SANDY TURNER sat on the toilet seat lid and opened the newspaper to the sports page. The article she’d hoped would be there even had a photo with it. She whispered, "Bingo,” and took the cuticle scissors from the overnight case to cut out the newest addition to the half-filled 1949 scrapbook. It was really the latest addition to those her mother had clipped over the years and kept—secretly, as far as Sandy could tell—until she died.
Sandy studied the picture. It was one the papers ran often, a close-up three-quarter shot with his racing helmet on. The angle of its bill against the dark background echoed the outline of his high cheekbones and strong jaw line. His eyes were so blue they photographed like pale rings around the pupils, and there were fine sprays of laugh lines in the outer corners. In all the pictures she’d secretlyhttps://websites.godaddy.com/ pored over the past month, he was smiling like that, the relaxed grin of a born winner. . . .
Preface
IT'S POSSIBLE that for 34 years the thought of ending it all never enters your head and then one day the idea presents itself, like a strange new entrée on an otherwise familiar menu. You’d think there’d be foreshadowing—an early inclination toward the dark side. Not necessarily. Sometimes it gets shuffled into the mix as you sense you're about to reach the end of your rope. Letting go is another option in the sequence of ill-considered decisions that nudged you over the edge and left you twisting there.
Here's one way it can happen. By mid-November, you’ve almost gotten used to waking up cold and disoriented in the back of your 2006 Dodge Caravan in the parking lot of a third-tier grocery store. It’s a place to hide when the local shelter is full. The streetlights are dimmed by sheets of snow driven by a frigid wind that rocks the car. You’d think you’d hit bottom. You’d be wrong.
Fearing that your ex and friends will discover your abject failure to reinvent your life, you’re desperate to avoid anyone who’s ever known you as the spouse of a successful lawyer, hosting many of Wichita’s movers and shakers. Keeping up appearances to conceal your downfall is taking a heavy toll as you spend most of your days hiding in plain sight.
Then one day you open your PO box praying for at least one decent job offer and withdraw an envelope from your ex’s law firm. The letter inside is only three pages long, but two words fly off the first page and hook like barbs in your eyes—sole custody.
Of all the words you’ve slung at each other—all those left unspoken for better or for worse—finally only those two matter, stretching like razor wire between you and the world you once took for granted.
When the only other option is to lie shivering in the back of your car with cheap vodka to dull the pain, wondering if it’s even possible to put a stop to the freight-train-out-of-control disaster of your life, it feels almost rational to also wonder if packing a wad of snow into the tail pipe can deliver you from despair to who cares . . . .
Chapter 1: A Summons of the Soul
“Guess who’s not dead yet.”
Annie had just started her car when the new ringtone caught her by surprise —this one the theme from the movie Rocky. The week before, her sister Kate had reset it to a warning siren.
She looked over at her phone that showed a close up of Kate finishing up a yawn, and asked, “What happened?”
“Nothing. Duh. That’s how that works.”
“Smart-ass,” Annie said as the car’s air conditioner blew a stingy pocket of relief into the late-June heat. “And quit messing with my ringtone. How long ago did you check?”
“I phoned the manager this morning. She said Mr. Frankel’s granddaughter thinks it’s some kind of miracle.”
“Crapola,” said Annie. “That’s all we need--a last-minute hand-of-god intervention throwing everything off schedule.”
“Wow, Sis, that’s cold.” Kate’s laugh ended with an involuntary snort, which usually got anyone within hearing distance laughing along.
“True,” Annie said, not laughing along. And that was out loud, she thought as she backed out of her driveway, which wass no doubt going to mess with her karma,. She was scheduled to show a house to prospective buyers just south of Kansas City’s famous Country Club Plaza, the world’s first mall. The highly coveted area was a one-of-a-kind shopping and dining mecca modeled after the Baroque architecture of Seville Spain. Mostly one-story buildings were distinguished by their unique patterns of colorful tiles. The small river running through the neighborhood and profusion of Kansas City’s famous fountains made it an urban oasis.
A little farther west of the Plaza was Carefree Living, where Mr. Frankel, comatose at a hundred and one, was supposed to have already given up the ghost. They’d been counting on his imminent demise to open up the sought-after two-bedroom apartment on the first floor in Carefree’s Assisted Living wing. The retirement complex was advertised as “Where the Interesting People Live,” and her grandparents were next up on the perennially long waiting list of interesting people.
Further complicating things, the closing date on Pops and G-ma Sally’s house sale was two weeks away. D-Day for the transition. And they needed that money to pay off the balloon note used to cover the hefty start-up costs of buying into Carefree’s in-perpetuity program.
“Looks like you’re in the car,” Kate’s disembodied voice rang out, causing Annie to startle.
“I thought you hung up.”
“Have you already picked up our lunches?”
“I’ll stop by the deli after I show the Meredith house.” Look … the move will be a tighter transition, but we can still make it work.” As first-born, Annie’s lot had been to grab the rudder whenever the family boat was rocked. Things had gotten a lot rockier since their parents drifted into a trial separation and their father paddled off to test the deep-sea fishing waters in Florida. For now, Annie was concerned with her own retreat, for the Fourth of July weekend, when she would have the house to herself to get back to her paints and charcoal.
“How boring life would be without a little drama, right?” Kate said, in her joie de vivre voice.
“Says the drama queen. Thanks for sharing the gloom and doom. Wait, are you still home?”
“I’m … hard at work.”
“Step away from your phone.”
Instead Kate leaned in, her nostrils filling the screen.
“I know you’re in your kitchen. That ancient percolator sounds like a bad day at Jurassic Park ...."
An Nguyen runs his fingers down the plastic crucifix hanging just inside the arched doorway to the kitchen of the apartment he shares with Thank Nguyen and his nephew Binh. The ladies of St. Paul's give them to refugees when they arrive in Wichita. Too restless to sleep, he lets his lips rest briefly on the savior’s ropy gold legs and crossed feet.
It is the first kiss he's given in a long time.
He tries to remember when the last one was, far back, long before the two weeks in hiding as he waited for word that there would be an attempt, a fishing boat waiting to the south of Da Nang if he could get there. And the long wait in the camp in Thailand, and finally the boat trip that cost everything but his life.
After the first raid on their village, his lips had tasted tears and blood on his young wife's hands—one side of her face missing from the screaming metal chips that killed and maimed their neighbors that afternoon. A chunk of flesh had been torn from his own right arm and planted in the smoking underbrush.
Leaning his head against the wall, he thinks back one day more, to when the air carried the rich smell of growing vegetation and smoke of wood fires as he returned from the fields. His wife’s throat and wrists had been scented with ylang ylang on that night when she’d last embraced him, the night he'd had no way of knowing that would be the moment of his last good kiss .. . .
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