Floating - Softcover

Troy, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671024493 ISBN 13: 9780671024499

Verlag: MTV Books, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the MTV Fiction Contest
Marking the debut of a vibrant new voice in American fiction, Floating is a poignant and sharply original novel about the fragile boundaries between desire, love, and betrayal. For most people, Whitticker, Arizona, population 641, is just a rest stop on a highway to somewhere else. But for twenty-five-year-old Ruby Pearson, there is nowhere else. With husband in jail and an eight-year-old son at home, Ruby knows what she wants what she doesn't -- and is determined to break free of a life going nowhere. When a pickup-truck cowboy named Sean rolls in off the interstate, bringing with him a world possibilities, Ruby is given her chance. Problem is, Sean's her husband's brother, her son's uncle...and maybe her best shot at true love and a ticket out.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robin Troy grew up in Connecticut and graduated from Harvard University in 1996. She currently lives in Denver and is working on her second book.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One
There is only one road leading out of Whitticker, Arizona, and Ruby Robert Black Pearson was walking down it -- past the sign that reads "Population: 641," toward the rest of the world -- the afternoon her husband held up the 7-Eleven at the edge of the freeway with an unloaded pistol. The mechanics at the service station next to the 7-Eleven had kept Ruby's truck jacked up toward the ceiling for the past six days, and Ruby was tired of walking. In high school alone she had walked this three-mile stretch of road out of Whitticker more times than she could remember, promising herself each time that she would keep on going, anywhere but back. But now, years later, with a child and a husband and the resignation that she was destined to grow old in the only town she'd ever known, Ruby would just as soon have had a car, any car, to whisk her out to the edge of the freeway and back before the truth hit her, yet again, that at the end of the road she was turning around. She'd had enough of walking.
Ruby walked to the service station that afternoon like a large, lumbering animal whose long, powerful strides appear languorous and slow until you need to outrun them. The crunching of her old boots in the packed-dirt shoulder could have been the clopping of a horse to any tourist passing with his eyes closed. And Ruby would not have disputed the comparison. It was true that everyone in Whitticker was fascinated by her hugeness, her six feet and two inches, her wide hips that, like the flanks of a young horse at a run, were strong and sensual and sometimes hypnotic, not fat. She was tall enough to keep any man sitting while in her presence, but however domineering she might be, no man seated near her wouldn't rather have been sweeping her off her feet. There had never been anyone, in Whitticker, like Ruby.
She talked out loud to herself as she marched deliberately along the shoulder, throwing declarations to the sage and the cacti that all of them were drunks, good-for-nothings, lumps of burden and laziness that she didn't care if she never saw again. She tossed to the brittle clusters the highlights of a conversation she planned to have later with her husband, Carl, and as she spat down to her mute desert audience that they were bums, spineless cowards, boring, worthless, childish, skinny little boys who couldn't put their feet down for themselves or their family if it meant saving their own lives, years of disdain rose from deep within her to the prickles rising on her skin. It was an exercise that energized her -- not that she needed the rehearsal. For one thing, if Carl was half as drunk as he had been last night when she knocked him off their front porch -- threatening to bring the empty bottle down hard on his head if he didn't get out of her sight until he could muster some semblance of a man again -- he wouldn't realize he was the center of so much attention before he was face down in the dirt for the second night in a row. And even if he wasn't drunk -- if he was just there on the porch with their dog Max and a wad of chew -- it would scarcely matter how she chose her words, because Carl rarely responded anyway.
So it was simply to pass the time that Ruby practiced as she walked. The road was flat and straight, the only rise and fall coming from the jagged cadence of Ruby's voice. The 7-Eleven and the service station ahead of Ruby scarred the landscape with their slick red roofs and neon signs. She had often wished that these two buildings and their concrete platforms were better dwarfed by the high mountains beyond them, so that they might appear as inconsequential in thesprawling desert as the individual cars that threaded themselves, like colored beads along a string, down the single road out of Whitticker to this glaring, commercial plot. At least the zoning laws had protected the town from any more of that kind of building, Ruby thought to herself. At least Whitticker had that much going for it. Even if there were posts you shouldn't lean against and steps it would be better to step over, the wooden storefronts along the main street downtown had a charm that the locals no longer really saw but still took pride in, that the tourists -- and there was always a stream of tourists -- snapped eagerly with their cameras so they could remember the place where they had swigged beer from a bottle next to a real cowboy, albeit one they'd be relieved to leave behind.
Ruby and Carl used to talk about the day when they might leave. In retrospect, Ruby thought their shared enthusiasm for planning ways out of Whitticker as teenagers had probably brought them together in the first place. Or maybe it was just the conviction they shared that if they wanted to leave, they could. Ruby didn't dislike Whitticker; twenty-five years later -- years after her mother and stepfather had given up on the town themselves and left -- Ruby could still recognize the character in the listing buildings, and her own shining place among them. But what bothered her was that within those buildings no one seemed to question what lay beyond the three-mile stretch of road where their small town spilled into the rest of the world.
Carl, on the other hand, had shown some curiosity. He had moved to town with his mother when he was ten, the new fifth grader from out of state. At Eagle Watch Elementary, he was the only friend Ruby had who could talk about the house where he used to live, the craggy passes where he used to ride his horse, the back alleys in his old town where he used to sit on overturned milk crates smoking cigarettes sneaked from his father's pants pocket. Carl had seen where the highway led -- if only from a few states away -- and his curiosity, unlike Ruby's, stemmed from the places he had seen, rather than the places he had not.
In high school, Carl worked pumping gas four afternoons a week at the station in town. Between customers, he chose maps from the rack by the register and spread them out one at a time over the counter, taking in the names of towns from California to Maine, running his finger along winding routes, counting miles by his thumbnail. For Ruby's seventeenth birthday, he wrapped a map of the United States in flowered paper and gave it to her with a card. She took one look at the map's yellowed edges and threw it back at him. She wasn't interested in a freebie Carl could help himself to just because no one else had wanted it. But Carl had picked up the map and unfolded it for her, revealing a maze of red routes he had carefully drawn in, each of them punctuated by gold star stickers showing where he would take Ruby someday. "I want to see all of this with you," the card was inscribed in the same red pen.
But it wasn't the promises that had drawn Ruby to Carl so much as the energy he put into his planning. The fact that his energy was complemented by sharp cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and confidence didn't slow her attraction to him, either. However, there was something else that drew Ruby to Carl. It was what had kept them together for years, but now, more than likely, was also driving them apart. Ruby could see how people in Whitticker looked at her, how they admired her bright presence in their town. But only from Carl could she hear it. Only Carl was close enough to tell her how he felt. And Carl felt that Ruby could do anything in the world that she wanted. He told her so repeatedly, and she loved him for it. For while it was one thing for Ruby to believe she was strong and capable, it was something entirely different to be told.
The snag, though, was that Carl had grown resentful over time. In the same years Ruby matured into a young woman who believed she was invincible, Carl became more and more dependent on his identity as her other half. While he always pictured them together in the stories he spun about the future, Ruby was quicker to take his confidence...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MTV Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0671024493
• ISBN 13: 9780671024499
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande