Goodbye, Earl: A Bad Girl Creek Novel (Bad Girl Creek Novels) - Softcover

Mapson, Jo-Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743224647 ISBN 13: 9780743224642

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2005

Synopsis

Five challenging years have passed in the lives of the ladies of Bad Girl Creek. Beryl, Nance, Ness, and Phoebe have experienced their share of hardship and heartache but also much love and happiness.
Beryl now lives with Earl in Alaska, where the fissures in their relationship have started to spread. But then Earl disappears one wintry night. Nance, on the heels of a string of devastating miscarriages, has been advised to stop trying for a baby. Phoebe finds herself overwhelmed by her five-year-old daughter, Sally, and an enigmatic Southern charmer named Andrew. And Ness tenderly nurses David Snow as he gradually succumbs to AIDS. The farm's successes have brought profits, but when a nursery opens across the road, the bar is set higher yet again.
Life rolls on, though, and in the midst of myriad misfortunes come explosive surprises. The old friends are challenged to reunite once again, to rediscover with fresh eyes the powerful words in Aunt Sadie's journal: Live life to the fullest. Love as often as you can. Regret nothing. Eat hearty. Laugh often. Plant flowers. And don't forget to dance.

About this title

About the Author:

Jo-Ann Mapson is the author of eight novels. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at the University of Alaska, and lives with her husband and four dogs in Anchorage, Alaska, where she is at work on a new novel. Visit her at www.joannmapson.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1: Peter Jennings and the Bear

That September, Anchorage had more moods than a menopausal woman. The sun shone one day and disappeared the next. The leaves began to turn russet and gold, but instead of falling hung on to branches, unwilling to let go. When the first frost came, and the last of the columbines shriveled, people sighed with relief at the return of what seemed like normal autumn weather. Then, a week later, it was warm again, and pansies close to the earth shamelessly opened their petals to take in the shine. Perhaps most troubling of this out-of-season business was the bears. By the end of the month they were usually bedded down for the winter, and stayed that way until spring. This year, however, bears ventured out long past their usual hibernation dates. Programmed to fill their bellies in preparation for sleep, they got into trash, foraging like ravens, and were seen taking dog food from dishes left out for retired huskies. The newspaper's gardening column warned bird lovers like Beryl Reilly to hold off filling feeders with thistle and sunflower seeds for the chickadees for fear of attracting ursine visitors. A bear encounter was the last thing Beryl wanted. Life was hard enough already.

She sat on the leather living room couch with her journal in her lap. It was a small book, its cover a map of the world. For the last five years she had marked in red pen every place she and Earl had traveled. The western United States, their slow drive through the South and up to New York and Canada, and then beyond the Atlantic, where the line stopped, and they'd flown to Europe. Earl wasn't the "see the British Isles tour" kind of traveler. Despite his casual clothes and fondness for diners, he flew first class wherever he went. He knew cutting-edge places to eat, where to shop for French jeans, and most of all, where to listen to the best live music to be found. He had friends in far-flung places, places he often traveled to on a moment's notice. But since the middle of summer, when he'd announced that he wanted to stay home for a while, Earl had spent most of his time in the basement, which he'd converted to a music studio.

Beryl uncapped her pen and wrote down exactly what she was thinking:

Earl's going to leave me. He thinks I don't know, but a woman can tell. When I walk into the kitchen and he's reading the paper, he tucks the sports section under his arm and heads downstairs to the studio. A shrink would call that "cave time," and advise me to "take care of my needs myself," but a shrink doesn't live with Earl, I do. He spends more time down there with the guitars and recording equipment than he does with me. Clear through the kitchen floor I hear him teasing notes from his guitars and keyboards. I imagine him adjusting the knobs and plunking the strings with the tenderness and attention he used to shower on me. With the flick of a switch he can loop a chord progression into a never-ending spiral, infuse an electronic drumbeat without a drummer within a hundred miles. Just the other day I heard the chugging sound of a locomotive passing underneath me sounding so real I ran to the window to look for a runaway train.

An extra inch separates us in bed. My lover, who has always turned to me in his sleep, now sleeps on his left side, turned away. When I ask, "Do you want spaghetti for dinner," he looks at me as if I've asked him to account for every single day of his life. No matter what I say, it puts him on edge.

Okay, so I've skipped a few periods. Maybe I am in menopause, the practical joke nature sics on woman so fiercely we wish our cramps and embarrassing accidents and water weight back again. Does he think I'm happy about hot flashes, mood swings, and my faltering libido? And lately I admit I cry at television commercials showing a tender family moment, and the one-legged chickadee hopping around our deck hoping for some crumbs tears my heart as if it's made of tissue paper, but is that necessarily a bad thing? I've been around the block. I know that in a man's world problems exist to be solved. What if I don't know what the problem is? "Just let me be sad," I say, and off he goes, alone, to the studio, to the bookstore, or to hike away from me, and I'm afraid he's never coming back. Yet sometimes we have sweet reunions. He whispers in my ear as he undresses me, and I feel the very pores of my skin open to take him in. And I want to say it doesn't matter, but it does, because I know Earl's going to leave me.

Five years back, when Earl had bought her the house, Beryl had imagined growing old there, the two of them, their life worn to softness by the years they'd weathered. Bohemian Waxwing, the oddly constructed house, was an Anchorage landmark high on the Hillside with its curving roads and occasional seventy-five-miles-per-hour winds. The builder had been a sculptor, married to a woman who was a serious bird-watcher. He'd set down his chisels to design a house that embodied his beloved's favorite bird. The roofline made up the arch of the bird's spine and connected two window-filled wings. To be sure, it was an unconventional dwelling, but the bank of windows struck Beryl as particularly illogical, since a week didn't go by without her hearing a fatal thump and finding a cooling feathered body lying on the deck. The house's story had its dark side as well. When the artist's wife developed a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer and died, the husband left town, and for years the house sat empty. Apparently nobody wanted to take a chance on hand-hewn beams if they came with the specter of love cut short.

But after walking through the empty rooms, Beryl told Earl she didn't believe in curses. She'd never thought she'd own a home, but she began to warm to the idea of decorating with earth tones and soft linens, making this place a reflection of the two of them. "Every house has a history," she said, "and every history holds its measure of sorrow." It was a house, for Pete's sake; Earl had put it in her name. Real estate, like lingerie, wasn't returnable.

Many nights she stood on the balcony wrapped in a blanket watching the northern lights shimmy across the evening sky. The aurora rippled and waned, varying from green to purple to -- on rare occasions -- nearly red. Supposedly, way out in the bush, if the conditions were right, you could hear it hum and whistle, but Beryl had never been that lucky. The lights almost made her believe in God again, but come daytime her confirmed distrust of the Creator of the universe came rushing back. There was too much sorrow on earth to believe that a Supreme Being would allow that kind of pain. Beryl told herself she believed in concrete details, in evolution, in matter she could touch, like the rich, dark earth, and her foul-mouthed parrot. Now that she lived where she could experience seasons, she believed in the earth all the more strongly.

Beryl studied the Alaskan landscape, the names of the mountains and glaciers -- Sleeping Lady, Denali, the Knik, and Matanuska. She memorized the names of flowers like the periwinkle blue forget-me-not, assorted columbines, and the frankly yellow butter-and-eggs. She cooked reindeer sausage and tried salmon jerky, but Earl preferred plain old meat loaf, mashed potatoes with a puddle of butter in the center, and lima beans straight from the can. When he said thank you -- like a man who after years of unwrapping ties and leather wallets finally receives the big red tool chest from Sears -- that was enough for her. They sat together at the kitchen table eating while Hester Prynne, Earl's tabby cat, peered down from atop the fridge, and Beryl's parrot Verde muttered obscenities to himself from his elaborate, toy-filled cage. She loved her life, even if her boyfriend didn't love her.

The morning she'd decided to confront Earl, he was up before she was. She washed her face, ran her fingers through her curly hair, and poked at the bags beneath her eyes, which, like unclaimed luggage, appeared to be there to stay. She heard the downstairs television switch on, and sat on the end of her bed, tying the belt of her pale pink chenille robe while gathering her nerve.

I will get through this, she told herself. It's time I took control of my life anyway. I'll learn to drive a car. Make an effort to find new friends. I'll let my emotions out instead of filing them away for that rainy day that never comes. I'll -- what was it her friend Maddy had said the last time they talked on the phone? "Fake it until you make it." A mantra for recovering alcoholics, it would work for newly single women as well.

Downstairs she stood in the kitchen and called his name. Her knees shook and she felt her stomach turn over. "Earl? Honey? We both know things can't go on like this. Can't we talk about it?"

For a long time he didn't answer. Rather than ask again she stared at the screen and watched Peter Jennings narrate in his strong, clear anchorman's voice over footage of whatever the latest world crisis was -- teenage mothers stuck in the welfare system, drug cartels financed by unwitting Americans, a war that was always brewing someplace -- oh, the specifics didn't really matter. Beryl stood at the kitchen table holding on to her elbows while Earl, on the living room couch, leaned forward concentrating on any news but hers. When he didn't answer her question, she sighed, swallowed against her nausea, and went upstairs to take her shower.

