The Opening

Delilah: Tuesday, October 17th 2017

It isn’t yet dawn as I ransack my apartment for things I can’t leave behind.  The list is surprisingly short.

       Handfuls of clothing stuffed into a duffel bag. My laptop. An awkwardly-sized cardboard box full of nostalgia, the only things I’d allowed myself to take from my parents’ house after my mother died. I wrap both arms around it, hefting it onto my hip as I cast my eyes in nervous darting circles, contemplating what doesn’t make the cut. The futon. The microwave. Sheets and towels and curtains. I leave it all.

       Everything fits quite easily in my Mini Cooper, the box and the duffel bag smooshed together on the backseat like sleepy children apprehensive of the spontaneous road trip. I go back to lock up, remembering to take a pale blue scarf from the hook just inside the door. I drape it over my fleece, which I zip up to my chin on the way back to the car. I slide into the front seat and turn the key. It starts right up – nothing like nightmares and old movies, where people can never leave in a hurry when they need to. Everything goes smoothly. Leaving is easy. As I pull out of the lot, and my apartment building gets smaller in the rearview, my breathing slows. I’m certain I won’t miss any of it. I wonder why I never thought of this before. 

       I feel no attachment to material things. I take some degree of pride in that. Near the end of her life, my mother asked me to take her antique furniture. She had an oak dresser and nightstand that were a set and she didn’t want them separated. She was dying and she was worried about keeping the furniture together.

       After the funeral, there’d been an estate sale. I don’t believe in an afterlife so I don’t believe my mother is upset with me or proud of me or looking out for me.

       Dead is dead.

       The cardboard box contains twelve file folders that hold report cards and artwork and essays from every year I went to school. If I looked closely, I’m sure I’d find my SAT scores. I haven’t looked closely, though. I saved a shoebox full of loose photos, but I haven’t looked closely at those either. When I first lifted the lid in the basement, my throat started closing. I replaced the lid and set it aside. For later. Whenever that is.

       My mother died five years ago, six months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. She’d never smoked. My father had smoked, though he quit before I was born. He’d died before her diagnosis. A heart attack we hadn’t seen coming. She’d just begun to shake off the most crippling parts of her widowhood when she got the news that she wouldn’t need to get used to living without him after all.

       My father’s death was sudden and shocking and devoid of the opportunity to say goodbye. It was terrifyingly fast: the fear in his eyes, his twisted face, the ambulance sirens too late. My mother’s death was miserably slow, an endless terror with a million goodbyes until there was nothing left to say and nothing left to do but wait for the guilty relief when it was over.

       Tucked into a corner of that box, wrapped in a checkered kitchen towel, are their wedding rings and her quarter carat diamond in yellow gold, the only jewelry my mother owned.

       As I wait at the intersection on the way to the highway, remembering my favorite frying pan with grooves in it that made burgers look like they’d been grilled, I see a police cruiser in my rearview mirror. It turns into the parking lot of my apartment complex and I take a right on red.

Blood  & Water is available on all platforms.

The best laid plans

So, on Monday I found out that the online distributor I use, Pronoun, is going kaput.

I have a very involved launch strategy for this book and started the pre-order phase October 1st. This news means reformatting the book for each platform and contacting all the promotion sites I had set up and losing my rank and losing the sales I was building for the past month and a half. 

After having a good cry, I've regrouped and spent yesterday doing all those things. I'm not done yet. 

Apologies to those who already purchased my book, but those sales have been cancelled. Here's the new link for Blood & Water. There are two more weeks to get your copy during the 99 cent launch.

If you're not an Amazon person, don't fear. Here's a link to all other platforms.

A Long Thaw - an excerpt

There are just a few more days to get my novel, A Long Thaw, for 99 cents. This is a multi-generational story about the power of secrets and the unbreakable bonds of family.Here's an excerpt: 

             Abby hasn’t seen Juliet in ten years. That summer, they had both been thirteen and had that special kind of girl-love that precedes the insecurity and competition of adolescence. They could spend an entire afternoon balancing precariously on rocks at the edge of the ocean, looking for starfish and empty crab shells and other beach treasures. They wore bathing suits that had been stretched and faded with overuse. They pulled snails from the rocks, slowly as not to harm them, and sat with them on their hands waiting for them to suction to their palms. They took turns burying each other in sand and then washed themselves off in the bone chilling Atlantic, squealing as they bent their knees so that the water rose to their belly buttons, their armpits, and finally, their throats.
            They’d had no way of knowing it would be the last summer. If Juliet knew her parents were bound for divorce, she hadn’t let on. By fall, Juliet would be starting school somewhere in California. The exact address was never given. There would be no postcards between cousins, no more family outings to the beach.
            Their parents sat low in beach chairs, talking and giving out snacks periodically. Juliet’s mother was still breast-feeding Lilly. Hannah sat at her feet, the architect of a primitive mud castle. She was four then, too young to want to follow her older sister around.
            “Stay where we can see you,” Abby’s mother would remind the girls whenever they were in earshot.
            “They’re fine,” Juliet’s father assured. “Juliet's a good swimmer, aren’t you Jules?”
            Juliet beamed and puffed out her chest, nodding.
            “They’re both good swimmers, Allen.” Rachel was squinting up at her brother with her hand against her brow like a visor. “This is the ocean.”
            “Just be careful, girls.” Abby’s father sat under an umbrella, reading a book about the Civil War.
            Abby nodded and Juliet took her hand, pulling her back to the frothy water’s edge.

A Long Thaw 99 cent sale!

This week, A Long Thaw is on sale for 99 cents! I'm gearing up for the launch of my new release, Blood & Water, November 28th.
I don't write sequels, but all my novels are connected and a familiar face from A Long Thaw shows up in the new book.

I’ve always imagined A Long Thaw as a modern interpretation of the old prince and the pauper story. Abby and Juliet are cousins who, until the age of ten, live the same privileged, sheltered lives in a big Irish Catholic family. When Juliet’s parents divorce, her mother moves across the country so that she no longer has that safety net. The cousins reconnect in their twenties and the book deals with the ways we are changed by our experiences as well as the ways we are unchangable.

As a writer (and human being), I am endlessly fascinated by issues of identity and family dynamics, by the nature vs. nurture debate. These are things that inevitably find their way into my fiction.