Early Morning Riser - Softcover

Heiny, Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593082729 ISBN 13: 9780593082720

Verlag: Vintage, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Alternately bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny, a wise, bighearted novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family—from the acclaimed author of Standard Deviation, who has been called the "literary descendant of Jane Austen, sharing Austen's essentially comic world view" (NPR).   

Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome but unfortunately, he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan's old girlfriends everywhere—at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away.

While Jane may be able to come to terms with dating the world's most prolific seducer of women, she wishes she did not have to share him quite so widely. His ex-wife, Aggie, a woman with shiny hair and pale milkmaid skin, still has Duncan mow her lawn. His coworker, Jimmy, comes and goes from Duncan's apartment at the most inopportune times. Sometimes Jane wonders if a relationship can even work with three people in it—never mind four. Five if you count Aggie's eccentric husband, Gary. Not to mention all the other residents of Boyne City, who freely share with Jane their opinions of her choices.

But any notion Jane had of love and marriage changes with one terrible car crash. Soon Jane's life is permanently intertwined with Duncan's, Aggie's, and Jimmy's, and Jane knows she will never have Duncan to herself. But could it be possible that a deeper kind of happiness is right in front of Jane's eyes? Katherine Heiny's Early Morning Riser is her most astonishingly wonderful work to date.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KATHERINE HEINY is the author of Standard Deviation and Single, Carefree, Mellow. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other magazines. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and children, and is a former resident of London, The Hague, and Boyne City, Michigan.

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Jane met Duncan a month after she moved to Boyne City. She had locked herself out of her house and had had to ask a neighbor to call a locksmith. She was sitting on her front steps in the early twilight wearing her pajamas—­she taught second grade and it was Pajama Day—­when Duncan drove up in a rust-­spotted white van.

 

“Whoa,” he said when he saw her. “Exactly how long have you been waiting?”

 

He was in his early forties, with slightly shaggy auburn hair and a full moustache. His eyes were brown with amber flecks, and his features were so symmetrical that his face looked as though it could have been cut from a piece of paper folded in half. He was of medium height, medium build, wearing nothing more distinctive than jeans and a denim shirt, yet he seemed to stand out vividly, like the subject of a photo with a blurred background. To Jane he looked like the Brawny paper towel man, and no less handsome.

 

“Only about twenty minutes,” she said. She stood up and gestured at her front door. “I’m afraid you may have to drill the lock out.”

 

“Oh, I doubt that,” Duncan said. “I bet we can find another way in. Folks always think their houses are totally safe because they have a couple locks on the front door, and then they call me and it turns out they’ve been sleeping with a bedroom window open for half a year. Let’s take a walk around.”

 

They circled the house slowly. It was a pretty little one-­story house, white with black shutters. Duncan kept stopping to look in the flower beds. “It’s also possible the previous owners left a key in a false rock or some such.”

 

At the back of the house, Duncan pointed to the bathroom window. “Here’s what I’m talking about. I could pop the screen off there and climb right in if the window’s not locked.”

 

“Okay,” Jane said meekly.

 

He slid the end of a screwdriver under the edge of the screen, and it popped loose with alarming ease. Duncan caught it with one hand. “Not much crime around here,” he said to Jane, “but last year Shirlene Talbot woke up to find a man making himself a ham sandwich in her kitchen. He was pretty harmless—­turned out he was the Masseys’ houseguest and was too drunk to remember which house they lived in. Still, I’d hate for that to happen to you.”

 

He dragged Jane’s garbage can over, climbed on top of it, and pushed the window open. He ducked inside, and a minute later, he opened the front door and called out to her.

 

Jane thanked him and asked him to stay for supper. She had never spontaneously invited a man to stay for supper before but she was grateful he hadn’t charged her anything. Also, she hadn’t had a real conversation with a man since she’d moved here, unless you counted the elderly man at Glen’s Market who had asked her to help him find his car.

 

She was twenty-­six years old, tall and slender, with dark blond hair that looked good in a ponytail, and she didn’t need much makeup. That last part was fortunate because she rarely wore any. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were naturally dark despite the light color of her hair, and her pale blue eyes were almond-­shaped, with slightly hooded lids that made eyeshadow pointless and hard to apply. (This had baffled Jane in her teen years when she followed step-­by-­step eyeshadow tutorials in magazines—­wait, where was the crease of her eyelid? Why did she look exactly the same afterward?) She had a straight nose and a generous mouth. She was very pretty when she remembered to sit up straight, and pretty enough when she slouched.

 

During supper—­Jane made an omelet and a salad—­Duncan told her that he was really a woodworker and specialized in custom-­made tables and chairs, but since someone wanted one of those only every once in a while, he also did antique furniture restoration and locksmithing, and that he’d grown up in a small town in the Upper Peninsula, and that he used to be married to a real estate agent named Aggie who could not tell the difference between a smallmouth and largemouth bass. (Jane wasn’t sure if that was just some descriptive detail about Aggie or Duncan’s reason for divorcing her.)

 

“Where is Aggie now?” she asked.

 

“Where?” Duncan said. “This time of night, she’s probably home over on Alice Street, I guess.”

 

“Oh,” Jane said. “I didn’t realize she lived around here.”

 

“Yeah, nice little house. I mow her lawn still.”

 

Jane folded her napkin into smaller rectangles. “You must be very close.”

 

“I don’t know about close.” Duncan took a bite of his omelet. “We’re friendly enough, I guess, seeing as she up and left me for Gary Polnichik at State Farm, and they’ve been together almost ten years now.”

 

“Why doesn’t Gary mow the lawn?” Jane asked.

 

“He doesn’t like it, and I don’t mind,” Duncan said. “Plus, he helps me with my taxes.”

 

Duncan talked a lot. He told Jane that she should buy eggs from the farmers’ market, and that she should never order the clam chowder at Robert’s Restaurant, and that the dentist had a drinking problem but morning appointments were generally okay, and that Bradley Reed up on the corner had a tendency to watch folks with his binoculars if they left their window shades up, and that the olive burger at the Boyne River Inn couldn’t be beat, and later he said, “I’m the luckiest man in Boyne City,” as he pulled Jane’s pajama pants off while she lay back on her sofa.

 

“But Boyne City is only about two hundred people!” Jane protested.

 

Duncan looked thoughtful. “Actually, more like three thousand.”

 

“Still, you’re supposed to say in the universe,” she said.

 

“How about Northern Michigan?” Duncan ran his hands up the insides of her thighs. “Will that do? I’m the luckiest man in Northern Michigan.”

 

That was on a Friday, and neither Jane nor Duncan left the house until Monday morning, when Jane had to go to school.

    This was only Jane’s third year of teaching. You could say she was still getting the kinks out.

    During her first two years of teaching—­one in Grand Rapids, one in Battle Creek—­she had made the first day of school as fun-­filled and exciting as possible: extensive school tour, scavenger hunt, time capsule, extra recess, dance party, LEGOs, working with clay. The result had been that both Jane and her students were hollow-­eyed and slack-­jawed with fatigue by three thirty, and no one remembered where the bathroom was the next day anyway.

 

She had finally realized that although second graders were officially entering the third year of schooling (more if they’d gone to preschool), they had clearly wiped all previous school experience from their hard drives over the summer. They had to relearn everything, like stroke patients: how to find their desks, how to form a line, how to walk quietly in the hall, how to keep their hands to themselves, how to grip a pencil, how to hold...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vintage
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593082729
• ISBN 13: 9780593082720
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 317
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland