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STONE CREEK by Victoria Lustbader
On Sale: May 27^th
Paperback
400 pages
ISBN-10: 0061369217
ISBN-13: 9780061369216

In Stone Creek, a small town in upstate NY, Danny, a young widower with a five year old son, still grieves for his late wife and can't seem to move beyond his pain. Lily has decided to spend the summer alone in her house in Stone Creek, rather than her elegant apartment in New York City. Her high-powered husband, Paul, has taken on a case that will demand every minute of his time, including lots of travel and late nights in the office. This is Paul's favorite kind of case-righting a wrong and making a large settlement in the process. But why should Lily be lonely in the city, constantly aware of the child she wishes she had-the child Paul would never agree to-while her husband is away, doing what he loves best. In Stone Creek, Lily agrees to help out a local charity where, in a chance encounter, she meets Danny and something immediate and undeniable that happens between them. While Lily is very much aware that she's not only married, she's ten years older than Danny, it's Danny's son, Caleb, that keeps them coming back to one another. Caleb's growing need for Lily is very much a reaction to having lost his mother and neither Danny nor Lily want to upset that delicate balance. But Danny and Lily find themselves, too, balancing on a high wire act between happiness and despair.

A former editor for both Harper & Row and Berkley/Putnam Victoria Lustbader became an author herself with her first novel, HIDDEN, published in June of 2006 by Forge Books. Victoria divides her time between Southampton and New York City.

Victoria Lustbader expertly looks at grief, love, loneliness, identity issues and passionate sex, and how these might intertwine, in STONE CREEK, an escapist page-turner that will be in more than a few beach bags this summer.

Lustbader comes to her second novel with experience. As a former fiction editor and the wife of novelist Eric Van Lustbader, she intimately knows the mechanics of writing a novel. This book reads smoothly from cover to cover. The story is set in the well-rendered fictional small town of Stone Creek, 70 miles northwest of New York City, a place she does a solid job sketching out for the reader.

But it’s the characters, not the place, that are the heart and soul of this novel. Danny Malloy is the attractive young widower and construction worker who married out of his class and whose grieving mother-in-law, Eve Jamison, won’t let him forget it. As the story opens, it’s been almost a year since his wife Tara died, and Danny finds it is all he can do to take care of his five-year-old son Caleb and make it through another day. Lustbader employs the oft-used device of a journal left behind by the deceased wife Tara as a method of filling in some historical blanks for the readers about Danny and Tara, and their passionate love for each other. It’s a bit of a clichéd device, but it works.

Danny’s life is about to intersect with Lily Spencer, a beautiful 46-year-old woman with everything money can buy. But she’s suffering from boredom and feels distant from her husband Paul, a 54-year-old workaholic corporate lawyer. They’ve been married nine years and are childless, a condition that is unpacked more thoroughly as the novel unfolds. Paul is a likable man prone to thoughtful gestures who has overcome his past as an unloved adopted son and strives to achieve. Lustbader makes him more than the easy cookie-cutter character, however, and it’s hard for readers to dislike or dismiss him. I particularly liked this description of Paul: “He sets his sights on something or someone and most of the time he gets what he’s after. And if he doesn’t get what he’s after, he stops wanting it. It’s a trick he taught himself….”

Eve, the mother-in-law you’d love to hate, is in fact impossible to hate because of the multifaceted way Lustbader portrays her character. Eve is anxious, angry, grieving, and feels a tremendous sense of guilt over an action in her past that later will shed light on her hatred of Danny. Her influence on Caleb threatens the peace that Danny and his son carved out after Caleb’s mother’s death.

Although it takes a bit of getting used to, the present tense narration lends a sense of urgency to the story. Each character’s motivations are gradually unveiled by Lustbader, as the tale moves to its unexpected conclusion. The complicated relationships between different people keep the tension high as the novel progresses.

For Lily, her life, however wonderful it looks on the outside, is just not enough. She needs to find herself, and her relationship with Danny holds the key to unlocking Lily’s own identity and helping her get a grip on her marriage. Lest readers be angry with Danny, Lustbader is clear that his relationship with Lily is just what he needs to heal from his grief. Lest readers be angry at Lily for cheating on Paul, Lustbader gives Paul flaws. I found what happens with Paul to be a plot device employed to make him less of a sympathetic character.

The themes of grief resolution, midlife angst and identity should generate plenty of discussion about STONE CREEK and will likely keep a few book groups chatting about it late into the night.

    --- Reviewed by Cindy Crosby. Contact Cindy at phrelanzer@aol.com

An Interview with Victoria Lustbader, Author of STONE CREEK

You were a fiction editor for many years, and worked with many successful writers. You are married to Eric Van Lustbader, a long-time bestselling author. What influence did your previous career and choice of mate have on becoming a writer yourself?
Let's have some fun and turn that around! My choices of career and mate were probably influenced by my attempt to avoid becoming a writer, although I'd wanted to be one since I was a child. Not that I didn't enjoy being an editor, or don't love my husband, but both my job and my marriage let me take the easy way out, sit on my own ambitions, be a good girl and a good help-mate to those who had the talent I thought I didn't. But often, I would find my sharp, blue editing pencil trembling over a page and dare to think, You could write this well. Maybe better.

Being married to a prolific and successful writer was for a long time a deterrent to my attempting to write. I couldn't imagine making the transition from help-mate to competitor, which was how I thought of it: that I would be competing with my husband, and I'd lose. Or worse, I'd win! That was a personal self-esteem issue I had to overcome in my own time. My husband has always been totally encouraging and supportive.

When did you finally start writing, and how? What got you past your fears and doubts?
I started for real in the spring of 2001. The underlying psychological theme of the book I wrote first, HIDDEN, is repression, and the damage people do to themselves and others when their true natures and desires are squelched. It's a very personal theme: what "got" me going was that I realized I was seriously unhappy despite having a wonderful life. Unhappiness is surely one of the greatest motivators of change; it's not a state one wants to dwell in. I'd reached the point where I simply had to speak my voice, say what I felt, do what I'd always wanted to do.

Rumor has it you were once planning to be a cellular biologist or some such. How did you end up in the publishing business? What happened?
Calculus happened. And adolescent laziness. Which just goes to prove that being a sluggard sometimes pays off. Yes, the sciences have always fascinated me, and still do [I'm reading up on quantum physics for the book I'm working on now... black holes, quarks, fermions, oh my!], but I would have made a terrible lab rat. By my sophomore year in college, I realized I didn't love science enough to do the required work. It was people that really fascinated me. I flirted with psychology, but ultimately became an English major. Pretty much because most of my friends were English majors, and I was still lazy and it was the easiest path to graduation. But as soon as I got my first job, at what was then Harper & Row, I couldn't deny that I'd always loved words, and books, and writing, more than anything. Science, psychology, humanity, history... books contained everything. I'd ended up exactly where I wanted and needed to be.

What are some of the challenges and benefits of having the same career as your spouse?
For us, I would say there are mostly only benefits.

Even after working with writers for years, the reality of living with one was an entirely different animal. Eric wrote almost constantly, and seemed "gone" most of the time. Having an intellectual understanding of why, and where he went, didn't help me feel less abandoned. It wasn't until I was writing myself that I understood viscerally what it meant to be partly living every moment in the world you were creating, and to appreciate what a joy that was. And to realize that it didn't make a writer's connection to the "real" world any less substantial.

Now, with both of us writing, there is nothing better than the times when we are in our separate offices, humming away on our books, feeling the creative vibes jumping in the air, each of us knowing that the other is having a good day. They aren't all good days, of course - writing can be a lonely, frustrating and dispiriting profession. We empathize with one another's ups and downs, down to the bone, and can often help one another. Eric and I write very different kinds of books, have different strengths and weaknesses, and can often complement the other's way of thinking about a problem.

However, being that I'm only human, confident one moment and hopeless the next, it is hard at times to not feel like the family after-thought when I compare my fledgling career to what Eric has already accomplished.

