After This
Page 27
Something he hadn’t even known he’d been straining to hear.
The boy finished the piece and in the fading of the last notes came the voices at the front door of the church, the Keanes and (he had their names on a slip of paper in his pocket) the other parents, the groom, and the young, expectant bride.
“Have you taken a lot of lessons?” the priest asked, before he walked down the aisle to greet them (because it would be an informal wedding, the best kind, really, softly spoken, unrehearsed). “Or have you always known how to play?”
The boy was arranging the pages of his music. He looked over his shoulder at the priest. The lights from the altar cast the shadow of his long lashes across his cheeks. A young man, beautiful in his way. “Both,” he said, politely. “A lot of lessons, but it seems I’ve always known how to play.”
Monsignor nodded. John Keane in his gray suit was coming toward them from one of the side aisles, favoring that bad leg, his son, his other son, just behind him, and then what had to be the bridegroom looking like the oversize boy he was in his first suit, well-scrubbed, determined, afraid. The women in their pale wedding clothes were gathered at the door.
“It’s a gift, then,” the priest said.
ALICE MCDERMOTT is the author of five previous novels, including A Bigamist’s Daughter; Child of My Heart; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; At Weddings and Wakes; and That Night. She lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.
Also by Alice McDermott
A Bigamist’s Daughter
That Night
At Weddings and Wakes
Charming Billy
Child of My Heart
Praise for AFTER THIS
“Exquisite…[McDermott] is a literary heir to Virginia Woolf.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“It’s all there on the first page: the wild silvery radiance of an early April day, the gust of hope and disillusionment in ordinary lives. Evocative…Read this for its real-world wisdom and for sentences that are gorgeous beyond belief.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“[McDermott] is back to realism, but her language has changed—it tumbles out, freer, more elliptical—and so has her treatment of time…. Again and again, After This moves toward revelation and then modestly, modernly, pulls back, but not without a memory of what it glimpsed.”
—New Yorker
“After This features McDermott’s by now trademark combination of exquisite delicacy and rich, multiclaused sentences. There is an incantatory interiority to her prose, capable of capturing subtle emotional nuances and flickers of moral wavering.”
—Newsday
“Alice McDermott writes beautiful, understated sentences so subtle and yet so packed with insight that if you blink, you might miss, say, the death of a character, or the realization by another that her grown-up life ‘would not be the life she wanted.’…McDermott’s prose is stunning…. [Her] talent never fails to impress.”
—USA Today
AFTER THIS
A Dial Press Trade Paperback Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Press hardcover edition published 2006
Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / October 2007
Published by The Dial Press
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Alice McDermott
The Dial Press and Dial Press Trade Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006005598
www.dialpress.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33730-0
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