Linda Watkins, the author of the novel Taking Flight and A Life Teaching Languages, her memoir, showcases fifteen of her best short stories in Vex, sweeping the reader across sixty years and half the globe through the struggles of her complex female protagonists. An unhappy suburban wife finds a strange escape route to a new life. A former flight attendant in San Francisco joins a mission to save orphans amid the bloody chaos of the fall of Saigon. In a chilly Greenwich Village park, a lonely professor witnesses a child being abused by her mother, and spontaneously decides to free her, consequences be damned. In the title story, an elderly mother and her grown daughter struggle to connect, exacerbated by time, distance and dementia.