Welcome Home, Caroline Kline - Softcover

Preiss, Courtney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593715411 ISBN 13: 9780593715413

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A debut novel sparkling with wit and insight about a young woman whose reluctant return to her Jersey Shore hometown gives her the second chance she didn’t know she needed.

Caroline Kline isn't ready to strike out.

In New York City, newly single Caroline is stumbling her way through the recent implosion of her life. After a surprise breakup leaves her with no job, no apartment, and no backup plan, she’s unsure of what to do next. That is, until Caroline’s father, Leo, injures himself in a bad fall and asks her to move home to the Jersey Shore suburb she’d always been desperate to escape. But Leo doesn’t want his daughter to be his caretaker; he needs her to replace him as third baseman in his local men’s softball league. This isn’t just any season, Leo claims. This is the year they have a real shot at the World Series, the pride and joy of Glen Brook, New Jersey.

Caroline agrees to move home, concerned that Leo is hiding a more serious health condition than he’s willing to admit. As the first female player in a league full of old-school men, she’s up against more than a few challenges. And when a night gone wrong lands her in the path of her hometown crush—and first love—Caroline struggles to reconcile the life she thought she’d have with the life she might actually want.

Sharply observed and full of humor and heart, Welcome Home, Caroline Kline is a touching tribute to the many unconventional paths that victory, and recovery, can take.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Courtney Preiss was born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey off the same Highway 9 Bruce Springsteen sings about on "Born to Run." She graduated from Emerson College with a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She lives in Asbury Park, NJ with her husband and their rescue dog, Barry. Welcome Home, Caroline Kline is her first novel.

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1

When I got the call to come home to the Jersey Shore suburb Springsteen's always singing about, I was in the back of an Uber zipping across the Williamsburg Bridge with a stranger's hand down my pants. I vaguely remembered the guy's name being Ross, but I wasn't sure. In my attempt to ignore the incoming call, I accidentally answered it.

"Caroline, it's your father," my stepmother, Claudia, said, her voice steeped in melodrama, as if she were being ushered out of a failed soap opera audition. "We're at Shore Hospital. He told me to get you on the horn."

"Oh, God," I breathed into the phone. My anonymous suitor had his face buried so deep in my neck, he couldn't tell that I was in distress. He took the noise as a command to keep digging into me.

"He had a bad fall," Claudia continued, a different level of intensity affecting every line she delivered. In her purebred Ronkonkoma accent, she sounded like she was reciting a monologue about Humpty Dumpty. "About an hour ago. He flew down a whole set of stairs to the basement and landed in this horrible position. He just got out of the MRI . . ." She started to trail off. "We're waiting for results."

My heart raced. I needed to unlatch from my paramour. I peeled Ross off me, my neck and his hand both slick with anticipation. He was disoriented, still not understanding that I was on the phone and that the course of the night was being rerouted with every passing word. I shifted into an upright position, crossed one leg over the other, pointed to the black brick at my ear, and held a single finger to my mouth. He turned away from me and rested his head against the window.

"What do they think it is?" I murmured, chewing on a cuticle and bracing myself. Now I was the one affecting a phone persona. The character I chose was concerned daughter who did not drink three filthy gin martinis and call it dinner "because of the olives."

"Broken wrist, a couple of broken ribs. But they needed to check for internal bleeding and look at his ACL and his meniscus . . ." She dropped down to a whisper and got weepy. "And his . . . vertebrates." She started crying. I asked her to hand the phone to my father. She shuffled and muttered, "Leo, take this."

"Hello?" he said, his voice warm and familiar, albeit weak. I recognized then how much my chest had tightened, loosening only once he spoke.

"Sir," I said into the phone, "I'm so sorry to be the one to tell you this, but it says here on your chart you've got . . . vertebrates."

He laughed, and a racking cough chased the sound up his throat. "Lousy fuckin' spinal column," he muttered. "Now I'll never be a jellyfish."

"Or a Republican," I added. I glanced over at Ross, who discreetly sucked on a vape pen as he watched the city lights streak by out the window.

"Caro," my father said, and I could hear the starshine fading from his voice. It sobered me up. "You know I never want to be the one to ask, but it'd mean a lot if you came home."

