A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
“You can never rely on musicians. I quit high school at one point to make a go of it with this band and we kept breaking up. So I went back to school.”
“When employers tell me they prefer married men, and encourage their men to have homes of their own, because it makes them so much steadier, I wonder if they have any idea of all that that implies.”