If the Ice Had Held (SFWP Literary Awards) - Softcover

Fox, Wendy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1939650917 ISBN 13: 9781939650917

Verlag: Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Melanie Henderson's life is a lie. The scandal of her birth and the identity of her true parents is kept from her family's small, conservative Colorado town. Not even she knows the truth: that her birth mother was just 14 and unmarried to her father, a local boy who drowned when he tried to take a shortcut across an icy river. Thirty-five years later, in Denver, Melanie dabbles in affairs with married men while clinging to a corporate job that gives her life order even as her tenuous relationships fall apart. She still hasn’t learned that the woman who raised her is actually her aunt—or that her birth mother visits her almost every day. This fiercely-guarded secret bonds the two most important women in her life, who hatched a plan to trade places and give Melanie a life unmarred by shame. Yet, as a forest fire rages through the Rocky Mountains and a car accident shakes the family, Melanie finds herself at the center of an unraveling tangle of tragedy and heartbreak. If the Ice Had Held speaks with a natural lyricism, and presents a cast of characters who quietly struggle through complicated lives.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wendy J. Fox is the author of The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories and The Pull of It. She received her MFA from Eastern Washington University, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in many literary reviews, websites, and blogs.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

If the Ice Had Held

By Wendy J. Fox

SFWP

Copyright © 2019 Wendy J. Fox
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-939650-91-7

Contents

Chapter One Kathleen Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Two Melanie Spring, 2007, 
Chapter Three Irene Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Four Melanie Spring, 2007, 
Chapter Five Kathleen Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Six Melanie Spring, 2007, 
Chapter Seven Brian Summer, 2001, 
Chapter Eight Irene Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Nine Melanie Spring, 2007, 
Chapter Ten Brian Summer, 2001, 
Chapter Eleven Kathleen Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Twelve Melanie Fall, 1986, 
Chapter Thirteen Irene Summer, 1974, 
Chapter Fourteen Melanie Summer, 1987, 
Chapter Fifteen Jenny Fall, 2005, 
Chapter Sixteen Irene Summer, 2007, 
Chapter Seventeen Melanie Summer, 2007, 
Chapter Eighteen Jenny Winter, 2005, 
Chapter Nineteen Kathleen Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Twenty Melanie Summer, 2007, 
Chapter Twenty-One Lucy Estelle Summer, 1970, 
Chapter Twenty-Two Melanie Summer, 1988, 
Chapter Twenty-Three Lucy Estelle Fall, 1970, 
Chapter Twenty-Four Melanie Fall, 1988, 
Chapter Twenty-Five Simon Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Twenty-Six Melanie Spring, 2007, 
Chapter Twenty-Seven Jenny Winter, 2005, 
Chapter Twenty-Eight Melanie Winter, 2007, 
Chapter Twenty-Nine Irene Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Thirty Melanie Summer, 1988, 
Chapter Thirty-One Brian Spring, 2007, 
Chapter Thirty-Two Melanie Summer, 2007, 
Chapter Thirty-Three Irene Winter, 1974, 
Chapter Thirty-Four Melanie Summer, 2007, 
Chapter Thirty-Five Jenny Fall, 1988, 
Chapter Thirty-Six Melanie Summer, 2007, 
Chapter Thirty-Seven Kathleen Summer, 1975, 

CHAPTER 1

Kathleen Winter, 1974

Kathleen wondered why, if half the human body was really made of water, how water could be so dangerous. Her brother Sammy had split the ice of the river trying to cross, and he floated to the shore — found by a townie cop before he was even missed.

She didn't understand, if he wasn't sunk, why the river couldn't lift him, glide him to the banks until his toes touched gravel and he put his legs down and walked back into the night. Glistening with cold, yes, lips blue, yes, skin brittle to the touch, clothes sopping and the hem of his jeans just starting to freeze, but still with breath, heat from his lungs condensing the air around him.

Instead, the officer heaved him from the water in the dark of the winter evening, Sammy's teenaged body sharp with ice.

CHAPTER 2

Melanie Spring, 2007

The software company in Denver where Melanie worked was in the majority of how start-ups ran — less glamorous than the swanky dot-coms of Silicon Valley, with their organic catering menus, on-site yoga, and complimentary Rolfing massage coupons; and more high-acid paper files sweltering under the heat of a hundred laptops, payroll cobbled out of questionable revenue recognition processes, and strings of code written under the damp pressure of a hangover. Their space was not sky-high and bathed in clean, filtered light, but rather it occupied the ground-floor wing of a crumbling office park where the air-conditioning was troubling and unreliable.

All through her twenties Melanie had bounced back and forth between jobs, and then finally, on the eve of her third decade, she landed this one. Through the issue of a company phone and a five-page document explaining how the 401(k) vested, she transformed into her idea of an adult and had stayed tethered to the company since then. The job gave her enough money to secure and pay a mortgage on a small condo close to downtown, to help her mother, Kathleen, out once in a while, and it gave her enough order to dampen the feeling of spinning she'd always had, even if only for moments.

Since she worked in tech, the model was acquisition, and she was not naîve to this. The model meant that the founders and a few of the earliest employees would cash out, and the rest of them would stay in the office, typing toward a different destiny — same keyboards, same products, just new letterhead that sat in the same place as the old letterhead, in a crumpled box under the printer. Still, when it actually happened, she had no idea the company had been for sale until she was asked to proofread the press release. Like an iffy check, it was postdated by several weeks and gave her a queasy feeling.

"Are there going to be layoffs?" she had asked her boss. She was in a small department where she did marketing and market analysis. She was hired without any training back when the company was not profitable; they'd taken a chance on her, so she felt a kind of loyalty. Still, she had read enough to know how acquisitions went. A team from corporate would make people redundant, and then the rest of the employees would plow through, taking on more and more work and living in terror of their cable bill.

Her boss told her not to talk about it. Her boss told her not to make any stock purchases of the publicly traded parent.

"You could be considered an insider," her boss had said and raised her eyebrow to a dangerous slope, like they were talking about a real tip, a life-changer.

Melanie did not think their little company being absorbed into a conglomerate would make even a blip in the markets, but she swore to secrecy anyway.

Later, when she was not let go and she told her new co-workers at headquarters in Chicago that she had to look them up, they were shocked. We are on the Fortune 500, they had said. Right, she had said, there are five hundred of those? She wondered if people who had gone to business school memorized this list, like the state capitals or the names of the saints.

CHAPTER 3

Irene Winter, 1974

Irene wasn't sure if she should go to the funeral, but she also couldn't stay away — she thought that was just like Sammy, pulling at her even after he was gone. It was hard to remain contained. The flowers, the handful of people sweating in their formal clothes that were too warm for the church with the heat cranking, the way there was so much silence because the pastor, or the minister, or whoever he was, didn't know Sammy, so he just did the usual passages, the ashes and such, and no one from the family got up to speak.

The only other funeral she had been to was her aunt's and uncle's, when they were in a car accident with a tractor-trailer carrying crates of chickens. They hadn't even been the vehicle directly involved, they'd only swerved to avoid the wreckage on the highway. She had been very young, but she remembered that after that, she didn't see her older cousin, Lucy Estelle, as much anymore. At the service, her father, her rigid and snapping father, was like a boy. She had been only ten, but she knew what it meant to see him cry for the first time. It wasn't even really a funeral, just a memorial at the VFW, but she saw her father bare then, raw from sobbing and from having drunk whiskey all day, and then from sobbing some more. In front of the people who had come to pay their respects to the man and the woman who had taken their last breaths in a crumple of iron while the down from the spilt chickens clung to them like frost, her father had opened. Her father had told the story of him and his brother as young enlisted men, briefly, and then he moved backward — two boys on a farm at the end of a dirt road and how they were so lucky. Your closest sibling is your first friend, he had said, and her father and his brother had stayed that way, the first person to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Santa Fe Writer's Project
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1939650917
• ISBN 13: 9781939650917
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 260
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland