Dad: “You just talk.”
Me, sounding awfully mature for my years. “I'll interview you, Mom.”
“About what, life in Westport, Connecticut?”
I put on a reporter voice: “Mrs. Hochmeyer, what does it feel like to have won the club tournament seven years in a row?”
And she put on the voice of the ingénue: “Why, it feels just grand.”
And rubbish like that, tears to my eyes: these lost voices. But more, of course, that Kate's was not among them.
Th
en there was our rendition of the Beatles song, Mom and Dad and me, heartfeltâterrible harmoniesâmemories of the laughter our singing evoked when we played it back, a time when there hadn't been much laughter. I listened to both sides of the tape, found a little more talk, and then a lot of music recorded off the radioâI'd stayed up half the night goofing with that machine.
Wrong reel, Dad.
A
FTER DINNER, LATE,
Aamani already in bed, I opened the last envelope from Dad's packet. Inside was a book he'd given me for my twelfth or thirteenth birthday, a compact little volume for budding outdoorsmen called
How to Survive in the Woods.
Inside, he'd tucked a couple of photos, images to take with him, no doubt, as he disappeared into the wilds.
Th
e first was of himself with Mom on their honeymoon, both of them tanned and ungodly attractive, twenty and twenty-one years old, a picture I'd never seen, the two of them kissing through smiles, his arm foreshortened and enormous as he holds the old Brownie reflex camera out to get the shot.
Th
e second photo made me smile, too: Katy Hochmeyer, about five years old, holding her little brother up by the armpits to see.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I'm grateful to all my many friends and to my family, none of whom are anything like the people in this book. I got lots of advice and direction and tough love from the writer friends who read the work in various stages along the way: Debora Black, Dana Chevalier, Laura Cowie, Melissa Falcon, David Gessner, Lea Graham, Stephanie Grant, Katherine Heiny, Sonya Huber, Debra Spark, and above all Kristen Keckler, who is a treasure.
Warmest gratitude to my editor, Kathy Pories, for her brains and gentle forbearance, and to everyone at Algonquin, still my dream publisher. And finally, thanks and a medal of honor to Betsy Lerner, my agent, so beautiful to me. And of course to my girls, Juliet and Elysia.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2012 by Bill Roorbach.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-61620-156-2