by Will Allison
Praise for
What You Have Left
by Will Allison
“One of Allison’s greatest gifts is his ability to come at a story from an original, surprising angle… . Just as it seems clear where the story is going, Allison spins it in another direction, one that’s somehow both surprising and inevitable. The moment is stunning… . he shows us a landscape that is rocky and difficult but that has its own sere beauty—the kind that, at the novel’s best, can make us forget for a moment to inhale.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“[T]he novel’s … characters slam through life embattled, weary, looking for missing pieces that most often remain missing.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“Loss and redemption take center stage in storywriter Allison’s beautifully written debut novel. Characters’ tension-fraught relationships are well played, and Allison is adept at navigating a labyrinthine web of psychological underpinnings … the nonlinear narrative gives Allison a trove of angles, and he nails all of them.
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Soulful, salt-of-the-earth tales of hurt and hope in redneck-proud South Carolina.… Raw-boned, heartfelt prose.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“The novel takes its place on the shelf of American abandonment fiction.… In spare, transparent prose, Allison takes us through nearly four decades in the lives of a South Carolina family crippled by the past and unarmed for the future.… The strength of What You Have Left lies in the relationships among its characters… . Allison captures the truth and irony of being part of a family, no matter how broken it is.”
—The Washington Post
“Allison knows Southern characters and paints them with a sympathetic brush, even when they’re addicted to video poker, sneaking cigarettes, or defending their state’s right to fly the Confederate flag. What You Have Left is a book readers will want to rush through and savor at the same time.”
—Bookpage
“Allison’s engaging debut dissects the guilt and betrayal embedded in the history of one South Carolina family… . Allison clearly empathizes with his characters’ foibles and manages always to find some measure of humor when they repeatedly let each other down.”
—Booklist
“Allison has crafted the sort of novel that should find a home in book groups everywhere.”
—Edmonton Journal
“[A]n enchanting, winsome look at Southern life … [the novel] concerns the sundry and tenuous bonds of family, with the specter of auto racing, NASCAR-style, buzzing in the background.”
—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
“Allison’s writing exposes brutal honesty with grace. Holly, Wylie, and Lyle know we’re hearing them out—sort of like poker players dealing the cards to their lives, daring us to show our hand to trump or fold.”
— NUVO, Indianapolis
“This wonderful little novel packs in heartbreaking emotions with the mundane, daily struggles.… This is the type of novel you read in one sitting, and then you call your loved ones to make sure they know you’re thinking about them.”
—Jackson Clarion-Ledger
“What makes the novel enjoyable is that it’s character-driven. It’s about desperation and obsession in the messy lives of people who are lovable not for what they do, but for what they believe, what they fear, what they crave—in short, for being human.”
—The Indianapolis Star
“As the title suggests, it’s a book about loss, and there is real sorrow in these pages, but the force of life in Allison’s prose is exhilarating, and it is a joy to discover a storyteller with such a sure hand.”
—Narrative Magazine
“The strength of Allison’s writing lies in his ability to convey his characters’ weaknesses without undue analyzing … Allison’s strength also lies in his ability to convey, in a delicate and kind manner, his characters’ goodness, conveyed through the particulars that teach the universal: small and daily good deeds, the difficult love of couples and parents, the tricky negotiations among generations.”
— The State, Columbia, South Carolina
“The story … stays with you long after you have closed the book.”
—Poughkeepsie Journal
“[The] intercutting of viewpoints and time sequences is stunningly effective. Storylines whirl and ricochet like stock cars swerving along a figure-eight track.”
—Dayton Daily News
“The moving account tells of a South Carolina family struggling to survive despite a mother’s death, a father’s abandonment, and a grandfather’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease—and a host of risky behaviors by others left behind.”
—Columbus Dispatch
“Allison does not tug at the heart with his narrative but rather takes up the threads of his characters’ lives with patience and a keen eye for the telling of detail.”
—Charleston City Paper
“Allison’s writing is personal and direct, his characters are interesting but not quirky.”
—Library Journal
“A remarkably cohesive novel in which the chapters also can stand alone as stories.”
— This Week, Ohio
“Allison structures his book well, writes in significantly understated but poignant prose, and keeps the reader riveted.”
—Southern Seen
“Propelled by Allison’s spare, straightforward prose, What You Have Left looks at the often uncomfortable circumstances of facing one’s past mistakes and the peculiar tapestry of American lives in the late-20th century with keen insight and genuine feeling.”
—City Beat
“Allison capably explores the enduring bonds that link family together.”
— The Independent Weekly
(Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill)
“What You Have Left is a remarkable first novel that glows with feeling and crackles with surprising insight into the ways that families shape one another. I love the elegance of Will Allison’s prose—he knows how to write a beautiful sentence but hasn’t forgotten how to tell a story too—and his book shows such wonderful control over complex moods: it’s funny yet thoughtful, heartfelt yet unsentimental, and altogether a rich and rewarding reading experience.”
—Dan Chaon, author of
Await Your Reply
“Will Allison’s What You Have Left is written with such vitality, such delicate intensity and clarity of feeling that I wanted it never to end. A story of fast cars and colliding emotions, it runs quicker than a dirt-track car on a Saturday night. The characters are heartbreaking, and absolutely real—good people spinning out of control.”
—Mark Childress, author of
Georgia Bottoms
“The clarity of Will Allison’s prose underscores the small, crucial moments when the fate of human beings is decided, on the subtle abacus of hope and accommodation, betrayal and love. He perfectly captures the texture of unstylized American lives.”
—Janet Fitch, author of
White Oleander and Paint It Black
“The death of race car driver Maddy Greer reverberates through the interlocking chapters of What You Have Left, creating a sharp and haunting picture of an absence. The prose is precise, the observations acute, and the emotional range huge. This is beautiful work.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of
The Jane Austen Book Club
“Though the beautifully drawn characters of Will Allison’s What You Have Left do not understand how their lives draft, fender to bumper, upon each other, the reader can only sit back wondering whether clear driving’s ahead, or a seemingly inevitable disaster. This is a masterpiece in writing, and in understanding Nature versus Nuture. We understand
that Holly’s her mother and father’s child whether she wants to be or not, and know that, in time, the little fire-cracker Claire will be her own independent-thinking, stock car driving, wonderfully obsessed person in her own right. Brutally hilarious and mesmerically tragic, What You Have Left might be the perfect novel. These characters will be sticking to my ribs for years.”
—George Singleton, author of
Work Shirts for Madmen
“No matter where you’re from, Will Allison’s novel feels like home, with characters who challenge, defy, and love each other in the ways that every family must. All that plus stock car racing—what’s not to love?”
—Erika Krouse, author of
Come Up and See Me Sometime
FREE PRESS
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Will Allison
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
This Free Press trade paperback edition February 2011
Portions of this novel have appeared or are forthcoming in the following publications: Glimmer Train (Issue #61, Winter 2007), Cincinnati Review (Fall 2006), One Story (Issue #47, November 2004), Zoetrope: All-Story (Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer 2004), Atlanta Magazine (Vol. 44, No. 1, May 2004), Kenyon Review (Vol. XXVI, No. 2, 2003), Shenandoah (Vol. 52, No. 1, Spring 2002).
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Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data Control Number: 2006051876
ISBN 978-1-4516-4319-0
ISBN 978-1-4165-4319-0 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4165-4667-2 (ebook)
For Deborah, who made me start over
CONTENTS
Chapter One: 1991 Holly
Chapter Two: 1971 Wylie
Chapter Three: 1991 Lyle
Chapter Four: 1970 Wylie
Chapter Five: 1996 Holly
Chapter Six: 2001 Lyle
Chapter Seven: 1979 Wylie
Chapter Eight: 2007 Holly
Reading Group Guide and Author Q&A
Excerpt from Long Drive Home
CHAPTER ONE
1991
Holly
I was sentenced to life on my grandfather’s dairy farm in the summer of 1976. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary, a month or so until my mother recovered from her water-skiing accident, but after one week, on the first day she was able to get out of her hospital bed and walk, a blood clot traveled up from her leg, blocked the vessels to her lungs, and killed her. My father had been the one driving the boat, the one who steered too close to the dock. Three days after the funeral, he walked out of the insurance agency where he worked and wasn’t heard from again.
Though my grandfather, Cal, spent months trying to track him down, it was no use, and that’s how, at the age of five, I came to be spending my nights in the bed my mother had slept in as a child. Cal made a gift to me of my mother’s arrowhead collection, which he’d helped her assemble when she was little. He also decided to repaint her bedroom for me and said I could pick the color. He was trying to be nice, but I wasn’t ready for nice. At Taylor Hardware, I chose Day-Glo orange, held the sample card up for my grandfather’s approval, and then proceeded to pick out three more hideous shades of orange—one for each wall—daring him to say no. Instead of stopping me, instead of telling me one color would do, he’d simply nodded. “Anything you want, sugar plum,” he said. Naturally, I threw a tantrum. What I wanted was my mom and dad, not stupid paint for a stupid room in a stupid old farmhouse. I’m sure everyone in the store thought I had it coming, but rather than drag me out to the parking lot for a spanking, as he’d surely have done with my mother, Cal just picked me up and held on as I kicked.
My grandfather’s relationship with my mother, his only child, was a difficult one, and the subject of her death always left him at a loss. Whenever I asked about her, Cal would either fall silent or try to deflect my questions with anodyne bits of wisdom, mostly quotations from the tattered Bartlett’s he kept by the toilet. His standby, the old chestnut that exasperated me most, was a line from Hubert Humphrey: “My friend, it’s not what they take away from you that counts; it’s what you do with what you have left.”
At the time, of course, I was too young to appreciate what my grandfather was doing with what he had left— raising yours truly—and in all my worry over what had been taken from me, I failed to consider how much had been taken from him. My grandmother, Josie, had passed away before I was born, and shortly after my mother’s death, my great-grandfather died as well. The Colonel had been living in the Alzheimer’s ward of a nursing home in Blythe-wood, a low brick building that smelled of Pine-Sol and pea soup. I hated visiting him, but Cal always brought me along, telling me that one day I’d be glad I’d gotten to know my great-grandfather.
There wasn’t much left to know. During our visits, the attendant would park the Colonel’s wheelchair by the window, where the sunlight lent his eyes a misleading sparkle. On the rare occasions he addressed me, he called me by my mother’s name, Maddy, but usually he’d just grab my wrist and shake it, moaning, oh oh oh. Looking back on those visits, I now see that if they were unpleasant for me, they were torture for Cal, who wasn’t just seeing his father; he was seeing his own future self. Over the years, he’d watched his grandfather, his uncle, and now the Colonel succumb to the same disease—smart, willful men reduced to drooling and diapers. He’d seen the ugliness of it, the anvil weight on his family, and he was determined not to go down the same road. Driving home from the Colonel’s funeral, he took a long swallow from his silver flask and swore he’d take matters into his own hands before it came to that.
I never forgot that vow, though when I was old enough to understand what it meant, I told myself it was just talk, that my grandfather would never intentionally leave me. But in the end, Cal was true to his word. When his mind started to go, he fought back with a handful of sleeping pills, leaving me the farm where I now live with my husband, Lyle, who was hired to renovate the farmhouse in the months before Cal’s death.
My grandfather first told me he was sick during the spring of my sophomore year at Carolina. He was starting to slip, was how he put it. “Maybe it’s something and maybe it’s not,” he said. “The doctors don’t know for sure yet.” It was early April, and I was at the farm for our weekly cocktails, the two of us sitting out front beneath the mossy live oaks, a pitcher of Cal’s peppery bloody marys on the wrought-iron table between us. I watched Lyle and his crew stacking steel beams alongside the house as Cal told me that over the past few months, he’d begun forgetting things—names, appointments, the day of the week. He figured it was probably old age, no reason to get all bent out of shape, but just to be safe, he’d gone to the VA for a checkup. They’d given him a physical and a mental-status evaluation. Now they wanted him back for more tests. I stared into my drink, thinking about how he’d forgotten my birthday that fall, how I’d been so busy with classes and pledge meetings that I blew it off, even though it was exactly the sort of lap
se I’d always been on the lookout for. Cal patted my knee and told me to cheer up. “Like Yogi Berra said, it ain’t over till it’s over.” Then he stared into his drink, too. “Course, he also said the future ain’t what it used to be.”
The pecky-cypress paneling in the master bedroom of our house is pitted and scarred, the handiwork of a thousand woodpeckers, or at least that’s what I imagined as a five-year-old. When I’d asked Cal about his funny-looking walls, though, he told me the pockmarks weren’t the result of woodpeckers or worms or beetles, as many people believed, but rather a rare and little-understood fungus. “What makes pecky hard to find,” he said, “is that you can’t tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open.”
When he’d purchased the farm, in 1939, the house wasn’t a house, it was a grain barn. He divided the building into rooms and framed doors and windows using wood from an old sharecropper’s cabin. After that first drafty winter, Josie shivering next to him in bed, he decided to insulate and panel their bedroom walls. He originally thought he’d get the wood from the Colonel’s sawmill, but this was the Depression: Cal couldn’t afford to buy lumber, and the Colonel couldn’t afford to give it away, not even to his own son. The best he could do was let Cal help himself to the scrap pile, which was where he found, underneath an old tarp, a load of pecky cypress, enough to panel the bedroom and his workshop. In later years, people would develop a taste for pecky and an appreciation for its scarcity, but in those days, it was considered junk wood. Josie didn’t care; she said it had low-country charm. Mainly, though, she was pleased that Cal went to all that trouble for her even as he worked twelve-hour days trying to establish their dairy farm. Her gratitude was not lost on him, and for the rest of her life, whenever he wanted to please her, he embarked on some new project to make the house more comfortable. Just before my mother was born, he added on a whole second story, and in later years he expanded the dining room and added a built-in china cabinet, then converted the front porch into a sitting parlor with French doors. In 1969, he was halfway done painting the house a minty shade of green that Josie picked out when doctors discovered the tumor in her breast.