Category: Excerpts (page 2 of 3)

Carol Kaczmarek was a screamer.

Back when we all played War in the connected backyards behind the houses that lined School Street and Willow Street, we made forts in the lilac bushes and used sticks like swords and flung mud balls and dog turds at our enemies from the basket of Dad’s old lacrosse stick; we took our prisoners to the shed behind the Larsons’ horse trailer, and we’d threaten to torture them with the snaffle bits and the other riding gear that hung on hooks on the walls, though mostly we never followed through—the worst we ever did was make them take their pants down. But nevertheless, whenever things got the least bit interesting or dangerous, it was Carol’s piercing scream that summoned the authorities—a parental dictatorship that would shut down the whole business.

So naturally, it was Carol who screamed the loudest and was the first to run to the nearest adult to tell on Big David and Annie when they tossed Tim Lenfers too hard and too far playing Statues. That was in the Lenfers’ backyard after supper on the last day of school.

Tim’s collarbone got broken, and it looked like he’d have to skip swimming at Miller Park Pool that whole summer. His mother, Cheri, made Big David and Annie’s mother, Joan, pay the emergency room bill. Joan didn’t really have the money, being the only single mother on the block so far. That was why there wasn’t money for the pool for Big David and Annie either. They’d have to miss out on swimming just like Tim, and it looked like they, too, would be stuck, staying home, bored to death, while their mother went off to work. It was a raw deal, but no one could say it wasn’t fair.   […]

“That secretary of yours is a real pistol! Sharp. Sassy. And that walk of hers has stopped more than one board meeting dead in its tracks,” said Frederick Ramsey, the senior partner of Ramsey, Sandman & Meyer.

He and David McCloud—his protégé, a junior at the firm—were sitting in lounge chairs drinking lemonade on the veranda at the back of Ramsey’s sprawling ranch house on the first warm Saturday of the year. Their daughters—Dahlia and Keely—were already out on the lake, floating in inner tubes, splashing and shrieking. Their wives were who knows where. In the house, doing what wives do.

“Hot stuff, that one—what’s her name? Shannon? And you know what they say about redheads,” continued Frederick, chuckling to himself.

Yes, David knew what Frederick meant. And he knew that most of the men and even some of the women lusted after Shannon Miller, but he did not add to that line of inquiry. Instead he said, “Yeah. Ms. Miller is the best paralegal I’ve ever had—she’s as smart as all three partners put together, when it comes to litigation prep.”

Then no one said anything for long time. The two men watched their daughters horseplay in the distance. Morning turned to afternoon during the pause that stretched out between them, begging for a subject.

Attempting to supply one, David said, “I wonder what kind of women our daughters will become.”   […]

You rarely see a corpse in the woods, but it happens now and then.

One evening, a couple of months after I’d come to live in the canyon, I was hurrying along an unfamiliar path at dusk. As I rounded a bend in the trail, my eyes on my shoes, a voice in my head said, “look up,” and when I did, I was just one step short of plummeting headfirst into a steep, rocky ravine.

I gripped onto a nearby sapling to catch my breath and my balance, and then peered over the edge to see just how far the fall would have been. There, some twenty feet below, lay the broken body of a young buck, his rack of antlers half-grown and velvety, his dead eye open and dull. How was it this creature—the very symbol of effortless grace—would come to take such a clumsy misstep and plunge to his death? How terrified he must have been to forget himself like that.

In those days my knowledge of predators was limited. At the time I asked myself, if it had been a pack of coyotes that chased it, why was the carcass left uneaten, intact in a wild place where nothing is wasted? But now, having lived in the wild for the last couple of years, I suspect it was a mountain lion that scared the poor thing off the cliff and that I had stumbled onto the scene moments before a feast. No doubt, the cougar had heard me a mile away—hidden in plain sight nearby, maybe draped on the branch of a live oak. I was lucky to be so unskilled, to announce myself so noisily. It gave the great cat time to grant me some grace, as I, the interloper, cut an inelegant path through the chaparral.   […]

Today, you will find my body, wedged between an uprooted tree and a boulder half-buried in the mud of the wash. It is evidence of His grace the Lord that has kept my limbs intact—that I am not battered and unrecognizable like the rest of the flood’s flotsam tangled in the rushes. That I am still wearing my glasses, my gloves, my Sunday best will be oddly comforting for you.

Before you find my body, you will spot my purse lying on the banks and you will allow yourself a moment of false hope. “Maybe Mother dropped it here when she climbed up out of the water. Maybe she escaped and cut across the cornfield to that house over there.” But you will know in your heart that if I had survived the flood and found refuge, I would have sent word to your father at the parsonage. We would have already had a happy reunion where I would have chided you, saying how foolish it was to be worried.

You and your father and the other men will be on horseback when you find me, because what roads there were in this backwoods part of Ohio have been destroyed by the flood, and to canoe along the Little Muskingum has always been a journey interrupted by portage after portage—now made all the worse by the slide and debris: hunks of hen houses, tangled rain gutters, whole roofs off tool sheds. And animal carcasses, poor things — the last thing I saw on earth was a pair of cows draped in the branches of the hickory trees above me. Of course they were dead but they looked so innocent in that cow way, as if they were waiting for someone to give them wings.   […]

My feet are so cold.

I am stuck in this hospital bed, enduring the dull interval between what they call “lunch” and what they call “dinner.” Around here, meals are more of a way to keep time than a culinary experience—especially when your diet is so limited. I’d say it’s about four in the afternoon.

Through the fifth-floor window, I’ve been watching heavy equipment operators working the cranes swinging around 20-foot lengths of steel I-beam, building the skeleton of the new wing of the hospital. The sun is low in the sky. Almost quitting time.

They can’t fool me. I’ve stood outside that door, out in that same hallway countless times, my hand on the shoulder of a loved one while I softly recount the details of the patient’s last moments, suppressing rage against failure, mine and that of my science, to keep some promise of immortality. But today I am the patient, not the doctor. I now see the flaw in my own reasoning, based as it was on the idea that we should live on the earth forever, that it is some kind of injustice to be forced to leave.

The attentive staff thinks I will die here.   […]

The Elm Ridge Funeral Home is the grandest building in the county. It looks like a miniature plantation house, dazzling white with a shallow colonnade across the front, strategically positioned at the corner of Washington Blvd. and Main Street — dead center of the tiny eastern Indiana town where the deLaughter family has presided over the prosperous dead for three generations.

At 8:17 on an unseasonably cold day in May, Assistant Mortician Sally McGuire is standing on the porch, struggling to unlock the massive double doors. At least today she has the key. Twice, she’s locked herself out and had to call Mr. deLaughter III from the payphone across the street, interrupting his breakfast. And this is the third time in the last two weeks she’s been late to work. But she’s lucky today — she’s the first one in. Everyone’s late!

It’s pouring rain, threatening snow. When the old wooden door finally gives way, Sally is enveloped in a welcome whoosh of warm air. Now inside the spacious foyer, she takes off her wet shoes and carries them with her as she passes through the carpeted parlor rooms, past upholstered chairs arranged in pairs along the wide hall, past bouquets of silk lilies filling bronze vases on polished end tables, beyond the entrance to the chapel where the smell of extinguished candles hangs in the heavy drapes and the morning light through the non-denominational stained glass drenches the floor with color. When she reaches the basement door, she has almost made it to her workstation, her tardiness undiscovered by Mr. deLaughter III’s secretary Ms. Parker. Only then does she breathe a sigh of relief.   […]

She drove west, deep into the afternoon. As the Arizona sun began to angle into the windshield, she lowered her sun visor. The tripometer turned 2,525. And the jukebox in her head clicked on. How did that old song go? In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive…Maybe she should have stopped in Winslow for the night, but she wasn’t tired. She wanted to keep going—maybe forever. She hoped the yellow dashed line down the middle of the blacktopped road ended in infinity. An idle thought entered her road-emptied mind: “How fast would I have to drive this car to stop?”

Should she throw it in reverse and rev it up to 1,040 mph to match the speed the earth is rotating on its axis? That way she could keep driving and never get anywhere. Or should she floor it to Kingdom Come, warp drive, 670,616, 629.38 mph—the speed of light—and literally stop time? It was a whimsy—and maybe she wasn’t much for calculations, but she knew this much: The little red pickup truck could barely go above eighty.

She hit the gas anyway, and the poor thing struggled for a moment before it surged forward, screeching off into a sloppy conundrum of physics.   […]

Truman had planned to take the long way home from school, to visit the swans at that lake in Prospect Park on his way to Flatbush. He’d saved the crusts of his sandwich to feed them. But it was getting dark, and it was best he head directly home on the No. 2 train instead of walking, else Tante would have his hide.

He dozed off in his seat, dreaming he was back on the island again―imagining himself lying on the sand, the sound of surf and gulls in his ears; imagining the colorful fishing boats all lined up on the beach at the end of the day, the sun slung low; imagining his mother calling him home for dinner… TRUUUUUUU-mahn.

Was that really her?

TRUUUUUUU-mahn.

No.   […]

The saleswoman came out of nowhere.

At that moment, and for the last several minutes, Tommy had been standing near the back wall of the Nordstrom’s nearly deserted lingerie department, fondling the empty cups of the largest bra in the display. He had it off its little hanger and was pinching and pulling at the lacy fabric with his eyes closed. He thought he was alone; he wasn’t even trying to hide what he was up to.

It’s hard to say which of the two of them was more startled.

“May I help you?” she said with a gasp when she saw what Tommy was doing.

“Nope,” said Tommy to the saleswoman, and he threw the Sevilla Semi Demi Underwire Size 48DDD at her as he fled the department, ran down the escalator, out the wide doors, and did not stop until he was a block away.

Out on Wilshire, at the bus stop, still recovering from his close shave, Tommy put in his earbuds and for the umpteenth time, listened to his cousin Dino belt out a nearly accent-free rendition of “My Way.” It was a recording Dino had made a few nights ago in that karaoke bar in Koreatown—the one that looks like a ship’s galley inside. The place still stinks like cigarettes, fifteen years after smoking was banned indoors, but it’s packed every night with a lively hipster crowd who enjoy slumming.

That night Tommy had felt nauseous from the closeness and the smells and had gone home early—alone, as usual—to their “swanky bachelor pad.” That’s what Dino called their place—even though it was really the guesthouse behind their rich uncle’s place in San Marino. Dino was always working on his idiomatic expressions. According to Dino, Tommy was a “dweeb.”   […]

You are standing with the porch light behind you, casting a shadow on the steps. I can see you’re holding the letter. I left it out on the kitchen table in plain sight, and yet I’m still surprised you noticed it, let alone cared to read it.

“Who’s Jim?”

In your mouth, the words are not an accusation. Far from it. Your question is casual. Guileless. Genuinely curious. But not without weight. A perfect reflection of all that I love best about you.

I’m sitting on a folding chair in the front yard, smoking a stale Marlboro – one of the cigarettes I’d hidden away when we quit last year. I’m out here letting my tears dry naturally in the cool evening air. For the last forty-five minutes, and for the long month before that, “Who’s Jim?” had been my question. Now it was ours. It was my turn to speak, and though I had left Exhibit A on the table for you to find, and was prepared for an indictment should that be the way it went, I still did not know what to say for myself.

That night last month, right after it happened, I vowed to lock up the details. What did it have to do with us? It was something I did for myself. And besides, it all started out so innocently. A matter of thirst – the kind a pint of Guinness might quench.   […]