Maureen Corrigan

The couple's two adult children visit, as do Claire's longtime close friends, Michelle and Holly, who shower her with self-care presents.

flannel PJs, fancy lotions, and manicures, causing Claire to joke about the death spa she's comfortably ensconced in.

Then one day when the couple is alone, Claire makes a request to her husband.

Here are snippets from that fateful conversation.

I'd like them to be here with me, Claire says.

Them?

Holly and Michelle.

What I mean is, I'd like them to take care of me.

Okay, Elliot hesitated.

The more the merrier.

Elliot, instead of you.

Numb, dismayed, Elliot agrees to pack up because he loves his wife, and it turns out her deepest wish is that he leave the house.

We're seeing a lot of literary fiction these days about the long goodbyes of aging and terminal illness.

I'm thinking of recent novels by Richard Ford, Stuart O'Nan, Elizabeth Strout, and now Ann Packer.

Part of the reason, surely, for this uptick in end-of-days dramas is that many of our novelists and their longtime readers are growing old in tandem.

Packer's best-known novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, was published in 2002.

It told the story of a young woman who'd been thinking of breaking up with her fiancé, but then feels obligated to stay after he's paralyzed in a diving accident.

Packer invested that contrived situation with emotional authenticity.

She pulls off the same magic trick in Some Bright Nowhere.

As a writer, she's deeply alert to the currents of thoughts and feelings that run through even a seconds-long conversation.