Introduction

Set in smalltown upstate New York, Lily spends a summer at Stone Creek while her powerful, workaholic husband, Paul, is home in New York City. Their once passionate marriage, has fizzled somewhat under the weight of Lily's childless sadness. While Lily is a vulnerable character, you get the sense of a quiet, penetrating power within her. One that Danny (ten years younger) rugged, sexy, outdoorsy thirty-something widower is drawn to and they form a very realistic and compassionate bond. Danny's son Caleb is swept up by Lily, too. It's well done and there are some nice moments between even the minor characters. Get tissues ready.

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Excerpt

Chapter One

In a house in the woods on the outskirts of a small town seventy miles northwest of New York City, Danny Malloy wakes with the dawn. There was a time when he woke gently, rising through the layers of his own soft darkness until his consciousness emerged, whole and round and perched on the radiant horizon of his day. Now he wakes rudely, abruptly, in a recurring state of shock, tangled in his bedcovers. There was a time when he slept without moving, her hand always somewhere on him, stilling any urge to restlessness or disquiet. Now disquiet takes possession of him in those dark hours. There is too much space in his bed and he thrashes in his sleep, blindly seeking what is missing.

It is the end of June and dawn comes early. In the deep shade along the north wall of the house, purple lilacs still bloom. Their sweet perfume floats in the air. The birds are busy, singing and darting to and fro. Bluebirds, orioles, cardinals, finches, jays, nuthatches, thrushes, wrens, catbirds, mockingbirds, humming¬birds. They take turns making hungry strikes at the feeders Dan¬ny has spaced throughout the clearing between the back of the house and the woods. Bumblebees drone through the flower-beds, nuzzling into the kaleidoscope of color, coating their little legs and proboscises with sticky pollen. From beyond the edge of the woods comes the sound of the creek. Its clear water rushes over hindering formations of stone and shale. In most years the creek is shallow and serene along the stretch that flows behind Danny's house, but this year it is swollen almost beyond its wide and curving banks from the melt of a winter now famous for its endless snow storms and an early spring full of rain.

Danny frees his limbs and pushes the sheets off him. His eyes linger on the willowy shadows above his head as pale gold light crawls over his face. He turns his head and looks across the empty expanse of bed until his eyes come to rest on her night table. They flutter shut and he turns his head in the other direction. But that is no better, maybe worse, because when he opens them again he is looking into the bathroom doorway. He sits up, puts his feet on the warm wood floor, his hands by his sides on the mattress. The night table is at his back now. A simple cherrywood table with a single drawer. Soon he will have to open that drawer and deal with what's in it; his long reprieve is nearly over. He made a promise and he will keep it, as he keeps all his promises.

He found the book, nearly a year ago, in a box secreted at the back of her closet. It was a lidded box of burled maple wood that he'd made for her twenty-third birthday. There was only the one thing in it: a medium-sized book with sheets of thick, handmade paper. His name stenciled on the embossed ruby-colored leather cover in bold strokes of indelible silver ink. Her cherished Du¬pont pen secure in a leather loop at its edge. He had never seen it before. He knew he shouldn't open it, shouldn't look at what was written on the vellum pages. It was far too soon and his pain was too great. He knew there was a chance that whatever was left unshattered inside him would not be enough to hold him together. But at that time he didn't want to be held together. He wanted to dissolve, to vanish into the black cave of his pain. And so he opened it, and he read.

I was ten years old the first time I saw Danny Malloy. He was eighteen. It was toward the end of that year when I was friends with Linda Tompkins. She and I met at Miss Ruth's Dance Academy in Middletown in the fall, two star-struck, dreaming ballerinas, twirling and leaping better than anyone else in our class. Linda and I saw each other three times a week and were inseparable during the ten-minute interludes before and after class, while we dressed and undressed in the moldy locker room. After that day I knew that Linda had come into my life to lead me to Danny.

It was a Wednesday in the middle of June. Class was over and Linda and I were on the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up and taken home. We stood in the sun in our pink tights and black leotards, little black ballet skirts wrapped around our waists, overstuffed dance bags at our feet. We felt so grown-up and important. When Linda's sister Carol arrived, two people got out of her car. Carol and a boy. I knew he must be the boy Carol was dating. Linda had told me about him, rolled her eyes and sniffed when she said that Carol was crazy about him, that she was doing it with him, that she wrote Carol Malloy over and over in decorative columns down the margins of the pages of her school notebooks. We giggled about it; ten years old, we were so clueless. Neither of us knew what it meant to be crazy about a boy.

He was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the shortened cuffs turned back high on his up¬per arms. He might have been chiseled from a block of marble, that's how hard and strong he looked. The spring sun had al¬ready darkened his fair skin to a light nutty brown and streaked his sandy hair with golden lights. Carol said, And this is Linda's friend, Tara. She's a terrific little dancer. Danny turned to smile at me and that's when I saw his blue eyes. I couldn't breathe. In the space of one heartbeat I fell in love. I wasn't a little girl any¬more, even though I still looked like one, staring up at him mute and trembling. His smile broadened and a dimple appeared in his right cheek. He chucked me lightly under the chin, said, Hi Tara. I'll have to come to one of your recitals sometime. He kept smiling down at me until he'd pulled a little upward twitch from my frozen lips, a blink from my wide-open lids.

Late that night, awake in my room long after my parents had gone to sleep, I turned on my little flashlight and opened my diary to a clean page. I wrote our two names one under the other. I crossed out all the letters our names had in common and then I counted off the letters that were left. Not with num¬bers. With a repeating litany of possible fates: Love, Marriage, Friendship, Hate, Love, Marriage, Friendship, Hate. And I put the results next to our names:

D A / N / N Y M / A / L L O / Y - M

T A / R A / J A M / I S O / N / - M

It came out exactly as I knew it would. It didn't matter that I hadn't understood anything before that afternoon. It didn't mat¬ter that I would remain a little girl to him for such a long time after. When the time was right, I would come and find him.

He closed the book and thrust it from him with a violent jerk of his hand. An automatic motion that originated somewhere in the middle of his chest. He sat on the bed gasping, then stag¬gered into the bathroom and tried in vain to rid himself of the small breakfast he had eaten an hour earlier. When finally his gorge settled and he was able to breathe normally, he found a large padded envelope and put the book inside. Then he put the envelope in the drawer of her table. He closed the drawer and promised her that in eleven months he would open it again and read every word. On the anniversary of the day she died.

There is no point in trying to go back to sleep, the day is already calling to him. Danny stands up and stretches his arms slowly and hugely over his head. He can get a lot done in these quiet early hours. Still, he takes the time to make the bed, smooth¬ing the sheets and tucking them under the mattress at the foot where his tossing has wrestled them loose. He fluffs his pillow. He pads across the room to his dresser, opens the top drawer, and exclaims, “Oh shit,” with a small, mournful laugh. He is out of clean underwear and he forgot to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer last night. It's been nearly a year but he can't seem to get it all under control. He sleeps naked, no matter the season, and so his jeans go on over his bare ass. He discovers that it's actually comfortable. He doesn't bother with shoes or a shirt.

As he crosses the threshold of the bedroom and no ghostly words follow him into the hallway, a faint sigh escapes him and he thinks that today will be a decent day. He peers into the open door of the first room down the hall. Caleb is a small mound un¬der the covers in the middle of his bed; one exposed bare white foot dangles over the edge of the mattress. Danny takes the little wooden hammer he carved from where it hangs on the door¬knob and moves it to the hook set in the middle of Caleb's door.

It's a signal they devised months ago, so that if Caleb awoke and Danny wasn't in the house, the boy would know to look for him in the studio. Danny goes into the sun-bright kitchen and puts up coffee. He goes into the mudroom where the washer and dryer are and transfers the damp ball of clothing.

When the words follow him he can't think clearly about any¬thing, he can only feel, and what he feels at those times is her; she is a fog that surrounds him. When they leave him alone, when she releases him, he is able to recapture his own memories. He is convinced that he must hold on to them or he will never be able to separate himself from her. If what he remembers of their com¬ing together is forever melded to the adoration she gifted him in her every word and act he will remain as possessed by her dim shade as he was by her brilliant substance.

As he listens to the gurgle and drip of the coffeemaker and watches the glass pot slowly fill with liquid, his mind wanders back seventeen years, to that day in June and the time that fol¬lowed. It was a hot beginning to what turned out to be an even hotter summer. Mid-June and already the skin on Danny's nose had peeled off twice and he had taken to smearing it with titanium dioxide cream when he was on an outdoor job. He was earning good money, working hard for Tom Gallo, the best general con¬tractor in the area. He'd graduated high school with an undis¬tinguished history, survived his mandatory education careening between As in subjects he liked and Ds in those that bored him. College was as far off his radar screen as a blip could get. Starting in first grade, his frustrated teachers held frequent meetings with Danny's gentle, affable parents in the hopes that they might help rouse their son to use his obvious intelligence more fully. John and Teresa said, Oh yes, of course, and then privately told him to do what made him happy. John was head of the janitorial staff at Stone Creek Elementary School, Teresa was a breakfast- and lunch-shift waitress at The Kitchen on the corner of Elm and Main streets. When they considered the shortcomings of their own lives, they calculated that what would give Danny the better life they wanted for him was finding the thing he loved best and being allowed to make it his life's work.

Now Danny was in the exhilarating throes of discovering that he had an innate talent and love for building and shaping things. He had a feel for wood and marble and granite and glass and their versatility and malleability. He'd been in Gallo's full-time employ only four weeks but already Tom was moving him around, letting him work on homes in various stages of comple¬tion, attaching him to different subcontractors, quietly watching to see how deep Danny's talents went. As though he were a piece of wood or marble or granite or glass, Danny was beginning to shape his own life.

Mid-June. Danny's world rotated in harmony with the universe. It would be several more months before he spun slowly away from Carol Tompkins, as he had from the two girls he'd dated before her, regretfully leaving her to cry all throughout the fall and winter. It would be more than a year before his mother, the welcoming smile at The Kitchen for twenty-five years, was diagnosed with the lung cancer that would kill her slowly and turn John and Danny into anguished custodians of her flickering life. It would be three years, after his twenty-first birthday had come and gone, after his mother had been dead four months, before his father gave him money and ordered him to go somewhere far; far enough that he could put the sadness and the smallness behind him, where he could learn his craft, where he could absorb enough of the wide world beyond Stone Creek to know that he had choices.

But none of that had happened yet. It was still mid-June and he was happy where he was. Late one afternoon he drove to Middletown, twenty minutes northwest of town, with Carol to pick up her kid sister after ballet class.

“Would you just look at the two of them,” Carol said as they pulled up at the curb. “Are they not the cutest things you've ever seen? The little ballerinas.”

“They are pretty damned cute,” Danny obliged. He looked through the window at Linda and the other girl. Linda was quite a good little ballerina, but you couldn't tell from the way she car¬ried herself outside class. She was just another shy, slouchy kid standing on the sidewalk, slump shouldered, fidgety, and slightly pigeon-toed, strands of mousy hair straggling across her face. In unfair contrast, the other girl was as poised, as posed, as if she were onstage. Back straight, shoulders down, chin up, gleaming mahogany-colored hair neat in its high ponytail. One small foot, still in its soft ballet slipper, pointed forward and slightly turned out, as though she were about to glide across the hot cement. “Who's the baby Maria Tallchief over there?”

“Yeah, isn't she just? That's Tara. She's a Harmony brat, lives up the ridge road. Her parents won't let her come to our house and, of course, Linda has never been invited to hers.” Offense on her sister's behalf tightened Carol's voice. “Tara actually seems like a really nice kid, though. Linda loves her.” She softened.

Maybe Tara was a nice kid, maybe she wasn't, it didn't matter to Danny. He didn't know her. She was just another kid growing up on the rich side of town, a different world from the one he lived in. He said hi, smiled, and looked down at her. She was a tiny, formless thing, her body all bone and her face all dark round eyes. Dark round eyes fixed on his face with a stricken look in them.

He didn't have a lot of experience with little girls, but he knew enough to want to be kind to one who looked at him with that look. So he smiled a little longer into the oval cameo of her face, said something about watching her dance and when he got a small smile from her in return, he looked away and forgot about her.

After that afternoon in June, she materialized like magic where she had no reason to be, like a word you hear one day for the first time in your life and then hear everywhere. Over the next three years he'd see her zipping by on her bike; she'd show up and linger at the construction sites where he was working, even ones miles from where she lived; he'd come upon her drinking a vanilla Coke or a strawberry milkshake at The Kitchen, where he would sometimes take his lunch break even after his mother had become too ill to keep her job. She'd appear in an aisle of the bookstore, on the sidewalk outside the hardware store, at the post office. And in the same way you might not ever say that new word although you'd become used to hearing it, Danny got used to seeing little Tara Jamison around and speaking a few words to her when he did, although he never thought of her between times.

They ran into each other on Main Street a week before he went away. Teresa was dead; John had given Danny five thousand dollars and a plane ticket to London; Tom Gallo had arranged a trial position for him with a company that restored historic buildings. Too dazed to be kind, Danny bluntly told her he was leaving for Europe and didn't know when he'd be back, then turned and left her, tearful and open-mouthed, the autumn sun glinting off the metal braces on her sweetly crooked teeth.

As soon as the coffee is done, Danny pours it into a Thermos. He brews his coffee very strong, and he adds a little half-and-half to mellow out the flavor. He balances the Thermos, a mug, a contain¬er of peach yogurt, and a spoon in his hands and he pushes aside the screen of the double-wide sliding glass doors that make up the south wall of the kitchen and that have been standing open all night. He slides the screen closed. He steps off the teak deck onto the bluestone path and crosses the gravel expanse to the square barnlike building behind the house. He unlatches the oversized wooden plank doors and swings them against the exterior wall. The opening is wide enough for him to drive his pickup truck through when he has something to load into it. He leaves these doors open as well so that Caleb can find him easily.

The pungent smells of wood dust and paint, glue, oil, and tur¬pentine ride the eddies of the fast-warming air. He puts his break¬fast down on a bench, strides across the painted cement floor, and opens the windows in the back to get some cross-ventilation. Now the bright aerated tingle of frothy water lightens the earthy scents. He turns and surveys the projects awaiting his attention. He antici¬pates with pleasure the work he'll do today. There are many things that give him pleasure. He is aware of that, and yet he knows, too, that he is stuck. Not paralyzed. He was never paralyzed. That was not a state he ever had the luxury of succumbing to. But he is stuck, and without her to help him he doesn't know how to become unstuck. It's starting to feel like another pleasure-living stuck-but no one has to tell him that that's not a good thing.

He fills his mug with hot coffee and sips it as he walks slowly around the interior of his workspace. Soon, the caffeine kicks in, his pace quickens, and his brain comes to full attention. He makes his choice from the many possibilities and goes to work. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

All three characters believe that they have met the love of their life. Danny thoughtTarawas the love of his life. Lily and Paul each believe the other is the love they were destined for. Do you believe there can only be onetruelove? Or is it possible to love again with the same kind of depth and fulfillment?
The book purposely brings up, without judgment, some of the many ways, motives and reasons why people are unfaithful to their committed partners, or to their idea of moral rightness. Do you think infidelity is ever justified? Can it be a good thing under the right circumstances? Do you think its ever justified to act in opposition to your own sense of what’s morally right? What are other reasons, not explored in this book, that might cause someone to take such an action?
Each of the main characters in the book experiences a loss that paralyzes him or her in some way. Danny’s loss is the most obvious; what loss do you think each of the other characters—Lily, Paul, Eve—suffer from? Do you think they all succeed in forgiving? Do you think that the act of forgiving, in each case, allows that person to move on with his or her life?
In reading about the beginning of their marriage, Lily’s and Paul’s relationship seems to be in perfect balance. How do you think this changes and what does Danny offer that Lily hasn’t gotten in her relationship with Paul? Do you think Danny envisions the same intimacy in a relationship with Lily as he had withTara?
Danny believes that he and Tara would never have had the problems that Lily and Paul have. Do you agree? Why? What are the differences in the two relationships?
Lily wonders which is worse – to lose something vital that you’ve had, or to have never had it at all; is one worse than the other and why? The reactions of the outside world are different in each case—when you lose something you had, the world notices and grieves with you. If you lose something you want but don’t get, does the world notice? How do you grieve differently for a private loss rather than a public one? Do you think one process is easier than the other?
Lily’s love for Danny is inextricably bound to her love and need for Caleb. They two of them bring up the two most primal urges in a woman/person: sex and parenthood. Would she have fallen in love with Danny if he didn’t have a son, or if she didn’t yearn for a child?
Danny’s feelings for Lily go deeper than her resemblance to his dead wife. What is he responding to in her? Do you think they could have had a future together?
Do you think that Danny was right to give Eve Tara's journal?Why do you think he chose to do that? Who do you think it helped more, Danny or Eve? What does his act say about his feelings toward Eve and about his grieving overTara? What do you think Eve’s reaction to what she reads would be? Do you think she will feel differently about Tara and Danny afterward?
Lily faces one of the toughest decisions a person can face—torn between loving two people and having to choose one. Did Lily make the right decision in staying with Paul? What do you think would have happened if she had chosen Danny? What do you think are her reasons for her choice?
Lily and Danny will see one another again - they are determined not to lose their friendship, and Caleb’s happiness. What do you think will happen when they do? Do you think it’s possible for two people, who feel the way they do about each other, to remain just friends? Can very strong feelings for a person morph into something just as strong, and yet different?

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