Summary of “So Much Water So Close to Home”:
The story features Stuart, his wife Claire and their son Dean. They live together, as a married couple, we don’t know where they live, but it seems like a small town of some sort.
One day Stuart and his friends leaves on a fishing trip, in the mountains, for a couple of days, to play some poker, drink some whiskey and obviously fish. One night one of the guys finds a body, floating around in the water. The men ties the body to a tree, and gets back to drinking. They drink and have fun for the rest of the trip, but decides to leave a day earlier than planned. They call the sheriff about the body, and head home.
He tells his wife about the incident the next morning, this leads to a lot of problems. Not only is she mad that he waited to tell her a story like that, but they slowly seem to drift away from each other.
In an attempt to deal with the situation they drive out to a pond to talk about things, but a similar story from Claire’s childhood, seems to overwhelm her, and she slaps Stuart. After a while they drive home.
Everything just gets worse, after some time Claire sleeps on the couch, and she won’t let Stuart touch her anymore.
Claire learns about the funeral, and heads up for it. There she finds out that the killer has been caught, but everything isn’t back to normal. She seems to despise Stuart more and more, and their relationship reaches some sort of a breaking point as the story ends.

Character Sketch of Jerry:
Jerry is one of the main characters in the minimalistic short story, “Tell the Women We’re Going”. He is best friends with the story’s other main character, Bill. He is 22 years old, has a wife named Carol and he has two children – Carol is pregnant with their third child. He dropped out of school, and is now working as an assistant manager at Robby’s Mart. He got married very early, which is why he dropped out, and this is significant for his behavior, later on.
Bill thinks that Jerry has matured very quickly and has become a full grown adult. Bill finds it somewhat cool, to have an adult friend like that. But Jerry isn’t that happy about it. He feels he has lost part of his life, more precisely, part of his youth. He is bored with his life, and he misses being the young Jerry, who hung out with Bill all the time, and had fun!
Also he seems to be happy in his relationship, but he wants to and needs to break free. He feels trapped, claustrophobic, paralyzed, and he wants to live again, young and independent.
This might be what suddenly makes him want to get away with Bill, like in the old days, where they would drink some beers and pick up some girls. Which is why they follow the two girls. In a desperate attempt to feel young again, the guys pursuit the girls up the hill, but in an intoxication of anger and frustration, Jerry kills the two girls, without a warning!