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Overview
Everyone in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, knows the story of Hope Jones, who was lost in the tornado of 1978. Her three young children found some stability in their father, a preoccupied doctor, and in their mother’s spitfire best friend—but nothing could make up for the loss of Hope.
Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger. Gaelan, the son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable. And the youngest, Bonnie, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs roadsides for clues to her mother’s legacy, and permission to move on.
When they’re summoned home after their father’s sudden death, each sibling is forced to revisit the childhood event that has defined their lives. With lyricism, wisdom, and humor, this novel by the national bestselling author of Broken for You explores the consequences of protecting those we love. Sing Them Home is a magnificent tapestry of lives connected and undone by tragedy, lives poised—unbeknownst to the characters—for redemption.
“Comparisons to John Irving and Tennessee Williams would not be amiss in this show-stopping debut.” —KirkusReviews, starred review
“Sing Them Home constantly surprises . . . A big cast of vividly portrayed characters.” —TheBoston Globe
“Fans of Ann Patchett and Haven Kimmel should dive onto the sofa one wintry weekend with Stephanie Kallos’ wonderfully transportive second novel.” —Entertainment Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555846589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Sales rank: | 332,141 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Stephanie Kallos spent twenty years in the theatre as an actress and voice teacher, and her short fiction has been nominated for both a Raymond Carver Award and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two sons. Broken For You is her first novel.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Mayor Ignores the Rules
For someone born and bred right here in the rainwater basin of the central great plains, Llewellyn Jones — the mayor and presumptive leader of Emlyn Springs, Nebraska — is showing a sad lack of common sense. His ladyfriend and bedfellow for the past twenty-five years, Alvina Closs, is flummoxed.
"Can't you wait an hour?" she is saying. "You can still get in nine holes — maybe even eighteen — after it blows over."
"I've got a tee time reserved," he answers. "I'm expected."
"We don't live in Miami!" Alvina counters, shrilly. "It's not as if there's a crowd of people waiting to play. Why can't you wait?"
"I'm going now, Viney," he says. Just like that. No explanation. No compromise.
"You and your goddamned golf."
He gives her a level, noncommittal look. "I'll be home by happy hour," he says. Then he turns around and walks up the stairs and toward the bedroom, his posture erect, his gait processional. If he thinks I'm going to follow him up there, Viney says to herself, molars clenched, he's got another thing coming.
Plenty of others share Viney's agitation. The smallest and least civilized townsfolk are the most distraught: the babies, all of them, even the easy ones, are confounding their mothers with uncharacteristic, colicky behavior. The babies have been fed and changed and burped and read to and sung to and walked and held but still they are out of sorts. They are determined to cry, naptime be damned. There are grumpy toddlers, too, throwing tantrums, caterwauling in unison. Family pets all over town are nervous and misbehaving — fluttering, howling, hissing, gnawing, mauling lace curtains, and mangling good leather shoes even though they know better. Premenstrual girls are arguing with their mothers, moping in front of the television, or daydreaming on polyester bedspreads behind violently slammed doors. Teenage boys contemplate their troubled complexions with dismay. Afternoon trysts are not going well. Noses tickle without relief. The carpenters in town curse and measure again, cut again, curse again, measure again. At the Williamses' mansion, Miss Hazel's most promising student strikes a C-sharp. Hazel cringes in the parlor; in the kitchen, her younger sister, Wauneeta, cringes, too. Downtown at the piano hospital, Blind Tom experiences a sudden unaccounted-for burst of tinnitus as he applies a cotton swab saturated with milk to a stained bit of ivory he found last week by the side of the road near Hallam. Next to the old train depot, the aged citizens encamped at the St. David's Home for the Elderly are experiencing intestinal problems; not a one of them, not even Mr. Eustace Craven, whose bowels have emptied like clockwork for every one of his ninety-eight years, has had a decent BM all day.
And in the living room of the house that has been Llewellyn Jones's primary place of residence for a quarter of a century, Viney turns her back on the mayor and plants herself at the picture window — arms folded, mouth adamantly stitched shut, brows lowering, wearing an expression that no one but her dearest friend has ever seen.
Viney rarely frowns. She does five minutes of facial exercises and acupressure every morning and makes an effort to keep her countenance (a word she routinely mispronounces as continence) relaxed and neutral. Time needn't be the enemy. A person doesn't have to spend a fortune on face-lifts and creams. Alvina Closs is seventy-four years old, almost seventy-five, but she looks at least ten years younger. Maybe even fifteen.
She scrutinizes the ballooning clouds advancing from the south. The baby-blanket blue of the sky is darkening, graying. She can hear Llewellyn banging around in the bedroom, opening and closing bureau drawers. He must be changing into his shorts.
Viney can't for the life of her imagine what's gotten into him. The mayor is usually so easygoing, a model of the compromising spirit. It's one of the many reasons they've stayed together for so long.
Many positive things could be said of Viney's late husband, Waldo, but a flexible nature was not one of them. They had sex in the same position their entire married life, and Waldo required some form of red meat at every meal. He'd choke down a slice of turkey at Thanksgiving, but that was the extent of it. Chicken? "Dirty birds," he'd say, although that didn't keep him from eating eggs fried in butter eight days a week. Fish? Forget it, even when his friends brought home fresh perch from the Big Blue. It was meat, meat, meat with Waldo, which is why — Viney knows this for a fact — he dropped dead of a massive heart attack when he was only thirty-two years old, leaving her a young widow with four kids. He had a beautiful body. She's still mad at him.
The window needs cleaning. They haven't had a good rain for days — although Viney's oldest daughter said it sprinkled up in Omaha yesterday. The topsoil is parched, the wind has been relentless. There's dust on everything. Viney takes up yesterday's newspaper and her spray bottle of water and Coke and gets to it.
The picture window is a relatively new addition. Waldo installed it back in 1962, not long before he collapsed in the parking lot of the Surf'n'Turf, where they'd gone to celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Waldo was handy, that was one of his attributes. He made a lot of improvements to the house when he was alive. Up and down ladders, hammering, hoisting, sawing, drilling. All those comforting male noises.
Alvina Closs has been a widow longer than she was married. She's been an adulteress longer than she's been a wife. She would have dried up for sure, grown shut down there — and in her mind and heart, too — if it hadn't been for Llewellyn Dewey Jones, and Hope.
Welly comes back downstairs and goes out through the kitchen door, not exactly slamming it but giving the action just enough oomph to set the door harp clanging overenergetically. What's wrong with him?
Viney hears him out in the backyard, thumping his shoes together, clearing off the dirt between the spikes. She pictures great bricks of dense sod being flung about the yard, and then falling into a serene, elliptical orbit with Welly at the center: a small angry god in argyle socks, giving birth to a new solar system in which the terrain of every planet is an immense, impeccably groomed PGA golf course.
Viney resumes window-cleaning. She does a few nasolabial stretches and waits for Welly to reappear. Surely he won't leave without patching things up.
Viney's house is one of the oldest in town, if not the finest or fanciest: a whitewashed two-story saltbox built back in 1910 by her great-grandfather as a wedding present for her grandparents. Her mother, aunts, and uncles were born here, as was Viney, as were Viney's four children. She keeps her house, and Welly keeps his, even though they've been sleeping together since the nation's bicentennial.
In part, it's for appearances' sake — but it's also because the house provides Alvina Closs with a sense of personal and historical continuity. Frankly, she's never cared a good goddamn what people think of her and Llewellyn and their unusual arrangement, and she's always deeply regretted the fact that Welly and the children didn't move in here after Hope went up.
But that's a sore subject and another story entirely.
Welly is in the attached garage now — another of Waldo's contributions — opening the garage door with the remote. Maybe he won't come back inside to say good-bye after all.
The phrase friable earth voices itself in Viney's mind suddenly. Where has she heard that expression? What does it mean? She goes to look it up.
In 1966, Viney replaced the family Bible on the lectern with a massive Webster's International Collegiate Dictionary. She makes a point of learning a new word every day and then using it in conversation. Staying mentally agile is crucial as one ages. There is no reason why a person should stop learning. Yesterday's word was sangfroid.
And then she remembers: One of her granddaughters — the one who's having so much trouble getting pregnant — told her recently that she was diagnosed as having a friable uterus. Viney was a registered nurse for over thirty years and maintains a keen interest in the medical field; nevertheless this expression was unfamiliar. She didn't have the heart to ask what it meant at the time, and a good thing, too:
Friable, she reads. Brittle. Readily crumbled. Pulverable.
How in the world does a uterus crumble?
Viney looks up. Llewellyn has backed out of the garage and is loading his clubs into the trunk of his Marquis. He's going then, without a word. His expression — normally so benign and handsome — bears a sour residue, the result, she supposes, of their recent spat.
The sex in the beginning was very good, probably because it felt illicit, even though their adultery was completely sanctioned — more than that, encouraged — by Llewellyn's wife, Hope.
Viney and Welly still have sex, at least once a month, after lunch. Welly is an improviser, a person who bends, goes with the flow. They have their routines, of course, but overall their life together has been one of freedom, quiet adventure, and discovery — both in and out of the bedroom. Viney has kept them on a semivegetarian lacto-ovo diet since 1980 — relying heavily on Fresh Vegetable and Fruit Juices: What's Missing from Your Body? and The Vegetarian Guide to Diet and Salad by N. W. Walker. She credits this with their physical health, mental acuity, and active love life. Viney pictures the two of them engaged in stimulating conversation over glasses of beet juice until they are well into their hundreds. Dr. Walker himself lived to be 110. No one has yet found any reason whatsoever why the human body should die.
All those years ago, when she charged through the front door of McKeever's Funeral Home, and, ignoring staff urgings to be reasonable ("State law my ass!" she proclaimed), stormed down to the basement prep room to see Waldo's pre-embalmed remains — such a strange word in that context, remains, because at that point Wally was still all there — she noticed a protrusion, something like a tent pole, midway down the sheet.
"What's that?" she'd asked, even though she had a pretty good idea. She was thinking about the fact that it was her fifteenth wedding anniversary, her husband was dead, and never once had they had sex with her on top.
