Girls: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
Frederick Busch
Language: English
Pages: 279
ISBN: 0449912639
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A New York Times Notable Book
In the unrelenting cold and bitter winter of upstate New York, Jack and his wife, Fanny, are trying to cope with the desperate sorrow they feel over the death of their young daughter. The loss forms a chasm in their relationship as Jack, a sardonic Vietnam vet, looks for a way to heal them both.
Then, in a nearby town, a fourteen-year-old girl disappears somewhere between her home and church. Though she is just one of the hundreds of children who vanish every year in America, Jack turns all his attention to this little girl. For finding what has become of this child could be Jack's salvation--if he can just get to her in time. . . .
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any less of me. Neither should you.” “No. I think I won’t.” She said, “I prepared a list of remarks to fall back on in case I couldn’t think of anything to say that would keep you on the line.” I could hear the hum and hiss of the open connection, but I couldn’t hear anything of her. Then she came back and I felt her on the line. A piece of paper rattled, and then she recited, the way you do when you read something out loud, “Are you eating well? Are you sleeping well? Are you, in general,
the courts that the records she was sent to jail for protecting didn’t exist. This much of it, I quite enjoyed. In being guilty as charged, she was also innocent, since what she protected by going to jail wasn’t on the surface of the earth or in it. Still, I worried about the Vice President. In a sealed campus-mail envelope was a letter for me on departmental letterhead. It said: And? It wasn’t signed with a name, only an initial: R. I thought it was pretty bold stuff, really. Consorting with
wouldn’t matter in a while, but I thought I ought to do what I knew how to do. The roll of dimes was in the car, and so was anything else I could use, including gloves. William Franklin shouted, “Absolutely yes! It’s him!” The Indian came around his door, holding it for balance, slipping a little in what I thought were street shoes, maybe loafers. I held on to the grille of the Jeep and kicked him as hard in the knee as I could with the toe of my heavy boot. He skidded in toward me, but he was
I thought. “Well,” I said, “you got me, I’m afraid. I didn’t help Janice, and I didn’t help her parents, and I surely didn’t help you,” He watched me again, all eyes and brain. He said, “I’m a man whose family left early in the morning while I was at school. My wife and my son and my daughter. In the car I’m still paying off in installments. One of those big Buick station wagons nobody needs unless they have to run errands before the country club dance. You know the kind of shit I mean? I know
girls? It’s some kind of psychological thing with you? Or was she one of those secret-rebellion kids who’s a miracle in the sack? And you of course were the super father physicist local community guy with the prick that was tenured for life and you were instructing her in whatever she couldn’t get in the preacher’s house. Holy shit, Randy. Did I leave any of it out?” “Oh yes,” he said. He moved to the wall and stooped the way nearsighted people do. He picked up the chalk at the end of its red