William Trevor's sense of an ending

Two stories juxtaposed in William Trevor's "Selected Stories" make for a revealing contrast in technique, both for what they share - Trevor's tone and milieu of sorrow and lost opportunity and missed connections - and for how they differ. Rose Wept, with the strange Biblical echo in its title, concerns a single discrete event, a small dinner gathering at which Rose's parents thank the tutor who helped Rose graduate from high school. During her tutoring sessions, Rose became aware that the tutor's wife had been having an affair, and this information became a coin she used for social acceptance among her group of schoolgirl friends. At the dinner, she feels remorse for telling tales about her tutor's suffering, hence the tears, at the conclusion. The next story in the collection, Big Bucks, is about a young couple in a poor Irish seacoast town with few prospects - his family owns a rundown farm he doesn't want, hers runs a pub she doesn't want to work in. The young man leaves for America with the hope of earning enough to bring his fiance there for marriage, but things don't work out - he never quite gets a good job, he ultimately calls her to break off the engagement. We see her then, years later, working in the pub, listening to the tales of another man who'd returned from America. There's once again a mournfulness in this story, but this one concerns a whole lifespan, a novel treated in a few pages. Both of these stories us the technique that Trevor increasingly develops in his late work of a strange, almost mystical conclusion - sometimes a passage, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes just a sentence - that both summarizes the story and requires us to see the events and feelings from a new and surprising perspective.