Almost Home

Zusatztext Edie Jarolim The New York Times Book Review Edgy...remarkably free of coming-of-age clichés. McNally doesn't believe in easy solutions to complicated problems! and his plotting is consistently sharp. Informationen zum Autor T. M. McNally is the author of Low Flying Aircraft, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Until Your Heart Stops, a New York Times Notable Book. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Arizona State University. Chapter 1 He was the boy with a dog. Standing in the first row, singing, she'd turn sometimes when she heard his voice: first tenor, clear and bright. For days he'd wear the same baggy sweater -- burgundy; worn at the elbows, covered always with lint. Once, before her family moved to Paradise Valley; her father had promised she could have a dog. He wasn't from here either. In 1978, nobody was. He was new -- a transfer, midsemester, from Illinois. He was quiet, and shy, and strangely confident of his own voice, as if just waiting to be discovered. Standing there, with him behind her in the choir, his sweater all full of fur, she would listen to him pierce a high C. She knew a lot about scales, would spend ten minutes a day, the start of each practice, warming up on her flute. In the afternoons, after arriving home, having departed the bus, having walked the three long blocks in the sunshine home, there she would wait for her father to call from his office and ask if she'd practiced yet. In Paradise Valley, the streets were newly paved, and there were no sidewalks, or telephone poles. Her father, excited about the possibilities of fiber optics, explained that here communication traveled underground. He explained that here everything was new. The valley, he explained, was fed by a series of rivers, the Salt and the Verde, the Gila, tributaries of the Colorado now linked by a growing system of canals and locks which had brought their family, as well as everybody else, here to live. At home, meanwhile, she spent a lot of time practicing, even if she knew it would be hopeless. She was good enough to know why she would never be really good -- exceptional, her father would say, hopefully. She was smart enough to know the world didn't need another girl who could play the flute. Once a guy learned she could play the flute, she knew precisely what he thought about. When she played, she'd lift the piece to her mouth, set her lip, her wrist now in full display. She kept her sleeves uncuffed, each rolled twice, but never more. The scars from a childhood accident began at her fingertips and ran past her elbow, toward her shoulder. When people asked what had happened, usually girls, because guys were too ashamed to admit they had noticed...whenever a girl asked what had happened, she always wanted to know just how. A pot of boiling water? You were eleven? Elizabeth doesn't remember any of it clearly. She doesn't recall the trip to the hospital, the sirens lit up like a parade, bright as day. Her mother once confessed the police had called to check up on her. They worried, her mother explained, it might have been done on purpose -- the water, scalding, and the flesh it had destroyed there on her arm. Now her mother says that true pain is always merciful. It hurts only by way of memory, long after the fact, and by then it has become bittersweet: like a kiss, provided by a shy boy you will not grow up to marry; or a slap delivered sharply by somebody you have been instructed by your life to love. Somehow, her mother says, tenderly, you have been made... not necessarily better, but stronger ...for it. Do you see? It's not the pain which matters, she has come to realize, but the way you carry the memory of it with you afterward. Each day she would rise, and dress, and then roll up the cuffs of her sleeves. When she was tan it was easier not to notice. In Paradise Valley, y...

Product details

• Authors: T. M McNally, T. M. McNally, T.M. McNally, MCNALLY T M
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.05.1999
• EAN: 9780684854458
• ISBN: 978-0-684-85445-8
• No. of pages: 236
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature