Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  He didn’t let the favor sit unreturned. I don’t know why I attribute my leaving with the night we met Sam Decker, even outside their proximity in time, but I do. Maybe it is because we always attached luck to celebrities, even just their images on buses and on movie posters in the lobby of the one theater in town. It was understood that the first person to spot the poster for the new Sam Decker movie would find favor with the universe, at least temporarily, and we could not begin to fathom how much luck there was in spending an entire night with him. Surely enough to get me somewhere else. Maybe it was because I thought his death left a vacancy in the population of people who lived lives with sweeping scopes that didn’t end where they began. Maybe it was because if I couldn’t convince him not to get stuck in the empty noise of Florida, I could take the advice he was wasting.

  Maybe it was because until that night I had never seen firsthand that people sometimes leave even when there is still good reason to stay, or maybe it was just because his name was on the note that accompanied the funds I would need in order to leave.

  That morning, as the bus pulled out of town, it didn’t quite pass Lila’s house, but it came close, stopping at an intersection only a few blocks away from where Golden Creek started, and the house her father bought right around the time Nina was released to us, and where Lila stayed when she was home. I hoped it was not too far for the silent dispatch I sent her to make it, the kind you send only to people you know you won’t see again, at least not often. Something not unlike a blessing. I wished her a life filled with more Ninas than Carines, knowing that for girls like her, there will always be both. I wished her well.

  Decker is the only one I gave a proper, face-to-face good-bye to. I passed a billboard for his latest movie on the way out of town, the one that would remain there for months after it flopped, and was finally taken down not because it finally occurred to the men who rented the space that it was insensitive to leave him exposed up there like that, but because other, better, newer movies were coming out and needed to be advertised. I mouthed Thank you at him as we passed but didn’t turn around for one last wave after, not wanting to make it any harder on him, knowing how he probably hated to see me go.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe many thank-yous to many people for their help in shaping this manuscript, but special thanks are due to my agent, Monika Woods, and my editor, Sarah Stein, under whose guidance I added and expanded scenes that now seem like some of the most central elements of the story I set out to tell here. That both women are wonderful, dynamic company in addition to being supernaturally wise and patient has been my good fortune.

  I am a firm believer that the key to writing a book is reading as many of them as humanly possible, and I am grateful that reading contemporary fiction has been part of my job for the last nine years. Thank you to my work wives of yore, who became some of my closest friends, and who continue to surprise and inspire me with their intelligence and generosity: Katie Freeman, Josie Kals, and Lena Khidritskaya. And to my current work wives, who make the hours pass, and for whom even the most panic-inducing work crisis is no match: Leslie Brandon and Sarah Bowlin. Thank you to David McCormick for the internship that started it all. And to Ann Close, Deb Garrison, and Gillian Blake, the three gracious and talented editors I’ve worked for. My wish for womankind is that every recent grad who moves to a new city and hits the pavement with an overly formal, shoulder-padded business suit and a stack of still-warm résumés finds someone like you.

  Thank you to Michele Nix, the only high school friend I ever needed, my Lila, Nina, and Lindsey in one. And to my Kenyon cohorts, especially Meghan Elster, Joy Bullen, and Lindsay Junkin, who kept the party going with me for all those years after graduation, and to Haley Dorsey, for being our glue. How fun it was to be young with you, how lucky I am to know you still. And in memory of Amanda Block, who continues to influence who we are both as individuals and as a group.

  Thank you to my teachers at Bennington, David Gates, Sheila Kohler, Bret Anthony Johnston, and Jill McCorkle. And to my friends and fellow writers, Louise Munson, Sarah Fuss, Shevaun Brannigan, Katy Simpson Smith, Meghan Gilliss, and Liz Solms. Let’s meet for cake and champagne at the end of the world every year.

  Thank you to the community of people who have kept me in New York, a city I love, but which I never would have lasted in as long as I have without friends to soften the blows the city can deal, and raise a glass or two in both the best and worst of times: Feldman and Aria and Kerry and their Chrisses, Sam and Sasha, Ben and Julia, Ira and Katie, Tara and Andrew, Rachel and James, Will and Georgia, Danny and Tim, Seth and Andrew and Amos, Josie and Katie (again). Please don’t ever move.

  Thank you to Carmen Johnson at Day One, my first editor, and another person I have been lucky enough to count as both colleague and friend. And to Mel, for making me feel pretty in my author photo.

  I have never suffered writer’s block so badly as I did when trying to come up with the words to adequately thank my family, both for shaping the person I am, and for being such good company. There is no group of people whom I enjoy drinking red wine and laughing with more, and I have always cherished the extent to which we are more than the sum of our parts. Thank you to my siblings, for sharing their childhood with me and letting me hang out with them even though I was not nearly as cool, and to my parents, for standing by that old parental adage that you can be whatever you want to be at every turn. And to Emma, whose imagination and wonder spark my own—I hope you not only continue to march to the beat of your own drum, but invent new instruments.

  And to my husband, Ben Mathis-Lilley, burrito maker extraordinaire, trivia whiz kid, intramural king, who doesn’t think that much less of me for getting lost every time I get off at the West 4th stop even though I’ve lived here almost a decade, who turns a walk to the corner bodega into an adventure, and with whom all things are possible. Thank you for your endless help and counsel on this book, but also for all you do, every day. Let’s go on vacation.

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