The threat of tears stung my sinuses and plugged up my throat. My father always wore his endurance and immunity as badges of honor. Never took a sick day, never broke any bones. I was almost certain he'd never even had a cavity. Before I could answer, Claudia took the phone back. "The doctor's here now," she whispered. "I'll text with any news. Let me know which train you'll be on. I'll pick you up from the station in the morning."

A shuffle, a click. The flashy patina of the city went by in a smear outside my window. We were in the part of Brooklyn they'd turned into Disneyland-no more sugar factories and textile mills. A slice of pizza cost seven dollars. A single delicate earring from the boutique jeweler: $150. A one-bedroom apartment: $3,500 a month.

The dejected man sitting next to me in the Uber lived here. Earlier, I'd been eager enough to cross a bridge for Ross and see where the night led, but now I did not want to go upstairs with him and play pretend. I did not want to find out he was one of three roommates living in a two-bedroom. I did not want to wrap my panties around my wrist like a scrunchie to save myself the agony of feeling around for them in the postcoital dark, the next Uber driver waiting for me downstairs, messaging me, I'm here. Miss. Are you coming? while my heart searched for its natural rhythm.

But I also did not want to send him away forever, I decided then, examining his silhouette in the intermittent Bedford Avenue lamplight. He was an astute enough kisser to make me wonder what other skills he might possess. I wasn't ready to sacrifice the investment I'd made that night and send him to the island of lost Hinge dates. The old sunk cost conundrum. I'd have to put a pin in the family trauma if I wanted to save Ross for a rainy day.

"I can't come up tonight," I said, scooting over to recoup his affections, sliding a well-manicured hand over his black-denim-clad thigh. "But not for lack of wanting to."

"You came all the way out here just to go back downtown?" he asked, gentle but incredulous. He blew a puff of nicotine vapor down the sleeve of his leather jacket. A hint of mint haunted the air between us. His face showed as much concern as four whiskeys on ice would allow. Ross looked like a young Alex Rodriguez, when he was just the rookie shortstop from my childhood whom I'd beg my dad to take me to see whenever the Mariners were in town. I pressed my lips to his jawline.

"Look, I'm not thrilled about it either. And this driver is going to be even less thrilled that I've taken up temporary residence in the back of his Impala. But it's a family emergency. I swear I wouldn't pull this shit if it wasn't serious. Scout's honor." I flashed him a double peace sign, like Richard Nixon with a mile of carefully displayed cleavage. My head buzzed as the martini fog receded, leaving me in a muzzy, in-between state of inebriation. Ross stayed quiet.

By the time the driver pulled up in front of his building, I'd kissed my way across his neck and crawled into his lap. Not bad, I thought, looking out the window and up at the facade. One of those modern structures with matte black banisters and semi-flush globe light fixtures. Inside I'd bet there were stainless steel appliances in every kitchen and a wheezing French bulldog on every floor.

"I think you should still come up. Make the trip worth it," he whispered, then stuck his tongue in my ear. I couldn't bring myself to recount the details of the phone call. Confiding in this stranger that I was legitimately worried about my dad felt too intimate and a little juvenile. I didn't want his pity.

"Listen, Ross," I said, pulling away. "Tonight's just not my night, but I really do want to see you again. And I'm not saying it in the obligatory you-just-gave-me-a-pelvic-exam-in-the-back-of-a-cab kind of way. I'm saying it because I just got out of a long-term relationship where no one spoke up about what they really wanted, and I think it's important for me-for the universe-that I tell you what I want."

Pivoting to the subject of Ben, my ex, was easier than that of my dad because I was still trying hard to tamp down the too-recent memory of him while I was out with other men. Both the parts of Ben that repulsed me (the relentless veneer, the cabal of New York City private school friends he never outgrew, the foggy intoxication-fueled fighting) and the good-on-paper parts that made me sure no one I could find on an app would ever measure up (the prospect of marrying into a family of Jewish doctors, the summer weekends in East Hampton, the sex that somehow stayed great and perhaps even got better when things between us were bad).

I searched Ross's expression for confirmation, but he just stared at me. Confusion masquerading as intensity, or perhaps the other way around. I clasped his tired face in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593715411
• ISBN 13: 9780593715413
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar