-year affair with him, only to watch him leave Green Bay for sunny Florida with his wife. Simpson spends more than half the book developing Bea and Shelley independently before their lives finally intertwine, in a subtle comment on how little separates one person from another in a close-knit community. Perhaps best known for her 1986 novel (and subsequent 1999 film adaptation) Anywhere But Here, Simpson examines the flip side of that story in Off Keck Road. In the former, a mother and daughter escape small-town Wisconsin for a new life in Los Angeles; in the latter, the women are never quite able to leave. Off Keck Road may be considerably shorter, but its emotional depth belies its brevity, bringing grace and compassion to a concise, memorably resonant story.