An Excerpt

Something all the books tell you not to do: post an excerpt of your own book.  Not one to follow the rules.  I've been working on this so long, I need to let part of it out.  In this excerpt, a friend of the main character explains what happened the night her brother, mother, and father died.  

“We’d just come back from ice-skating.  We had a great time.  Like a normal family, not like a poor family from Nebraska who’d run away from a drunken asshole.   A Hallmark card that day.  Keith was really good on the ice, he was always really coordinated.  Mom looked like she had some sort of physical disability while she tried to skate and we kept laughing at her.   But Keith kept trying to help her, which was a disaster.  It was like trying to save someone who’s drowning: how they both die.  He told us what you said.  About whole families disappearing under the ice.  We laughed about that a lot.  We imagined them living under the ice, frozen.  They lived underground in frozen houses.  They watched a frozen T.V. and ate frozen T.V. dinners.  We kept telling each other we were going to disappear under the ice forever, just like you worried about. 

“On the way home we stopped to get a box of hot chocolate and marshmallows.  Keith wanted the little ones and I wanted the big ones and Mom decided to get me the big ones and I wish he would’ve gotten what he wanted.  That’s a lot of what I think about.  I’m glad Starbucks doesn’t have marshmallows because I can’t look at them anymore.

 “Everything seemed normal in front of the apartment.  Keith had been looking for my dad’s truck for the past couple of weeks; he didn’t tell me this, I could just tell.  We knew each other like that.   But as the holiday grew closer and closer, it was pretty obvious we were all on the lookout.

“I can’t say my dad was a total idiot because he parked around the side of the block, so maybe he did have a brain cell.  We were too happy and excited (and cold) for our hot chocolate to look carefully for his truck.  Mom didn’t think he had Aunt Casey’s address anyway and I think we all thought he was too dumb to figure it out.

“He did, though.  There he was.  He sat inside the apartment, in the dark, holding an oversized can of beer in one hand and a shotgun in the other.  He said, ‘Merry Fuckin’ Christmas, pack your shit, we’re leavin’.’  Keith grabbed the shovel to the fireplace and told me to go to our room.  I couldn’t move and then he yelled it in my face: ‘Go!’ It was a yell out of love, not one that my dad would do.  But it’s funny how both kinds of yells can sound the same.  I pretended to go to our room but I grabbed the biggest knife I could find in the kitchen and climbed on to the rafters of the ceiling.  I thought I’d jump on my dad if I needed to. 

“I don’t know.  Mom and Keith were telling him to leave.  Mom tried to reason with him—it was better this way, doesn’t he realize?  Keith was yelling that he was going to kill him.  Dad was drunk and grabbed Mom by the hair, pulling her neck in an awful way.  Keith struck him in the side with the shovel, and then in the arm.  I think he tried to knock the gun out of his hand.  Dad hit him across the head with his rifle.  Mom picked up the shovel Keith dropped and whacked Dad in the balls.  He crouched over in pain and Keith came at him and knocked him to the floor.  That was amazing because Keith was, like, a tenth the size of my dad. Mom grabbed the shotgun and pointed it at Dad.  But they were no match for him.  He was such a fat motherfucker.  He grabbed the gun from her in a second.  He was so pissed off and drunk, he shot them instantaneously, like a knee-jerk reaction.  No real thought.  Pow, pow.  Like he was playing a video game.   That’s when I let go of the rafters and fell on him.”

Nicole drinks the vodka like it’s water.  She lights another cigarette.  “He threw me off of him and said to get my shit, little girl, and hurry the fuck up.”

“And then he shot himself?”

“He didn’t see the knife. I stabbed him in the ass, grabbed the shotgun and killed him.” 

Nicole looks out into the water.  It shines from nearby lights.  On this late April evening, other couples pepper the rocks.  Three, four maybe.  It’s the middle of the week.  Their talk is of love, of Spring, of the future.  Or, maybe, of killing their fathers.  Since my own life was turning out the way it was, there’s virtually nothing that surprises or shocks me.  Nothing is worthy of embarrassment, despite my latent adolescence.  What might only surprise me now, is life’s occasional predictability. 

“But the crazy thing is?” she gathers her cigarette butts.  She always picks them up off the ground.  She shoves them into her pockets and empties the pockets later.  She feels bad about leaving the ashes.  “Before the police came?” She lights the last one from the pack.  She takes her time to tell me.  “I made myself the hot chocolate.  I put in three marshmallows.  The big ones.  One for each of us.”