STONE CREEK is your second novel, and totally different from your first, Hidden, which is an historical family saga. How did you come to write two such different books?
I might have set a story with the themes of Hidden in the present. What people can't express or do hasn't changed as much as we like to think it has. But I chose to set it in the 1920s because it was a period of extraordinary and painful transition. The rules and expectations of behavior and morality were still black and white for some, while falling to pieces for others. The still-strong Victorian influence and epic historical saga trappings allowed me the freedom to be a bit more narratively melodramatic, and to keep more emotional distance than is possible with a book set in the world I live in.

The question of how I came to write Stone Creek is covered elsewhere, but the why is that I was ready to write a contemporary novel. I needed and wanted to write something from which I could not maintain that emotional distance. I wanted to write a realer, more "authentic" book, if you will. I'd welcome the opportunity to write a sequel to Hidden some day, but novels like Stone Creek are my first love.

Lily, the female protagonist of Stone Creek, is childless and married to a powerful, successful man. As are you. So, forgive us, but the obvious next question is: how much of Stone Creek is autobiographical?
A fair, if pushy question!

I realize now, as I'm working on my third book, that everything I write is going to be autobiographical in the sense that the emotional and psychological themes I find myself writing about come from the experiences that have been the most formative in my own life. Those experiences, and the feelings and wisdom they have left me with, are not uniquely mine, by any stretch of the imagination - quite the opposite. That's why I believe they're worth writing about.

That said, whereas nothing in the actual storyline of Hidden paralleled my own life, I, like Lily, have had to face the hard reality of not having children. Her story is not mine, she is not me. Paul is not my husband, and [more's the pity!] I never met a Danny. However, the emotional journey that Lily goes through is one I am intimately familiar with. One of the loveliest compliments I've received from readers so far - whether they have shared that exact experience, or some other than engendered similar emotions - is that the book is so true to life they feel I had to have lived it to write about it so honestly.

As to the background details, writing a contemporary book after an historical was like being let loose in a chocolate factory. Little fun things got plucked from my life, or the lives of friends. For instance, I actually had a ballet teacher named Miss Ruth when I was a girl; dear friends adopted children the way Rick and Alan do in the book; I spent my youthful summers in a community upstate New York; we have a mahogany deck around our pool!

If I wanted to write something wholly autobiographical, however, I'd be writing memoirs. For me, exploring and filtering my experiences and observations through the lens of people I create is more interesting; it lets me move beyond myself, into the realm of the universal.

Who is your favorite character in the book, and why?
Oh, that's just not fair. It's like asking a parent of three wonderful kids which one they love the most. So like a parent, but a really really honest one, I'll say, I love ALL the characters, but at the end of the day, of the three leads - Danny, Lily and Paul - Danny is my favorite.

Lily can't be my favorite, because I'm looking at the world of Stone Creek through her eyes; we're too close. And anyway, I like guys too much... so...

Paul is my cerebral favorite - he's the most complicated person in the book and I love his pretzeled brain and his deep desire to be good.

But Danny is my heart's favorite. He's as close to my perfect fantasy man as I could come without making him feel unreal. He's sexy, passionate, physically competent, emotionally accessible, capable of deep love and infatuated with his child. As one of my reader friends said, He's beautiful and he makes things! He can even cook. And, while Lily, Paul and Eve all were fundamentally responsible for their current painful lives, Danny had his tragedy thrust upon him. He has an innocent nature, much like his young son, a quality that I find enormously moving.

What was the hardest part of writing this book?
I think the hardest part was expressing Paul's contradictory personality and convoluted psychological make-up, and Eve's rigidity and superficial nastiness, in ways that were comprehensible, believable, and ultimately sympathetic. They could too easily be dislikable characters, and it was essential that the reader come to love Paul, as Lily did, and come to understand, forgive, and like Eve, as Danny did.

Writing a novel is tantamount to working out an enormous, complex puzzle, and figuring out Paul's inner dynamics, especially, was a tough puzzle within a tough puzzle. But, since human psychology is my favorite subject, for all the difficulties he presented, creating Paul was also one of the most enjoyable parts of writing this book.

Another difficult thing was keeping control over the book's language. My writing voice is clean and lucid, somewhat spare but also lyrical and poetic. However, given the huge emotions and passions I was writing about in Stone Creek, and my innate romanticism, my language occasionally went veering off into the wild purple yonder, and sometimes I couldn't see it, I was so caught up in the emotions and passions myself. I needed the gentle hand of my wonderful editor to help me tone things down in places.

What do you love most about writing?
That it is a personal, positive, spiritual experience. I am not a religious person, but like many people who can't turn to existing belief systems or rituals for spiritual comfort, I am searching for it elsewhere: for an inner peace and contentment that makes existence meaningful. Writing is as close as I've ever come to finding that. It takes me out of my mundane self and puts me in touch with an undefinable creative force that exists both within and without.

The moments I love the most are when I'm laboring like mad over a sentence, a paragraph, concentrating so hard everything around me disappears, and then I sit back, read what I've written and think to myself, Who the hell wrote that? I know full well that I did, two seconds before, but the me who wrote those words is not the same me reading them. It's a wonderful feeling to realize there is more to me than even I know.

On a more down to earth level, I love that it's difficult. I love the challenge, and the belief in myself that I can rise to it, and I love when something comes together like nuclear fusion in my head and I'm off and running. Until I fall into the next ditch and lie there bitching and moaning about how I can't do this. Or when I realize I've forgotten to make dinner because the work is going so well that me and my sense of time have parted company.

I think we all need to feel that we've created something from our lives that gives evidence of our having been here. For me, it's turned out to be sharing what I know through my writing.

Chapter One

In a house in the woods on the outskirts of a small town seventy miles northwest of New York City, Danny Malloy wakes with the dawn. There was a time when he woke gently, rising through the layers of his own soft darkness until his consciousness emerged, whole and round and perched on the radiant horizon of his day. Now he wakes rudely, abruptly, in a recurring state of shock, tangled in his bedcovers. There was a time when he slept without moving, her hand always somewhere on him, stilling any urge to restlessness or disquiet. Now disquiet takes possession of him in those dark hours. There is too much space in his bed and he thrashes in his sleep, blindly seeking what is missing.

It is the end of June and dawn comes early. In the deep shade along the north wall of the house, purple lilacs still bloom. Their sweet perfume floats in the air. The birds are busy, singing and darting to and fro. Bluebirds, orioles, cardinals, finches, jays, nuthatches, thrushes, wrens, catbirds, mockingbirds, hummingbirds. They take turns making hungry strikes at the feeders Danny has spaced throughout the clearing between the back of the house and the woods. Bumblebees drone through the flower-beds, nuzzling into the kaleidoscope of color, coating their little legs and proboscises with sticky pollen. From beyond the edge of the woods comes the sound of the creek. Its clear water rushes over hindering formations of stone and shale. In most years the creek is shallow and serene along the stretch that flows behind Danny's house, but this year it is swollen almost beyond its wide and curving banks from the melt of a winter now famous for its endless snow storms and an early spring full of rain.

Danny frees his limbs and pushes the sheets off him. His eyes linger on the willowy shadows above his head as pale gold light crawls over his face. He turns his head and looks across the empty expanse of bed until his eyes come to rest on her night table. They flutter shut and he turns his head in the other direction. But that is no better, maybe worse, because when he opens them again he is looking into the bathroom doorway. He sits up, puts his feet on the warm wood floor, his hands by his sides on the mattress. The night table is at his back now. A simple cherrywood table with a single drawer. Soon he will have to open that drawer and deal with what's in it; his long reprieve is nearly over. He made a promise and he will keep it, as he keeps all his promises.

He found the book, nearly a year ago, in a box secreted at the back of her closet. It was a lidded box of burled maple wood that he'd made for her twenty-third birthday. There was only the one thing in it: a medium-sized book with sheets of thick, handmade paper. His name stenciled on the embossed ruby-colored leather cover in bold strokes of indelible silver ink. Her cherished Dupont pen secure in a leather loop at its edge. He had never seen it before. He knew he shouldn't open it, shouldn't look at what was written on the vellum pages. It was far too soon and his pain was too great. He knew there was a chance that whatever was left unshattered inside him would not be enough to hold him together. But at that time he didn't want to be held together. He wanted to dissolve, to vanish into the black cave of his pain. And so he opened it, and he read.

I was ten years old the first time I saw Danny Malloy. He was eighteen. It was toward the end of that year when I was friends with Linda Tompkins. She and I met at Miss Ruth's Dance Academy in Middletown in the fall, two star-struck, dreaming ballerinas, twirling and leaping better than anyone else in our class. Linda and I saw each other three times a week and were inseparable during the ten-minute interludes before and after class, while we dressed and undressed in the moldy locker room. After that day I knew that Linda had come into my life to lead me to Danny.

It was a Wednesday in the middle of June. Class was over and Linda and I were on the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up and taken home. We stood in the sun in our pink tights and black leotards, little black ballet skirts wrapped around our waists, overstuffed dance bags at our feet. We felt so grown-up and important. When Linda's sister Carol arrived, two people got out of her car. Carol and a boy. I knew he must be the boy Carol was dating. Linda had told me about him, rolled her eyes and sniffed when she said that Carol was crazy about him, that she was doing it with him, that she wrote Carol Malloy over and over in decorative columns down the margins of the pages of her school notebooks. We giggled about it; ten years old, we were so clueless. Neither of us knew what it meant to be crazy about a boy.

He was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the shortened cuffs turned back high on his upper arms. He might have been chiseled from a block of marble, that's how hard and strong he looked. The spring sun had already darkened his fair skin to a light nutty brown and streaked his sandy hair with golden lights. Carol said, And this is Linda's friend, Tara. She's a terrific little dancer. Danny turned to smile at me and that's when I saw his blue eyes. I couldn't breathe. In the space of one heartbeat I fell in love. I wasn't a little girl anymore, even though I still looked like one, staring up at him mute and trembling. His smile broadened and a dimple appeared in his right cheek. He chucked me lightly under the chin, said, Hi Tara. I'll have to come to one of your recitals sometime. He kept smiling down at me until he'd pulled a little upward twitch from my frozen lips, a blink from my wide-open lids.

Late that night, awake in my room long after my parents had gone to sleep, I turned on my little flashlight and opened my diary to a clean page. I wrote our two names one under the other. I crossed out all the letters our names had in common and then I counted off the letters that were left. Not with numbers. With a repeating litany of possible fates: Love, Marriage, Friendship, Hate, Love, Marriage, Friendship, Hate. And I put the results next to our names:

It came out exactly as I knew it would. It didn't matter that I hadn't understood anything before that afternoon. It didn't matter that I would remain a little girl to him for such a long time after. When the time was right, I would come and find him.

He closed the book and thrust it from him with a violent jerk of his hand. An automatic motion that originated somewhere in the middle of his chest. He sat on the bed gasping, then stag-gered into the bathroom and tried in vain to rid himself of the small breakfast he had eaten an hour earlier. When finally his gorge settled and he was able to breathe normally, he found a large padded envelope and put the book inside. Then he put the envelope in the drawer of her table. He closed the drawer and promised her that in eleven months he would open it again and read every word. On the anniversary of the day she died.

There is no point in trying to go back to sleep, the day is already calling to him. Danny stands up and stretches his arms slowly and hugely over his head. He can get a lot done in these quiet early hours. Still, he takes the time to make the bed, smoothing the sheets and tucking them under the mattress at the foot where his tossing has wrestled them loose. He fluffs his pillow. He pads across the room to his dresser, opens the top drawer, and exclaims, "Oh shit," with a small, mournful laugh. He is out of clean underwear and he forgot to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer last night. It's been nearly a year but he can't seem to get it all under control. He sleeps naked, no matter the season, and so his jeans go on over his bare ass. He discovers that it's actually comfortable. He doesn't bother with shoes or a shirt.

As he crosses the threshold of the bedroom and no ghostly words follow him into the hallway, a faint sigh escapes him and he thinks that today will be a decent day. He peers into the open door of the first room down the hall. Caleb is a small mound under the covers in the middle of his bed; one exposed bare white foot dangles over the edge of the mattress. Danny takes the little wooden hammer he carved from where it hangs on the doorknob and moves it to the hook set in the middle of Caleb's door.

It's a signal they devised months ago, so that if Caleb awoke and Danny wasn't in the house, the boy would know to look for him in the studio. Danny goes into the sun-bright kitchen and puts up coffee. He goes into the mudroom where the washer and dryer are and transfers the damp ball of clothing.

When the words follow him he can't think clearly about any-thing, he can only feel, and what he feels at those times is her; she is a fog that surrounds him. When they leave him alone, when she releases him, he is able to recapture his own memories. He is convinced that he must hold on to them or he will never be able to separate himself from her. If what he remembers of their coming together is forever melded to the adoration she gifted him in her every word and act he will remain as possessed by her dim shade as he was by her brilliant substance.

As he listens to the gurgle and drip of the coffeemaker and watches the glass pot slowly fill with liquid, his mind wanders back seventeen years, to that day in June and the time that followed.

It was a hot beginning to what turned out to be an even hotter summer. Mid-June and already the skin on Danny's nose had peeled off twice and he had taken to smearing it with titanium dioxide cream when he was on an outdoor job. He was earning good money, working hard for Tom Gallo, the best general contractor in the area. He'd graduated high school with an undistinguished history, survived his mandatory education careening between As in subjects he liked and Ds in those that bored him. College was as far off his radar screen as a blip could get. Starting in first grade, his frustrated teachers held frequent meetings with Danny's gentle, affable parents in the hopes that they might help rouse their son to use his obvious intelligence more fully. John and Teresa said, Oh yes, of course, and then privately told him to do what made him happy. John was head of the janitorial staff at Stone Creek Elementary School, Teresa was a breakfast- and lunch-shift waitress at The Kitchen on the corner of Elm and Main streets. When they considered the shortcomings of their own lives, they calculated that what would give Danny the better life they wanted for him was finding the thing he loved best and being allowed to make it his life's work.

Now Danny was in the exhilarating throes of discovering that he had an innate talent and love for building and shaping things. He had a feel for wood and marble and granite and glass and their versatility and malleability. He'd been in Gallo's full-time employ only four weeks but already Tom was moving him around, letting him work on homes in various stages of completion, attaching him to different subcontractors, quietly watching to see how deep Danny's talents went. As though he were a piece of wood or marble or granite or glass, Danny was beginning to shape his own life.

Mid-June. Danny's world rotated in harmony with the universe. It would be several more months before he spun slowly away from Carol Tompkins, as he had from the two girls he'd dated before her, regretfully leaving her to cry all throughout the fall and winter. It would be more than a year before his mother, the welcoming smile at The Kitchen for twenty-five years, was diagnosed with the lung cancer that would kill her slowly and turn John and Danny into anguished custodians of her flickering life. It would be three years, after his twenty-first birthday had come and gone, after his mother had been dead four months, before his father gave him money and ordered him to go somewhere far; far enough that he could put the sadness and the smallness behind him, where he could learn his craft, where he could absorb enough of the wide world beyond Stone Creek to know that he had choices.

But none of that had happened yet. It was still mid-June and he was happy where he was. Late one afternoon he drove to Middletown, twenty minutes northwest of town, with Carol to pick up her kid sister after ballet class.

"Would you just look at the two of them," Carol said as they pulled up at the curb. "Are they not the cutest things you've ever seen? The little ballerinas."

"They are pretty damned cute," Danny obliged. He looked through the window at Linda and the other girl. Linda was quite a good little ballerina, but you couldn't tell from the way she carried herself outside class. She was just another shy, slouchy kid standing on the sidewalk, slump shouldered, fidgety, and slightly pigeon-toed, strands of mousy hair straggling across her face. In unfair contrast, the other girl was as poised, as posed, as if she were onstage. Back straight, shoulders down, chin up, gleaming mahogany-colored hair neat in its high ponytail. One small foot, still in its soft ballet slipper, pointed forward and slightly turned out, as though she were about to glide across the hot cement. "Who's the baby Maria Tallchief over there?"

"Yeah, isn't she just? That's Tara. She's a Harmony brat, lives up the ridge road. Her parents won't let her come to our house and, of course, Linda has never been invited to hers." Offense on her sister's behalf tightened Carol's voice. "Tara actually seems like a really nice kid, though. Linda loves her." She softened.

Maybe Tara was a nice kid, maybe she wasn't, it didn't matter to Danny. He didn't know her. She was just another kid growing up on the rich side of town, a different world from the one he lived in. He said hi, smiled, and looked down at her. She was a tiny, formless thing, her body all bone and her face all dark round eyes. Dark round eyes fixed on his face with a stricken look in them.

He didn't have a lot of experience with little girls, but he knew enough to want to be kind to one who looked at him with that look. So he smiled a little longer into the oval cameo of her face, said something about watching her dance and when he got a small smile from her in return, he looked away and forgot about her.

After that afternoon in June, she materialized like magic where she had no reason to be, like a word you hear one day for the first time in your life and then hear everywhere. Over the next three years he'd see her zipping by on her bike; she'd show up and linger at the construction sites where he was working, even ones miles from where she lived; he'd come upon her drinking a vanilla Coke or a strawberry milkshake at The Kitchen, where he would sometimes take his lunch break even after his mother had become too ill to keep her job. She'd appear in an aisle of the bookstore, on the sidewalk outside the hardware store, at the post office. And in the same way you might not ever say that new word although you'd become used to hearing it, Danny got used to seeing little Tara Jamison around and speaking a few words to her when he did, although he never thought of her between times.

They ran into each other on Main Street a week before he went away. Teresa was dead; John had given Danny five thousand dollars and a plane ticket to London; Tom Gallo had arranged a trial position for him with a company that restored historic buildings. Too dazed to be kind, Danny bluntly told her he was leaving for Europe and didn't know when he'd be back, then turned and left her, tearful and open-mouthed, the autumn sun glinting off the metal braces on her sweetly crooked teeth.

As soon as the coffee is done, Danny pours it into a Thermos. He brews his coffee very strong, and he adds a little half-and-half to mellow out the flavor. He balances the Thermos, a mug, a container of peach yogurt, and a spoon in his hands and he pushes aside the screen of the double-wide sliding glass doors that make up the south wall of the kitchen and that have been standing open all night. He slides the screen closed. He steps off the teak deck onto the bluestone path and crosses the gravel expanse to the square barnlike building behind the house. He unlatches the oversized wooden plank doors and swings them against the exterior wall. The opening is wide enough for him to drive his pickup truck through when he has something to load into it. He leaves these doors open as well so that Caleb can find him easily.

The pungent smells of wood dust and paint, glue, oil, and tur-pentine ride the eddies of the fast-warming air. He puts his breakfast down on a bench, strides across the painted cement floor, and opens the windows in the back to get some cross-ventilation. Now the bright aerated tingle of frothy water lightens the earthy scents. He turns and surveys the projects awaiting his attention. He anticipates with pleasure the work he'll do today. There are many things that give him pleasure. He is aware of that, and yet he knows, too, that he is stuck. Not paralyzed. He was never paralyzed. That was not a state he ever had the luxury of succumbing to. But he is stuck, and without her to help him he doesn't know how to become unstuck. It's starting to feel like another pleasure --- living stuck --- but no one has to tell him that that's not a good thing.

He fills his mug with hot coffee and sips it as he walks slowly around the interior of his workspace. Soon, the caffeine kicks in, his pace quickens, and his brain comes to full attention. He makes his choice from the many possibilities and goes to work.