Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Part One
Chapter 1 - Cal
Chapter 2 - Jenny
Chapter 3 - Cal
Chapter 4 - Jenny
Chapter 5 - Cal
Chapter 6 - Jenny
Chapter 7 - Cal
Chapter 8 - Jenny
Part Two
Chapter 9 - Cal
Chapter 10 - Jenny
Chapter 11 - Cal
Chapter 12 - Jenny
Chapter 13 - Cal
Chapter 14 - Jenny
Chapter 15 - Cal
Chapter 16 - Jenny
Part Three
Chapter 17 - Cal
Chapter 18 - Jenny
Chapter 19 - Cal
Chapter 20 - Jenny
Chapter 21 - Cal
Chapter 22 - Cal
Chapter 23 - Jenny
Chapter 24 - Cal and Jenny
A CONVERSATION WITH LIZA GYLLENHAAL
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Praise for
So Near
“Where is the truth in the midst of a family tragedy? Liza Gyllenhaal plumbs the complexity of human emotions in this wonderful novel. With sensitivity and compassion, she creates characters that will pull at your heart on their journey through grief. I loved reading So Near, a truly believable and compelling story.”
—Katharine Davis, author of A Slender Thread
Praise for
Local Knowledge
“This is a book to savor. . . . Selling real estate is the surface story, but as you peel back the layers throughout the chapters you realize it is about family relationships, old friends, and new friends.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A damn fine novel. . . . Gyllenhaal truly makes the Berkshire setting jump to life. And she is terrific with character—I particularly admired the way she wove personality into action—so that the behavior of her characters in her setting seems natural, unforced, and often really compelling. In a way, this is what really makes a novel like Local Knowledge exciting—I constantly felt as if I knew the people on the page, so I was captivated by their story. . . . I really look forward to her next novel.”
—John Katzenbach, bestselling author of The Wrong Man
“Gripping and deeply perceptive, this powerful debut novel reveals the pleasures and struggles of true friendship and the painful decisions we often make for acceptance and love. Small-town life and work are rendered in vivid detail, as are the memorable characters, who come alive in the hands of a gifted new writer.”
—Ben Sherwood, author of Charlie St. Cloud
Written by today’s freshest new talents and selected by New American Library, NAL Accent novels touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, from friendship to family to finding our place in the world. The Conversation Guides included in each book are intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.
Visit us online at www.penguin.com.
“A powerful and deeply moving novel about the lies we tell ourselves, the moral corners we cut, and the loved ones we betray to get what we want. Gyllenhaal has X-ray vision into the human heart and a sharp eye for contemporary mores and social maneuvering. She knows women and men and children, and pins them to the page with some of the most dazzling prose I’ve read in a long time.”
—Ellen Feldman, author of Scottsboro
“Liza Gyllenhaal’s new novel invites instant immersion. . . . With insight and sensitivity, Liza Gyllenhaal deftly draws the reader of Local Knowledge down through the layers and layers of intimate entanglements her characters have with each other, the land, and the new and old ways of life. I highly recommend Local Knowledge to anyone who loves good writing, a good story, and hopes to come away from a book with a deeper understanding of others’ lives and choices.”
—Tina Welling, author of Cowboys Never Cry
“Enjoyable and intriguing. . . . Gyllenhaal has a magnificent grasp of small-town dynamics. . . . Gyllenhaal breaks the mold of expectation by weaving in complex interactions over years of shared economic and emotional struggles. That weaving is both figurative and literal. The alternating story line is far more effective than [the] typical flashback passages of many novels. The background chapters flow beautifully with the present and explain the long-standing tensions among Maddie, Paul, and Luke. . . . [T]hrough Gyllenhaal’s superb skill there is an almost poetic quality to how the events of the past tie into the fragile relationships of the present.”
—Jody Kordana, Berkshire Eagle
“How accomplished this first novel is . . . a rich, authentic read . . . with a tightly focused cast of characters once again proving the old adage that less is more . . . a timely enough message if ever there was one.”
—Berkshire Living
NAL ACCENT
Published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
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First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, September 2011
Copyright © Liza Gyllenhaal, 2011
Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Gyllenhaal, Liza.
So near/Liza Gyllenhaal.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54414-3
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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In memory of my mother,
Virginia Childs Gyllenhaal
And for W.E.B.,
as always
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Michael Lambertus for his insights into the workings of product liability law and to Maurice Sieradzski for explaining the ins and outs of the New York State court system. I am deeply grateful to: Ellen Feldman, mentor, friend, critic, and cheerleader nonpareil; Natalie Lambertus and Patricia Aakre for their thoughtful and extremely helpful early reads of the manuscript; my agent, Susan Cohen, for going beyond the call; my editor, Tracy Bernstein, for being such a wunderkind; and my husband, William Bennett, for once again acting as my toughest critic and staunchest ally.
Part One
1
Cal
“Horigan Lumber and Hardware?” said the girlish voice on the other end of the line. Lori Swinson. She’s been answering the main number and handling phone sales at the store for five or six years now, and it drives me crazy how she always turns the name of my father’s forty-year-old business operation into a question.
“You sure about that?” I asked.
“What?” Despite the fact that we go through this routine almost every time I have to call the 800 number, I could almost hear the wheels creaking in her brain. “I’m sorry, but I—Oh! It’s you, isn’t it, Cal?”
“Yeah, Lori, it’s me. How’re you doing?” But before she could launch into it—and she always assumes I actually want to know—I added, “The old man around? He’s not picking up his cell.”
“He’s over at Deer Creek Bistro with Edmund and some guy.”
“Still?” I looked at my watch. It was closing in on two thirty. My dad’s lunch hour is typically a ten-minute pause over a take-out sandwich from the deli counter at Covington Public Market next door. Even his business lunches tend to clock in at under an hour. Most of us know he’s only wasting his time at a sit-down meal because he’s hoping to squeeze out another thirty days on the payables schedule or browbeat some poor bastard into a better bulk-discount deal. Any sales rep who thinks he’s going to sweet-talk Jay Horigan into some new line of double-hung thermals over dessert and coffee has a thing or two to learn.
“Want me to page him?” Lori asked.
“That’s okay. Kurt and I will probably just swing by and surprise him.”
“That’s got to be some kind of a record,” I told Kurt as I hung up the phone. My older brother is an online solitaire addict, and when he finds himself with free time on our office computer, he spends it riffling through a digital stack of cards. Without taking his eyes off the screen, he tilted his head back to let me know he heard me and was primed for my big news. We’ve been working literally side by side for nearly eight years now, and that, combined with the brother thing, means we could probably communicate on an entirely nonverbal level if we had to.
“Dad’s still at lunch.”
Kurt swiveled his chair around to face me.
“What’s up?”
“Edmund’s with him. So I guess everything’s okay.” The whole family’s been in code red since my dad’s open-heart surgery last August. They caught the blockages at a routine checkup and were wheeling him into the operating room at Albany Medical by five that afternoon. But the reverberations of a near-miss linger: the seismic activity that you can’t feel but still sense continues to shift ominously under the family’s tectonic plates.
“Maybe he’s finally taking our advice,” I told Kurt as he shut down the computer. “Maybe he’s just smelling the roses.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Kurt replied as we hit the lights and headed out the door. But we both know the odds aren’t good. Jay Horigan doesn’t take advice; he dispenses it. He glad-hands his opinions around to everyone in the vicinity the same way he doles out his beloved bright green Horigan Lumber and Hardware magnetic business cards. The man lives to work. He built the business up from nothing, and his character is practically pressure treated into the main store’s floorboards. The day he actually does start to slack off? That’s when we begin to worry.
Kurt preceded me down the steps, and I noticed how his scalp was starting to shine through on top. At thirty-three, Kurt’s five years older than me, a shorter, stouter, bearded take on your basic Horigan model. He started losing hair and putting on weight at an accelerated pace about the same time our company, Horigan Builders, really began to take off.
We raised this cinder-block outbuilding in the back of Kurt’s place two years ago. We store our heavy equipment on the ground floor and have our office space above. It’s nothing fancy—just insulated drywall, a couple of electrical space heaters, and furniture and computer systems from the exclusive Office Depot line. We lucked out on the business, I know: right place, time, background, backing. But Dad says you make your own luck. And for both Kurt and me, our father’s outsized pride in Horigan Builders means more to us than the six figures we’ve been routinely pulling down the past few years.
It was only early April, but the sunny Saturday afternoon was as warm and promising as any day in June. The robins were back, performing their little three-hop jig on the hill behind Kurt’s contemporary colonial. The trees hadn’t greened out yet, but I could see that some of the furry buds on the pussy willows down by the brook were already beginning to flower. Kurt’s wife, Tessa, eyes closed, face turned to the sun, was sitting on a folding chair in the backyard with eighteen-month-old Jamie planted next to her on an army blanket. As we approached, the baby wobbled to his feet, took five short steps, teetered briefly, then collapsed onto his well-padded backside.
“Jaybird!” Kurt said, scooping the kid up before he had a chance to cry. “Birdie Bird!” Kurt covered his son’s face with kisses, and Jamie kicked his feet with joy—just the way my two-year-old, Betsy, does when I plant raspberries across her belly.
“What’s up?” Tessa asked, shielding her eyes against the strong, unfiltered sunlight. Something in our stance seemed to put her on alert. Tessa teaches math and science part-time at the regional high school and has zero tolerance for any sort of male shenanigans.
“We’re going down to talk Dad into letting some of the guys go early for a pickup game,” Kurt told her as he danced in a little circle with Jamie. “Get a head start on the season.”
“It’s too nice a day,” I said when Tessa just sat there, saying nothing, looking from Kurt to me and back to her husband again. I didn’t add “to work,” though it was on the tip of my tongue. The whole subject of work, or lack thereof, is one we’re all tending to dance around these days as clumsily as Kurt was with the baby. It was fine during the long winter months to complain about how dead things were. Whoever worked in January and February except to cut down trees and make lumber? And that’s one thankless job in the often subzero wind chills that regularly sweep across our hills. No, in winters past, Kurt and I were happy to put our feet up for a stretch, bear down on the paperwork, and wait for the ground to thaw and the phones to start ringing again.
But this year we were uneasy even then; two of the three projects we’d lined up for the spring fell through due to financing problems. And we kept hearing about how the roof was collapsing on new housing starts across the region. Kurt and I would sit around and grouse for hours about the fucking banks and the greedy Wall Street bastards who’d sliced and diced those subprime mortgages into pieces of worthless shit. But when the snow began to melt in the middle of March and we still sat for days at a time without a single lead, we began to slowly move away from the economy as a topic of conversation. We talked instead about the Red Sox’s chances. How long Giambi had been juicing. Whether we should go ahead and asterisk the whole damned Baseball Hall of Fame.
Just that morning we’d gotten another call from one of our regular crew members, Mike Lerner. He was touching base again about the Ravitch job, the one big piece of new business we still had on the docket. Kurt had put in a c
all to Philip Ravitch in the city earlier in the week about breaking ground. He hadn’t called back yet. This was our second house for the criminal defense lawyer. The first, a hilltop octagonal contemporary, had been ceded to his second wife in a nasty divorce settlement. Some guys never learn—the “cottage-style” megamansion we were going to build that spring for the balding septuagenarian was a wedding present for wife number three. We’d already signed the contract and banked his deposit. Trouble was, for the first time in years, we had a lot more guys counting on us for work than we could use.
“Any day now, I think . . . ,” Kurt was telling Mike. I could hear the uncertainty in his voice. I hated to think where all this was heading. Kurt and I hadn’t talked about it yet, but very soon we were going to have to go down the roster of our regular guys—many of them lifelong friends—and make some tough decisions.
“Hey!” I called over, interrupting my brother. “Ask Mike if he wants to play ball. Look at this beautiful day! What are we doing inside? Let’s get out there and see what we’ve got.”
Between Horigan Lumber and Horigan Builders we’ve cobbled together a baseball lineup that usually ends the season ranking first in the informal network of teams that crisscross our quadrant of the county. Depending on the year, the five or six teams that make up the league rotate every Saturday, playing on one of the run-down ball fields behind the old Covington or Red River high schools. Both of these brick buildings are abandoned now, windows boarded up, empty since the mid-1980s, when flush state tax coffers underwrote the big new regional complex.
“Yeah, why the hell not?” Kurt had said, and half a dozen phone calls later we had the Horigan Builders team lined up. Now we had to see if Dad would let his guys go.
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