Later she could hear Earl bumping around in his studio, but she didn't go after him. She tried to work on some embroidery, but she had a headache, so she took a nap. She dreamed of her friends in California on the flower farm where she'd once lived. It was a typical, sunny autumn day, and the smell of chrysanthemums was thick in the air. Phoebe, who had inherited the farm from her aunt Sadie, was telling them all something Sadie had said about growing roses, and Beryl couldn't help but smell the soft, dusty petals even deep in her subconscious. When she woke, the September sun was waning outside her bedroom window, bathing the birches in failing light.

Downstairs the kitchen lay half in shadow. While she could have turned on any number of lights, she didn't want the scene to have sharp edges. Earl was bent over the kitchen table writing checks from one of those enormous checkbooks, four of them to a page. He paid all their bills, and every month he gave Beryl more money than she knew what to do with for "household expenses." She hardly ever spent it unless she was buying him a gift. After all this time she had a bank account well into the mid-six figures, which didn't seem quite real when she opened her statement and examined the balance. "My buddy," she said as she rubbed his shoulders, "buddy" being her term of endearment for this skinny, gray-haired virtuoso who collected signed first editions and traveled to Europe as easily as people around here drove to the Kenai Peninsula for the weekend. "Tell me what's wrong."

Earl reached up and patted her hand. "Nothing's wrong."

Beryl took a breath, let it out, and spoke before she lost her courage. "Earl, don't do this."

"Do what?"

"Retreat from me," she said. "Go all icy and distant and pull away when I go to touch you. If there's something wrong, let's talk about it. Fix it. You know I love you, right?"

He stamped the envelopes and stacked the bills in a neat pile before he answered. "Beryl, I'm as fine as anybody is these days," he said. "The economy's in the toilet, and Bush is in the White House. Ask me again in four years." He closed the checkbook and stretched his arms above his head, neatly moving away from her in the same movement. "I need to get out. Winter's coming. It makes everyone feel a little claustrophobic."

Just then Verde squawked from the front room. Beryl's severe macaw didn't appreciate being left out of any conversation, and this one was no exception. Beryl opened a cupboard to get him some peanuts. "There's still some light. We could hike Powerline Pass trail if we hurry," she said. The hike wasn't exactly challenging for someone like Earl, but it wore Beryl out. The views were stunning, but unless you were looking inside a Wal-Mart, gorgeous scenery pretty much set the standard for south central Alaska.

The set of Earl's shoulders was stiff. Maybe this was all about impending winter. Maybe she was, as her stepmother used to say, "borrowing trouble." But deep down she felt sure he was trying to figure out how to leave -- how a man could do that after promising a woman "forever." It gutted her legs, but she took a breath and forged ahead. "Look. I can tell you want to leave, and not just for a little while. So let's get it out in the open. Be grateful we had five years."

He stared at her, measuring her words.

"This isn't a trick," she said. "I'm sad, but I won't fall apart. Why don't you go take your hike? I'll stay here and make some bread. That rye you like. And soup. When you get home, we'll work this out like adults."

Earl smiled in such plain relief that Beryl fell for him all over again -- the shy, reluctant grin, the slightly overlapping front teeth, and the crinkly lines near his eyes that smoothed out when they made love. "Are you sure?" he asked.

Sure? About dismantling her life? Well, it wouldn't be the first time she'd done it. "Why would I lie to you?"

"No reason. Okay, then. I think I will go. On the hike."

As if she'd signed his permission slip, Earl was out the door in twenty minutes. No perfunctory goodbye kiss, just him grabbing his daypack and jacket and a terse "See you later." Beryl glimpsed a wave of the hand with the callused fingertips she loved to feel travel across her skin -- though she hadn't in quite some time, and now she was going to have to say goodbye to all that. He'd return less burdened. They'd eat dinner and push their plates aside and open their mouths and behave like civilized people. You love that couch, so you keep it. I know how important your books are to you, so I'll help you pack them up so they won't get damaged, when all she wanted was to sidle up close, unbutton the top of his Henley and run her hands over his chest until he got the idea that using bodies instead of words was a much better form of communication -- and medicine to heal most rifts.

Instead she put on her winter jacket and gloves and set out for her own walk. A spattering of rain, typical of the autumn season, darkened the tarmac. Soon, enough moisture would collect in the graveled places and turn to frost. They lived too far up the Hillside to have streetlights, but it was still a fairly spendy neighborhood, complete with a homeowner's association she continually worried would discover her past felony conviction and boot her out as undesirable. Beryl tried to imagine who lived in the houses on the acre-plus lots. Some were styled in a postmodern box shape, with paned windows like staring eyes. Others were massive log-home forts, and when Beryl looked at them she pictured entire forests giving their lives to become pretty lumber. Rarely on her walks did she encounter a neighbor. Oh, sometimes a dog walker would give her a brief nod, but nob...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0743224647
• ISBN 13: 9780743224642
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384