Malwyn McKeever repositioned himself so that she no longer had a view of Waldo's nether regions. "It's a reflex," Mal said, clearly embarrassed by the question. "A common postmortem reflex."
"That figures," Viney muttered. She had stopped crying and was starting to feel the undertow of a fierce, angry grief. She was young and foolish enough back then to believe that the worst thing in the world had just happened to her. She didn't know anything.
She was curious to hear about how embalmers deal with postmortem stiffies — imagining this almost made her laugh — but Mal's face was as pink as a medium-rare steak. So she picked out a coffin, signed the papers, and (vowing to never put herself through the experience of laying eyes on him again) bid farewell to her beautiful dead husband's erect remains.
She could never in a million years have gotten Waldo to drink carrot-ginger juice on a daily basis or sit through a program on educational television.
Why, just last night she and Welly were watching one of those science shows on PBS about stem cell research and a whole new branch of study called regenerative medicine. There's a group of doctors now who believe that people with spinal cord injuries can walk again. They've done things like remove stem cells from people's noses and pack them into the spinal cords of people who've broken their backs or necks or are suffering from some other kind of damage to their nervous systems. Lo and behold, those cells start regenerating. People who've never been able to do so much as wiggle a toe have started flexing their feet! They've even done this with a person's heart, a young boy whose idiot friend was playing around with a nail gun and shot him right through the left ventricle. Nobody believed it was possible to regenerate heart tissue, but sure enough, they've done it!
Viney tried to engage Welly in a conversation about the TV show when they were getting ready for bed, but for some reason he was unusually quiet (possibly the subject matter was upsetting given their shared history, the wheelchair-bound, and so forth) so she didn't push him.
Even though they have never officially tied the knot, they are bound together in all the ways that matter — through the rituals of everyday living, dependability, courtesy, and an innate sense of when to talk and when to keep still.
All the emphasis on honesty these days is, in Viney's opinion, a bad idea. Living with another human being is a stormy enough proposition without stirring up trouble over this and that and every last little thing. As far as she can tell, this obsession with talking and listening, sharing feelings and so on, hasn't done one blessed thing for the institution of marriage. Just look at the statistics. Viney's own children are example enough of the state of things: one divorced, one separated, one in counseling. None of Welly's kids have ever even gotten married. Viney has always felt sad for them — and for Welly, too, with no grandbabies — but maybe it's for the best. Cohabitation is not for the faint of heart.
Viney regrets getting snippy. She shouldn't have made a fuss, pushed him like that. It's one of those men things, a matter of pride, and there's nothing she can do now to stop him. She watches him slam the trunk closed and walk around to the driver's side door. He could use some new golf shoes. She got him that pair a couple of Christmases ago. It's not like he hasn't gotten good use out of them.
A wind kicks up. The bamboo chimes shudder; the whirligig in the rose bed spins madly. Welly starts the car. A cloud of exhaust is instantly dissipated.
It's August! Viney thinks with sudden clarity. That's what it is, that explains everything. The Joneses always get owly in late August. Criminy, the whole town does for that matter, it's not as if what happened to them didn't happen to the rest of us.
Welly's children must be feeling it, too — Bonnie a few blocks away, Larken and Gaelan up in Lincoln. Poor kids. None of them are happy, none of them have ever really settled down. Viney glances at the photographs of Llewellyn and Hope's children, prominently displayed on the fireplace mantle along with the pictures of her own blood kin.
Feeling a burst of sympathy and contrition, Viney hurriedly pushes open the screen door and scurries out to the curb to wave good-bye, but it's too late. Welly is already turning the car onto Bridge Street. He doesn't see her.
Viney sighs. That man does love to whack things with a stick. Funny. He's not even very good at it.
She gives an assessing look to the accumulating clouds off to the southwest, checks the thermometer on the garage, and sniffs the air. The wind is high now, and cooling. The thick humid air that's hovered over town for the past few days is being pushed aside.
Viney goes in. She changes into footless tights and a leotard. She'll do her exercise video and then figure out something for dinner.
Maybe he'll get to the club and run into Alan or Glen. They'll have a drink. That's probably what he'll do. He won't tee off when it's sure to storm soon.
Viney shoves Young at Heart Yoga into the VCR and pushes the Play button.
While the FBI reminds her of the penalties associated with video piracy, she unrolls her mat, sits down in lotus, and closes her eyes.
It's Friday. They'll have frozen lemon pepper filets and that new Stouffer's Spinach Souffle. She'll whip up a salad from Dr. Walker's cookbook. She'll make a fresh lime and celery juice tonic and mix it with spring water.
The music begins. The steady, sangfroid voice of the yoga instructor encourages her to relax, relax. Breathe.
And for dessert, they'll have big dishes of that fat-free rocky road that Welly likes so much.
The living aren't the only ones unsettled. The dead — especially the fathers — are also perturbed by the mayor's behavior.
There he goes, they're thinking: kicking up dust with that gas guzzler he drives, hell-bent to engage in his favorite form of outdoor recreation, putting himself in the path of what any fool could see is a developing thunder cell, and at the worst possible hour of the day.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sing Them Home"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Stephanie Kallos.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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