Amy Lane's Blog: Writer's Lane, page 150

Baby, Take a Bow

Squish, wearing the costume I
didn't get to see.Omigod, am I glad that's over with.

Recital hits us every year, and every year, I wonder that I have something new to blog about.  This year is no different--yeah, I was backstage this year, but that only made the experience, uhm, richer somehow.

Okay.

It wasn't on my list of favorite things, no.

For one thing, getting to see my own kids was really frickin' hard, and I actually missed Squish doing Ghostbusters, which was depressing because it was her favorite song.  I know, I know, other parents miss their kids, but you know what?  It still sucks.  Getting the two kids to the four classes a week bites, and Chicken literally got off the plane and walked into last week's rehearsal to help, and she loved it, and felt really happy to spend her vacation doing that, but dammit, I would have liked to see it a little.

Okay, so there's my whine. It's vintage and aged in bitterness, perhaps we can throw it out now.

By the way-- twelve five-year old girls.  If you ever have a chance to get twelve five-year-old girls in and out of costume, and set up with snack and set up in line and quiet in line, and not plucking the feathers off of their duckling costumes and not shoving the chopsticks out of their hair and not running to the bathroom six-thousand times a day and not guzzling water and not eating like locusts because they have nothing but snack between one in the afternoon and seven at night and not crying because of sudden onset mommy-missing and not climbing on top of walls with their duckling costumes and not falling out of their little mandarin outfits and not...

*flops backwards dramatically on the couch*

Oh. My God.

If you ever get a chance to do this thing?  Run the hell away.

I spent yesterday at the movies with my family and watching Monster's University, and writing.  When I wrote, I literally sank myself so deeply into my work that the only reason the family knew I was alive was because of the twitch.  *twitch twitch* (And the sobbing.  Ethan Gold got sad.)  I would rather teach an entire week of high school than one day of five-year old girls.  The next time you meet a kindergarten teacher, by all means, weep on that person in gratitude-- I know I plan to.  Jesus H. Christ, I'd sooner wear salmon cologne in a bear cage than do that on a daily basis.  At least the bears would make it quick.

But we survived.  The family recital team made it through intact, with only vague puzzling questions left in our wake.  Questions such as, "Why did I buy an entire package of wife-beaters for my son to wear when he was going to forget and leave his tank shirt in his dance bag when he put on the night shirt it was supposed to go under?"  Were eventually answered with, "Apparently I bought them so he could spend his summer looking like Thugs-R-Us, get over it!"

And then, the surreal, funny part of the day.

The entire family (sans Big T, who has essentially bailed on the entire dance thing since he was twelve with no regrets) went out to Chevy's after the recital, because we were tired and hungry and hyper.  So, when we got out of the restaurant, this post-it was schwacked to my car window.

Now I know I'm asking for it.  I've got pro-Obama bumper stickers on the crapmobile because I'm actually way more political in my private life than I am even in my public life, and I've gotten used to being honked at and flipped off in traffic by random wild-eyed strangers in gas-guzzling pickup trucks that say things like "You can take my gun away when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."  (I always want to take them up on that, but, well, that pesky jail thing...)  This town is not pro on the president, because, as I've said many times, this here's part of the Northern California Bible Belt, and I've got the ex-job to prove it.

But still.  This post-it cracked me up.  Because, you know, if this guy had only spelled "idiot" correctly I might seriously have reconsidered my entire world view.

Uhm, you know, it's a post-it.  Maybe not.

But we survived!  Yay!!!  I'm so relieved.  We have an entire week off, and, well, without realizing it, I signed myself up to go to RWA in July right during the State Fair, which means that I don't have to go to the fair when it's a fifty-seven-thousand degrees outside and watch them forget their dances in a miasma of sweat!  God.  I feel bad not being there, but seriously-- I wish I could claim credit for scheduling that on purpose.  A smart woman would avoid shit like this.

But then, I'm obviously not that bright.  I'm not an IDOT, but still.  I foresee a few more dances in our future, before we call this quits.

(Oh, hey-- there's a contest at Stumbling Over Chaos for an e-copy of Forever Promised.  I offer three copies at 125 entries--enter now!)  

Some things that happen when school's out and your husband's on sabbatical

*  Your kids eat like locusts

*  Except these locusts refuse to eat fresh fruit or fresh veggies, even if you're buying

*  They have a secret sixth sense for whenever you are going into nap, and suddenly it's time to talk.  (This goes double for husbands who are jealous that you are suddenly spending your time with your children.)

*  They think "mom working" is just a quaint thing she does where she stares at her computer screen and while the entire world melts down behind her.

*  They assume someone else is going to walk the dog until he pees on their stuff

*  The older kids forget how to tell time

*  They younger kids forget to listen to anyone but the older kids

* The older kids think that philosophical conversations demand everyone's attention

*  Nobody wants to watch Burn Notice but ME!

*  My suggestions count for shit

* There is fuck-all in terms of children's movies to watch

*  The movies they want to see are the movies you want to see

*  Your friends send you lots of NSFW links that you just open anyway because usually nobody's home with you

*  That thing you did to make all these children becomes a dream of the past, like it happened to somebody else, in a place where adult children don't stay up until three a.m.

*  That weird "time is relative" thing happens when you triple plan for downtime you accidentally scheduled with a volunteer gig that you feel completely unappreciated while doing

*  Your happy time at the gym must be carefully negotiated or it morphs into family time at the gym and you spend three hours in a chlorinated pool and spend two days sleeping off the sunburn

*  Anything you want to watch on television becomes an affront to your adult children's lives and an attempt to shit all over their creative freedom to warp your younger children by watching R-rated horror films in front of them

*  You would literally blow the pizza guy as a tip, just go get him to sneak you some chocolate chip cookie dough, since you and your husband have been supposedly dieting, and you are now all gungh-ho about fruit and yoghurt and all you want is some fucking lard and sugar filled toasted crap!!!

*  The dog eats chew toys and nobody understands the term vacuum

*  You're so distracted that your porn stars haven't had sex for 77 thousand words.  Did you hear that?  Celibate porn stars.  For fuck's sake-- doesn't that like break the space time continuum or something?

*  You write a scene literally about a conversation about poop that your characters have through the bathroom door, and it doesn't occur to you until talking to the dog and the kids through the bathroom door that your inner life does not have even a bathroom door to separate it from your outer life, and that your porn stars might have another 25 K before they get their rocks off!

*  You gain weight in spite of eating yoghurt and fruit, and you really wish you could blow that pizza delivery guy for the cookie dough because you're emotions demand it!

*  Your oldest son tells you to "bite me" and you're just relieved because it means he's going to go sulk in his room

*  You cook glop and ignore all the complaints because it is your glop and you loves it

*  You put in Knight's Tale because if you're not getting any work done anyway, dammit, you might as well get you're own fucking TV!

Going to watch Knight's Tale now.  Next week, I'll probably try blogging from McDonalds so that my family and I might LIVE!

So 24 is what? Pewter?

Happy Pewter Anniversary to Mate and me!

Huzzah!  Hooray!  Can we sleep in?

See, today may be our anniversary, but this weekend was the San Francisco Marathon, and Mate ran the half-course, so I got to be his plus-sized cheerleader on the sidelines.

It was really a pretty wonderful time.

We got to SF early Saturday, so Mate could sign in, and then we checked into the hotel which was sort of amazingly awesome.  You know that house in Harry Potter-- Sirius Black's House-- the one that was sort of squeezed between two other buildings?  This hotel was JUST LIKE THAT.  It was the Hotel Griffon, and it was Squished between the YMCA and something else.  It was a luxury hotel--but the rooms were laid out like those little tiny perfectly engineered spaces where every cubic foot counts.  And although from our room, we had a view of Steuert street, from the opposite end of the hallway, this was the view.

Look at that.  The Embarcadero and the Bay Bridge.  Can you beat that?  Not with a flogger and a bullwhip, that's for damned sure!  Anyway, we got back and ate lunch at Gott's, which is inside the Embarcadero, and I took this picture from our picnic table while devouring an ahi burger that would have made angels weep.

So, you know, there was that.

The next day, we got up at crotch-o-dawn a.m. so Mate could go run.  Our original plan was for me to stick my head out of that window with the view of the bay, but I took one look out there in the morning and thought I wanted to actually see him run by, so I ran downstairs and was in place in time for the seventh wave (no, not the Sting song) and I got to see him run by.  Of course, I couldn't have actually seen him if he hadn't waved at me and flagged me down, because geez, among all my other weaknesses, apparently picking a face out of a mass of humanity goes down as a really frickin' huge one.  Anyway, he's in that mass of humanity photographed below-- and he's in a red shirt and he's waving madly to me-- yay!



 After that, I ran and hopped on the MASSIVELY uncomfortable shuttle designed for carrying grade school kids, UGH, and we drove to the three mile mark.  Of course Mate, being a good and smart Mate, had my phone programmed to track his progress, and as we neared the three mile mark, I realized that he'd passed this mark twenty minutes earlier, so, that was futile.

I did, however, manage to get to the finish line about a twenty minutes before he got there--and that almost proved my undoing.  There I was, waiting patiently, checking his progress from marker to marker, and figuring out, "Hey, he should be here in about five... minutes..." when he suddenly waved his arm RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME and shouted my name.  I was so busy looking at my phone figuring out when he SHOULD get there, I almost missed him when he DID get there, and that would have sucked.  But I waved madly back and that as awesome.

See-- and here's some background you might have needed-- when Mate ran the full marathon in San Diego, back about ten years ago when I was pregnant with Zoomboy, he thought we missed him come in.  We had no way to track him and he was about two hours later than all his peers.  I'd been at the finish line with four kids (two of them belonged to another friend) and they were hot and bored and burning (seriously-- blistering burning because it was overcast and they were sitting on the metal bleachers) and I didn't want to miss him.  But I'd been sort of whiny during the entire trip (no, this doesn't reflect well on me either) and he thought I'd just bailed on watching him come in because he didn't see us even though we were there, and we got into a big hairy fight (which is really unlike us) and I had to burst into tears and tell him that we wouldn't do that to him-- we were proud of him.

Well, this time around, I wasn't pregnant and hauling four kids around, so I was in a much better and much more supportive frame of mind, and he hadn't been listening to me whine for three days, so he was much more appreciative of his own personal cheerleader.  And when he came in, I looked up and we saw each other and I was there at the finish (although we must have walked right past each other there at the end) and I got a picture of him, holding a medal, with the finish line in sight.

And see-- marriage does get better as it gets older, who knew that was even possible, right?

I didn't.  I do now.  Because the pewter or half marathon or San Francisco anniversary was really really rock awesome, and I'm so proud of my Mate that I could cry.

And did I mention that, twenty-six and a half years ago, our first date was in San Francisco.  We weren't really dating-- it was just supposed to be as friends, and another friend bailed--but I loved him so much even then, and watching one of the last Journey concerts with the guy you loved when you got to walk around the City by the Bay before then-- well, that's gotta be called a date.  I think he remembers it as a date--sometimes the best memories really are the ones you create after the fact, right?  Anyway, so we got to go back to our city, and we got to put paid to one sort of crappy memory with a really really awesome memory, and twenty-four years isn't nearly long enough.

Forever Promised

Okay-- so wrapping up a series is hard.  I mean, really hard.  I had to put this book down three times-- once for City Mouse, once for Bolt Hole and once for Racing for the Sun.  It was worth it-- I think both those books were new territory for me and I'm proud of them, and when the dragon flies sometimes you just gotta fly with it, but putting this book down didn't make it any easier to write.
it really hurts to say goodbye.
For one thing, I wanted to say goodbye to every body--which meant I had multiple plotlines to wrap up, and that's hard, don't let anyone tell you different.  I wanted to leave our guys in a good place, a Happy Ever After place, but not in a "everybody's so happy it defies the bounds of probability given how fucked up everyone was at the beginning" place, and, well, that's a delicate wire to walk.  
I hope I did it justice.
One of the things people reading this book need to be aware of-- everybody had a chapter.  Deacon, Crick, Mikhail, Shane, Jeff, Collin, Benny and Jon-- they all get a say so in this, sometimes just so we could be in their head.  So there's that, and there's also (and forgive me for this) girl cooties are all over the frickin' place.  Yes-- there is implied sex with girls, (from their appropriate partners, of course) and yes there is a girl's POV and yes, there's reproductive difficulties because, well, you're married for a while and you want to have a baby, and with gay men, that's an obstacle because the equipment is different.  I refused to just have our girls--whom we loved-- pop out babies like gerbils.  It was a disservice to them, especially because, while I know my body was made for dropping the little darlings at the end of the tomato row and then just popping that bugger in a basket and finishing the next row, I know a lot of women who have had much different experiences, and, well, if people want babies, girl cooties need to be addressed.  I'm not going to apologize-- I wanted to write real people, and these are real people's problems.  I'm pretty sure those who have followed the series thus far are with me on this, and I love them for it.  
And yeah-- when you get to the end, I think you'll recognize it as "The End"-- I put a pretty big stamp of "They Lived HAPPILY EVER AFTER" here-- but I think-- hope-- that by the time you get there, you'll think it's a really good place to be.  
So here it is, available for pre-order.  I hope you love it as much as I do-- but I'm pretty sure you'll have the same problem I did.  It really hurts to say goodbye.  

Keeping Promise Rock: Book Four  

Crick has been home from Iraq for five years, Jeff and Collin are finally married, and Shane and Mikhail are quietly making lives better for the dispossessed teenagers who come their way. Everything is right in Deacon's world, but nothing ever stays the same. 

When Deacon's best friends, Jon and Amy, answer the call of an opportunity in Washington, DC, Deacon figures that’s life. You love people, and they leave you, and you survive. Even Benny, Crick’s little sister, is close to grown and ready to start her own future. But Benny loves Deacon, and she owes him—she may move beyond The Pulpit and Levee Oaks one day, but not without leaving something of herself behind. And so she offers Deacon and Crick an amazing gift… and a terrifying decision. 
Benny’s offer forces Deacon and Crick to dredge up every past mistake and offer of redemption. And not just the two of them—everybody is forced to examine the chances they've been given and the promises they've made. In a real family, a child is a promise, and to the men and women of Promise Rock, keeping that promise will change their lives forever.

And here's the PRE-ORDER site.And here's the excerpt that will appear on the site before it's released:
Benny: Life with Girl Cooties
WHEN Bernice Angela Coats was three years old, her older half brother, Carrick James Francis, cut church one day and never went again for the rest of his life.

No, that lucky fucker got to spend his weekends at The Pulpit, a horse ranch run by Deacon Winters and his father, Parrish, and if Crick’s new best friends hadn’t spent their time taking Benny and her sisters out to the park or the movies as they got older, she might have hated Crick for that.

What she did instead was fall in love with Deacon.

Benny was a smart girl—she couldn’t possibly hate Crick. Crick made her dinner and did her laundry and put Crystal and Missy to sleep after they came along. When Benny was six, Crystal was three, and Missy was one, both the littler kids had some sort of explosive diarrhea, which meant their mother must have cooked. Anyway, Bob (as Benny called her father in her thoughts, because that’s what Crick called him) got home and both the kids were crying and dinner was burning on the stove and Crick had Missy on his hip and she’d just crapped all over them both while he was turning off the heat on some mac and cheese that was never meant to be.

Bob backhanded Crick as he stood and the water of the boiling pot splashed up and burnt Missy, and Crick had to tend to her and his split lip together.

It wasn’t a new thing—Bob hit Crick all the time—but it was, perhaps, the first time it really sank into Benny’s head that it wasn’t fair. It was the first time any of the girls had gotten hurt, and Benny realized a lot of what Crick did for them was take the punishment Bob ordinarily dished out.

As Benny got older and she saw examples of her brother’s hair-trigger temper and shotgun mouth, she started to understand they were all lucky. Crick had some of the things that made him a lot like Bob, but was spending weekends at The Pulpit, so he had Deacon and Parrish too, so those bad things didn’t mix in the right way, and he stayed her big brother.

And that was why, when Crick came out as gay in the middle of a funeral, she didn’t begrudge him to Deacon.

Deacon was the one to come collect him off the front lawn. She’d seen them picking Crick’s shit up, like it wasn’t even a question. She’d seen how Crick had yearned, even then, when she was ten years old. She had a home, still, and Bob wasn’t hitting her yet, so she could give Crick to Deacon. She hadn’t known, really, what gay meant, or why Bob thought it was so bad, but she knew her brother deserved the kindness in Deacon’s eyes more than anyone else she knew.

As time passed, and she had to duck more often because Bob started noticing she was the one in charge of the little kids, and all of that shit little kids did—crap, cry, need food—was all on her head, she started to dream she would have a Deacon one day, who would come and save her from what her life was when Deacon and Crick and Parrish weren’t around.

When Crick signed up for the military and ran away like a filthy coward (okay, maybe she was a little angry at him), she watched helplessly from afar as Deacon fell apart.

When he started haunting the liquor store like the ghost of winos past, her disappointment was acute. She’d woken up pregnant after a night she didn’t remember with a kid she hadn’t been all that crazy about before he’d roofied her, and Deacon was her last best hope. By that point, he had the DTs so bad after just a day she was shocked he didn’t lose his lunch right there in front of the liquor store. When he came through for her? Stopped drinking cold turkey? Showed up on her doorstep with his friends, picked her shit off the lawn, and then (and he didn’t know she knew this) decked Bob in retaliation for the black eye the fucker had left her with?

She’d sensed, even then, that she was going to love Deacon helplessly, like a brother, a mentor, and a hero, for maybe the rest of her life.

He would never know—never know—how hard she’d had to work to not fall in love with him as well as love him. Her worthless, cowardly shit-for- brains brother obviously had Deacon’s entire heart. That didn’t stop her from being just a little bit moony over the man after he held her and helped her deliver her baby. Waking up in the middle of the night during those first months to find him rocking Parry Angel in his arms made her stomach all fluttery, but she was so not going to go there.

That didn’t mean that etched in her memory, forever and ever, she didn’t hold a picture of Deacon, his boy-pretty face relaxed and sweet, his hazel- green eyes closed, lying on his back on the old plaid couch with Parry, wearing a pink onesie, tucked on his chest, both of them fast asleep. Deacon was that guy, the guy who would get up with a baby and who would give the baby’s mother a room of her own and an education and safety when she couldn’t really remember having any of those things after Crick left.

When Andrew Carpenter showed up on their doorstep with the dubious claim that her worthless brother actually saved his life, Benny was willing to look beyond that obvious falsehood and see that Andrew was a fine young man. (Deacon bought it, and only Benny’s deep and abiding love for him kept him from losing serious esteem points in her eyes.) Drew was more than fine, in fact. Drew was stalwart—he stayed at The Pulpit even when all Deacon had to pay him was room and board. He didn’t fuss if he was suddenly babysitting instead of horse breaking, and he never, not once, asked her who Parry Angel’s father was. When he did learn who the guy was, he clocked him in the jaw, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that when his slow white smile broadened his dark face, the way he looked at Benny let her know that smile was just for her.

It made her stomach flutter and her palms sweat. It made her feel like she had a wasp waist and a size-D rack instead of her plain, thin body with the flat chest; and long, flowing, perfectly styled blonde hair instead of flyaway mouse-brown hair that needed to be cut to her shoulders or it would get all splitty.
From the time she was sixteen, when Drew started working at The Pulpit, to the time she turned eighteen, right about the time of her misguided attempt to leave Levee Oaks to go to school, Drew’s smile seemed to grow deeper and more electric, and more and more just for her.

Benny started to love it that way.

When she returned from school, frightened (terrified!) because Deacon’s health was piss-poor and everybody in the family was afraid for him, Drew had been the guy to greet her. She’d kissed him in front of everybody, in spite of the fact that as far as she remembered, she hadn’t kissed anybody that way, and if her body didn’t remember the entire pregnancy and birth thing she endured with Parry Angel, she’d flat-out swear she was still a virgin.

It didn’t matter.

She was scared for Deacon and missing her daughter, but Drew was there, and he was solid and kind and stalwart and funny in a sly way that sort of snuck up on you when you weren’t paying attention—she liked that!—and Benny decided that if a man as young as Deacon, who wasn’t even thirty, could get so sick so fast, she didn’t have any room for dithering about or dillydallying.

Besides. She’d been dying to kiss Drew for two years.

He kissed... beautifully. He opened his mouth and let her tongue in, and he was warm and dark and safe. His big hands were easy on her skinny little hips and he pulled her in against his wide chest and she knew she was home. When the family—Deacon’s entire little assembled family—stood on the porch and applauded, she flipped them all off not because she was mad, but because she wanted them to know this moment was for her and it was for Drew, and as much as everyone had seen it coming and wanted it, she’d made it come, and she wanted it more.

Of course, then she went inside and saw Deacon, white-faced, his jaw clenched in pain, so immersed in the misery of congestive heart failure he was barely there for his family.

At that point, Jon, Deacon’s best friend since diapers or close enough, took Deacon into his and Crick’s room and called an ambulance. Jon was a lawyer, and he might look like a surfer or a Hollywood pool boy, but the truth was Jon was smarter and more ruthless than probably anyone else at The Pulpit, and Benny was one of the few people who didn’t forget that.

Jon was made to do things like that. He could tell someone to fuck off, they were being stupid, and not sound mean about it. Benny said those things, but she always sounded mean. Jon just had all that authority around him. It’s why his little wife adored him, even though she was a bossy little shit, which is why Amy and Benny got along so very well.

That quality was why, Benny thought on this achingly hot August day about two and a half years after Deacon’s heart attack, Jon made such a splendid officiator for the weddings they kept having out at Promise Rock.

Today’s victims stood suffering in the heat. Why Jeff and Collin thought August was a good time for a wedding was beyond Benny. But they’d had it early enough in the day to stifle the sadistic heat, and the fashion de rigueur was cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts for the men and sundresses for the women. Benny thought that must have been Collin’s idea, and she didn’t mind. Any excuse to buy a new sundress was an opportunity she’d take advantage of, even if she was sweating through the side of it already. But it didn’t matter that the wedding was unseasonable, or that it would be so hot by two o’clock that the cake would be melting off its fashionably rustic wooden pedestal. Jeff must have still been lost in the romance of the whole thing, because he was crying such a steady stream of quiet tears that Benny had needed to go up to his elbow a couple of times to switch out his Kleenex.
Jeff was dressed impeccably—natty ecru linen suit, double-breasted, nipped in at the waist, with trousers tight enough to bounce a quarter off his ass. Of course, underneath the jacket he was wearing a pastel T-shirt, Miami Vice style, but that just made it better. His angular, bony features with a slightly aquiline nose had been pretty and, well, gayer than a roaring twenties revue. He managed to look like a dandy out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald book as he’d greeted his guests at what amounted to a private swimming hole in the middle of nowhere.

Collin, his intended, looked nothing like him. Collin’s hair was long and blond, blow-dried straight and tied in a queue; his jaw was square, and his nose turned up on the end. Collin had been the one who insisted on putting “dress comfortably” in the wedding invitations, and he was wearing khakis, a short-sleeved button-up shirt, pink suspenders, and a matching bow tie. He was (and people gave Jeff shit about this all the time just to make him turn red and duck his head) nearly ten years younger than his soon-to-be husband. It was funny, though—Benny had taken one look at the two of them when she’d gotten back from college and told Drew, “Oh yeah, but you can bet that kid calls all the shots!”
Drew had laughed then, but watching the two of them over the last two and a half years had proved her right. Not that she lived on I-told-you-so or anything, but once Deacon moved her out of her parents’ place and helped her get her shit together, she got pretty used to being the one who knew best.
She was also damned proud of serving her family quietly and competently. Those things had become her trademarks in the beginning, when Crick was still in Iraq and it was just her and Deacon, trying to keep Deacon’s business afloat. She’d been afraid then and had worked like her place in Deacon’s home depended on her usefulness, and although she’d outgrown the fear, mostly, she hadn’t outgrown that love of being needed.

So she was surprised when, the third time she dodged behind his elbow to take one Kleenex in a plastic bag and replace it with another, Jeff stopped responding to the vows Jon was reciting, wrapped a playful arm around her head, and grinned.

“Benny, my love, are you angling for the same service when it’s your turn?”

Benny grinned at him and reached up (way up—he was tall; she was not!) and tousled his absolutely perfectly cemented hair. “Damned straight, Jeffy. Right after you and Collin bear me up the aisle in my own sedan chair.”

That elicited a laugh from the crowd, and Jeff bent down and dropped a teary kiss in her hair. “It’s a deal, oh short one. You take good care of us.”

She smiled at him, a little watery herself. She’d practically sobbed through Crick and Deacon’s wedding three years ago, hadn’t been much better through Shane and Mikhail’s, and had barely held it together through Lucas and Kimmy’s. The only reason she’d been able to tough it out through this one was because Jeff was doing all the crying for her, but now that she had to talk and look the happiness straight in the eye, she might not make it.

“Well”—she sniffled—“you guys always take good care of us right back.” Her voice broke unapologetically on the last word, and Jeffy crushed her to his chest for a good, solid hug.
After a moment, Jon said, “Now, Benny, until it’s your turn, you really don’t get to spend all that time up here, you know that, right?”

General laughter echoed from the small crowd of friends and family under the oak trees. They stood by the granite outcropping that marked the swimming hole, and for a moment in the shade, her Uncle Jeffy hugged her and she was happy. Then she felt a hand on her elbow as she stepped out of the circle.
Looking up, she saw Deacon, his small, square-jawed face with those pretty green eyes and brown-blond hair, and he engulfed her in his arms. He smelled so good. She picked his fabric softener and bought his bodywash, but there was more to his smell than that. Deacon had worn a suit, to keep Jon company because Jon never wore suits, and she could smell sweat underneath and the ever-present, honest smell of horse, and there was Deacon. For six years that smell had meant comfort and home, and as she lost her nut for happiness in his arms, a part of her was crying because she knew that very soon, that would have to change.

Jon finished speaking and Jeff and Collin exchanged what appeared to be a very chaste kiss. Benny knew most of the people there in the shade of the oak trees, even Collin’s family, although there were a few friends from Jeff’s work that she hadn’t met yet, and they all applauded happily. Deacon relaxed his arms around her shoulders, and suddenly Benny’s pride and joy ignored her mother and said, “Deacon, I was so good, I didn’t talk at all!” at the same time Benny’s beloved said, “Deacon, I’ll trade ya!” Benny was pushed gently into Drew’s hug so Deacon could heft Parry Angel into his arms. Her riotously curly brown hair was strung up with ribbons, and even though she was nearing six, she could still squeal like a toddler when he swung her plump little body high in the air.

Benny turned to Drew with a sniffly smile only to see something alien shadowing his eyes.

He reached out with a thumb to wipe a leftover tear, and she felt her eyebrows knit. “What?” she asked.

He grimaced, and it wasn’t his comforting bright smile. “Benny, you know I love the guy like a brother, right?” he asked soberly, and she nodded. The rest of the company had moved into the receiving line, and she worried about not being there. Drew backed them up into the shade next to the boulder itself.
“Yeah, so do I,” she told him, trying to lighten the moment.

Drew just shook his head. He had wonderful eyes—dark, dark brown, intelligent, soulful. When he blinked, dark lashes, obscenely long, swept over his cheekbones, and when he opened his eyes again, they were both hopeful and fearful at once.

“He’s a tough act to follow,” Drew said softly. “Have you told him yet?”

Benny gnawed on her lower lip. “That I’m ready to move out of the house on his property and into the other house on his property?” she asked factiously, hoping the facts would obscure what a big step this was.

“If you’re ready to move you and Parry into my home. Benny, I love it here, and I’m happy to live here, go to school when you’re done, raise a family working in Deacon’s business. But I need you in my own home. Is that so much to ask? I want to....” He grimaced again and looked around at where they were. It was a swimming hole, plain and simple, but it was also the family church. The shade from the oak trees kept the August sun from pounding too hotly on the two of them, and the water from the irrigation stream burbled as it rounded the bend. It was a pretty place, carved by necessity in what could be a harsh world, and when they weren’t having weddings or summer parties or greeting new babies or making love (at least with her and Drew it had happened here the first time), it was the summer swimming hole and family thinking spot.

Important things happened here, and apparently Drew had decided that it was time for one more.

“Benny, don’t you want to get married?” he asked rawly, and Benny blinked and smiled huge, delighted because she thought this conversation was going to get a lot more serious than this.

“To you? Because, well, duh!” she laughed. “What do you think, Drew? Two and a half years we’ve been seeing each other?” Her voice dropped, and she splayed her small hand across his chest, hard with weighty muscle underneath his pink dress shirt. “Do you think I... I mean, my whole family knows about us. Do you think that would happen if I didn’t want us to be permanent?”

Drew covered her hand with his larger one, and she resisted the temptation to examine it, as she often did, to contrast the coffee color of the skin on the back with the tender pinkness of the palm and the pads of his fingers. These things fascinated her, and she never made any secret about the fact his skin color delighted her as much as the rest of him. She was unafraid of their difference in race, and unafraid of the skin under his prosthetic leg, and unafraid of the complete contrast in culture between his upbringing in the South and hers in Northern California. About the only thing she did fear about her relationship with Drew was that somehow it would take her away from her family.

“I want us to be permanent,” he said softly. “But you know that means that you’re going to need to move you and Parry out of that house. And someday—not now, but someday, after we’re both through school, and when we’ve had another baby or two—we may have to move way from here. From The Pulpit. From Levee Oaks. From Deacon. And I need to know you’re up for that.”

Benny swallowed hard and tried not to tear up—she still had that leftover hot feeling behind her eyes from the wedding, she told herself stoutly. It was only natural.

“You mean choose you,” she said, knowing that this was where it was leading.

“Over Deacon,” Drew affirmed. He glanced furtively up, and Benny looked to where Deacon was holding Parry Angel, and now she had to wipe her face with her hand again.

“Of course I choose you,” she whispered painfully, because it wasn’t that cut and dried and they both knew it. They both owed Deacon so much. Leaving him alone seemed a horrible way of paying him back. “I’ll tell him we’re moving out tomorrow.”

Drew nodded and smiled, and he looked like the weight of the world had fallen from his sturdy shoulders. He pulled her close and rested his forehead against hers, and she smiled into his eyes.

“I really love you,” she said softly, thinking that it was true, and her heart felt so swollen in her chest it hurt. “You know that, right?”

“I love you too, Bernice.”

“Oh hell, Drew. I’ll take it all back if you don’t stop calling me that.”

He laughed and closed his mouth over hers, and she relaxed into his kiss.

And it might have stayed there. She might not have taken that next step in her thinking, or in what she asked of Drew, or what she wanted to give Deacon, if her stupid brother hadn’t had a weak spell with his injured leg and needed to be driven back home. She was going to offer to do it for him, and get her stuff to stay the night at Drew’s if that was okay, but she needed to find Deacon first and tell him. Besides, Crick would need help walking across the grounds and the cattle gate to get into the truck, and nobody could do that but Deacon.

She looked around the clearing—it was later in the day, and Collin and Jeff were sitting on a couple of folding chairs, talking to anybody who wanted to talk.

“The flowers?” Jeff asked, gesturing to the assortment of wildflowers in glass decanters that Benny had helped him scavenge from yard sales everywhere. “Pinterest, girlfriend! I know, they look totally rustic, like you’d think that’d be easy, but omigod! Tracking them down was a nightmare, and Benny and I rubbed our fingers raw tying off the little burlap bows!”

“I was not allowed to help,” Collin said, pulling his lean lips into a Kewpie doll moue.

“Hello, you’d get grease on them!”

“Because rustic is only cool when it involves dust,” Collin said dryly, and
Jeff nodded his head in complete seriousness.

“Of course! If the wedding was in your garage, then you could have gotten grease on the burlap!”

Everybody wanted to talk, and although Collin mostly sat back quietly and let his new husband tell the stories with flamboyant gestures and razor- lightning quickness, he was good for a snarktastic quip or two. Jeff’s job was pausing to let him get those in too, and together they could entertain at their own party like nobody else.

Amy, dressed in a pale-green summer dress, sat at the sandy beach of the creek, holding her youngest by the hands so he could dangle his feet in the water.

“Heya, Jon-Jon,” she murmured, and the baby—a tow-headed, brown- eyed version of his blue-eyed father—giggled. His little baby three-piece suit (his father’s idea of a joke, since Jon only wore a suit to officiate at weddings, even when he was in court) lay neatly folded in the diaper bag over Amy’s shoulder, and the royal crowned King of Promise Rock was wearing a diaper and a smile.

Lila Lisa, Amy and Jon’s little girl, crouched with Parry Angel; they were looking to see if any minnows flitted in the sandy part of the shore. The little girls wore matching lavender sundresses, because that’s why you had girls, so you could put them in frilly things that made them smile. Of course, the skirts of both dresses were now tucked, wadded, and otherwise fixed firmly between their legs so they didn’t get the hems wet, but since Lila was so short, her bottom was dragging in the water anyway.

Benny stopped for a moment to bend down and kiss Parry on her curly little head, and then turned to Amy—pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed Amy, the only girl Benny knew who was tinier than Benny herself—and smiled. “Have you seen Deacon?”

To her surprise, Amy looked troubled and a little sad. “Yeah. I think he and Jon are off talking on the man’s side of the rock.”

Benny snickered. “There’s a man’s side of the rock?”

Amy had a piquant little face and adorable little chipmunk cheeks, but she could manage a look of total disgust if it suited her. “Yeah, the other side of the rock, the side without shade. It’s where they go to talk when they’re pretty sure the rest of us plebeians with tits don’t want to sweat and won’t follow them over.”

“Is that what we are?” Kimmy asked, walking over to the creek. She was looking at the children wistfully, and Amy smiled at her and hefted Jon-Jon up so Kimmy could grab him and blow tummy bubbles. Kimmy was a beautiful woman in her thirties, with brown hair that hung unbound to her waist, in spite of the heat, and a serene oval-shaped face with brown eyes exactly like her twin brother’s. She blew the tummy bubbles and Jon-Jon giggled loudly.

“Kimmy!”

“Heya, Puppy. Have you had any cake yet?” Jon-Jon’s eyes got big and round. “Cake?”

“Kimmy, you snot!” Amy complained. “You know he wears it more than eats it!”

“That’s all right,” Kimmy said warmly. “I’ll wash him off when we’re done.” She hefted the toddler over to the table, and Amy stood up from the bank, keeping a careful eye on the two girls.

“Are you going to hang around, Benny?” she asked.

Benny looked over to where Crick sat, looking embarrassed. He tried, while she was watching, to stand up completely, but his leg gave out, and he gritted his teeth. He’d been putting a lot of stress on his leg and his arm, trying to get ready for this event, and he’d overdone it. Pretty much the only person he’d let help him when he was like this was Deacon.

“Crick needs to go home,” Benny said quietly. “He’s going to need Deacon’s help to get in the truck.”

Amy looked up and frowned. “God—I knew he shouldn’t have been helping load chairs yesterday! He said he was fine, but—”

Benny shrugged. “He’s stubborn,” she said, because it was true. But it was also true he pushed himself, like he hadn’t almost gotten himself blown halfway to hell, and he didn’t like people to know he wasn’t just as fit as anyone else. But then, part of that was Crick’s reluctance to give up even one iota of the job of taking care of Deacon.

“I’ll go find Deacon,” Benny decided, because hey! How bad could a conversation with Jon be?

“Hey, Benny—” Amy called behind her, but Benny was already halfway to the tree, and Lila picked that moment to fall into the surprisingly cold water and shriek loud enough to break the plastic glasses for the sparkling cider. Amy didn’t try to get her attention again, and Benny didn’t look back.

She rounded the corner of Promise Rock quietly, expecting to have to wait until the boys were done talking to get Deacon’s attention, and what she heard in Deacon’s voice made her pause.

“Damn, Jon! That’s a hell of an opportunity!”

Jon’s reply, when it came, was rough and shaky, and she stayed quiet in the shade of the oak tree while Deacon and Jon stood facing the sun, their backs to the rock and to her. “It would mean leaving you.”

“Yeah, well, that would suck,” Deacon said, clapping Jon on the shoulder. Jon made a strangled laugh sound, and Deacon settled back against the rock again.

“I love it here!” Jon protested, and his voice sounded weak to Benny, and probably weak to Deacon as well. “My family loves it here. We grew up here, and my kids love it here—”

“Jon, let’s get one thing straight. Nobody loves Levee Oaks that much, not even the founding fathers, whoever the hell they might have been. You love us. Now, when I was going to uproot this place four years ago, you were going to move with me, so I know you can do this—”

“Okay, so this place sucks, but Deacon—!”

“Jon, do you realize what you’ve been asked to do?” “Yeah—wear a fucking suit!”

“No! You’ve been asked to go to Washington and work for a cause! Do you get that? All this bullshit Crick and me, and Shane and Mickey and all those kids in Promise House, have been through—hell, Jeff and Collin’s medicine and treatment—all of that bullshit, all of that difficulty, has been given the stamp of approval by the powers that fucking be. You got asked to go change all that, Jon! Jesus, do you know how huge that is!”

Benny clapped her hand over her mouth, because for once in her life, she needed to keep it shut. Oh hell. Hell, this was enormous. Jon? Jon was Deacon’s rock. Crick was passionate, wound up, and high maintenance—Jon was Deacon’s one chance at sanity, and he was going?

“I know,” Jon said quietly. “I do. And Amy would love to help, and that’s big too, because as much as she loves the kids, she didn’t get her law degree for nothing either. And we got hired on as a team—I mean, who does that? And it’s a chance to... I don’t know....”

“Change history? Make your mark? Do something important with your life?”

“I thought I was doing that by practicing here!”

Deacon laughed a little and ran his hand through his thick dark-blond hair. “Yeah, well, as great as it’s been having our own pet lawyer in our pockets, Jon, you really were made for more. I mean, how do you think you got noticed in the first place?”

“You sent my name in to that website,” Jon said flatly, and Benny had to try hard not to cackle hysterically when Deacon shrugged.

“It was Crick’s idea. They were asking for community members who’d made a difference. That’s you, big guy—can’t fight it!”

“Jesus, Deacon did you have any idea—”

“That you’d get enough attention to get put in that magazine? No. That the lobbyists in DC would want to come sweep you away? Not a fucking clue. But Jon....” Deacon took two steps out and turned back around, and Benny looked hungrily at his face for some clue as to how he really felt about this. Anybody who loved Deacon knew what he said, even the inflection of his voice, was not a real barometer. Deacon was a master at putting the things he wanted on hold for the people he loved.

But his eyes....

Benny had learned to look at the way his eyes crinkled in the corners, or the skin tightened over his cheekbones, to know what he was really thinking.

The night her stupid brother called him to say he’d cheated while in the service, Deacon’s eyes had been wide and earnest when he told Benny he’d be okay. But the crinkles in the corners of his green eyes had been bunched together, like his jaw was clenched too tight to let them get as wide as they should be.

They looked just like that now.

“You and Amy were always meant for bigger things than me or this town anyway,” Deacon said gruffly. “I’ll miss you—God, we’ll all miss you. But telling you not to go because we’d miss you is pure selfishness.”

“And God forbid you be selfish, right, Deacon?” Jon said bitterly, and Deacon swallowed.

“You know, asshole, me and Crick managed to keep together for two years of writing actual letters and tweets. We got two face-to-face chats on satellite phone in two years, and we did just fine. We’ve got Skype and we’ve got texting and I’m pretty damned sure I’m not going to whither and die because you left me behind.”

Jon shook his head bitterly. “Yeah, Deacon, I remember ‘just fine’. Remember the DTs? ’Cause I do, and if I ever have to even know that you took a drink again, I will come back here and beat you dead.”

Deacon rolled his eyes. “Jon, you know damned well that pacemaker or not, if I ever had to do that again, no one would have to beat me to see me dead.”

Jon took a swing at him.

Benny might have cried out if it had landed, but Deacon was quick, and he’d been taking very good care of his body since his heart attack. He dodged sideways, grabbed Jon’s arm, and pulled, and Jon’s forward momentum brought him straight into Deacon’s arms.

Jon struggled for a moment and then gave it up and returned the hug full force. “We’ll miss you,” he muttered.

“God, I hope so,” Deacon said back, and he’d turned enough for Benny to see his face over Jon’s shoulder.

Drew found her ten minutes later, huddled in the little hidden spot where the sun and shade met. Deacon and Jon had gone round the other side, back to the reception, and Benny was pretty sure he was giving Crick a ride home.

Which was good, because she hadn’t been able to stop crying, and she wouldn’t have wanted to confess to Deacon why.

“Benny?” Drew asked, crouching down by where she was dragging the hem of her new dress in the dust. “What’s wrong, baby?”

Benny wiped her eyes with her palm, boy style, and wanted to swear because her carefully applied makeup was now smeared all over her eyes and it stung like a sonuvabitch.

Drew was prepared, though—he pulled out a little package of tissues and handed them over, and she spent a few moments getting the mascara off her cheeks while she pulled herself together.

“Drew?” she said tentatively, hating that she was going to ask him this but not able to change it.

“Yeah?”

“We need to give him something,” she whispered. “Something that he can keep. Something that will make his family always here.”

Drew’s questioning look was hard to face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Bernice.”

It took her a while to explain it to him, and when she was done, it took a week to make it right between them. But in the end, he saw that she was right, that it was a perfect solution. In the end, even Drew saw that if they wanted to leave Deacon, it would sit right with both of them if they promised him forever first. 

Can You Believe This-- aGAIN?

Okay-- so I figured out how I got out of it for all these years. I couldn't figure it out.  Chicken has been with the dance place since she was a baby-- literally, three years old, barely potty-trained, and passive aggressive as hell.  Anyway-- she was a baby, and I volunteered for the recital-- a little bit.  How a little bit?  Well, I did some of the costumes during the rehearsals.   Yup.  I spent hours gluing yellow feathers to a yellow headband in order to make a little kid look like a baby duck.
And for years, that's how I participated.  I got my kids there, I sewed if they needed it, and I yarned like a madwoman if they didn't.  
Because... wait for it... 
I taught high school, and the recital came during the last two weeks of high school, and graduation was a surly, raging, rabid monkey on my back and I had to beat that fucker to death or it would kill me.
So anyway--for about thirteen years that's why I didn't do it.  And then, once I no longer had to worry about graduation, my oldest two children had to worry, and thus, I worried with them.  So nope-- no backstage mom for me.
This year, I had no excuse, and the dance leader called me up and begged.
And I said, "Uhm, sure."
Because, you know, I'm so comfortable with other people's barely potty-trained children.  
Anyway-- yes.  That was me, helping them with shoes, helping them with costumes, trying to watch my own kids dance.  It was two parts awesome, one part, "Oh crap, I've got so much to DO!" and a whole other part, "Amy, Amy, what are you doing here?"
But I survived, and in the middle of it, I met Izzie.
Izzie is three.  She has dark hair and dark eyes and a distinctly Latina cast to her skin, and Izzy takes no prisoners.  She is going to the movies and she is going with her aunt, and we all need to listen to her and do this right and give her stamps in her book and let her color, because she needs to tell us about the movies and she's so excited about the movies and do we want to know what picture she colored and why?
I sort of fell in love a little with Izzy.  And then, just when I was wondering why she seemed so familiar, I got a text from Mary, My Mary, and Nobody Else Shall Have Her, and I replied with, 
Hello.  I think I've found the little girl you used to be.
To which Mary replied, Is she bossy?  Does she like to please the grown ups?  Does she like to manage?
I looked up to see Izzy, stoutly telling another little girl what color crayon to take.  
It IS you! I told her happily, and Mary had to agree.
So yeah.  It was sort of  a pain in the ass, and who has the time?
But that's just like being an Art Docent, or helping Mate, in any capacity, coach soccer.
I got back so much more than I put in.  I know I couldn't possibly have done this sooner, but I'm grateful for the chance to do it now!

What's the Name of That Song?

Chicken sent me this  and this which was kind of her because I'm OVERWHELMED with stuff to do, and nothing works better than being completely distracted from your real work by stuff that makes you happy.

Wait... there's a word for that, isn't there.  What's that word again...

I don't know... but I'm sure I'll remember by the end of post.

Hey-- does anyone remember this?

It's THE world's most infectious melody, but... seriously... what's the name of that...?



Anyway, so I'm doing a proposal for sort of a biopic about, you know, the last couple years of clusterfuck with the erstwhile career, and that stuff takes some serious focus, and in the meantime I've got --

Hey, did you know Pandora introduced me to a whole bunch of new music, including

This guy, whom I love-- 

And this guy, and I just want to go back in time and tell him "It's okay baby.  We can make it better, I know it!"  Because his music, just... it just calls to me so hard and it's a time and a book and a character, just screaming to get out, but instead of screaming, he's plucking this subtle, breathy music, and... just...

I can't even...



So these guys are singing to me, and they're amazing and soulful and they just feed something in me, but I can't obsess about them because... wait, what do I have to do again?

Ethan!  Yeah, that's right.  Ethan is progressing really well, lots and lots of Ethan and Jonah and it's so painful because they're doing this terrible delicate dance of "let's just be friends" when Ethan's so afraid to relate to anyone like a relationship because his relationships... well... just trust me.  Bad.

Anyway, so right.  I need to be writing a book proposal and I need to be writing Ethan and... what was that other thing...

Promises!

Crap!  How could I forget!  I just got the galley for Promises and I need to edit it and OMG!  IT'S OUT IN THREE WEEKS!!!

Cover art?  Cover art?  *pant* *wheeze*  *stress*  It's coming.  I know.  I've seen a sketch.  I have.  There was a sketch.  Needed tweaking.  Fuck.   Three weeks?   LESS?  


Yeah.  So I've got to do that.

And did I mention the kids are out of school?

And Mate set up his computer right next to mine at the kitchen table so he can input stuff as soccer registrar while I work?

And the dog is sleeping in my tank top?

And my nephew graduated this week and we had his party today?

And... wait... my friend Kait just sent me something shiny and someone on Facebook presented me with THIS which I'd have to be insane not to want to make but... hey... Don't I have something else to do in the meantime?

You know, how bout if I sit down, watch some Teen Wolf or maybe some Defiance, and I'm pretty sure it'll come to me.

But first, I have to make food for all the people.  And they seem to want some sort of attention from me. And when that's done I've got to walk the dog.

And wait--

What's that word again?

What's the name of that song?

The Last Day of School and Why "Amy Lane"

My computer is having trouble loading pictures, and if that doesn't stop, well, my post is going to be way more boring than I'd planned.

Anyway-- today was the kids' last day of school.  They were so excited-- we picked them up and took them to buy a book and then took them for frozen yoghurt.  We got to look at Squish's report card, at least-- Zoomboy's is still hidden in his backpack.  But one of the nice things that Squish's report card had was this picture, right here, from the beginning of the year.

Isn't she adorable?

Well, she's more than adorable.  She's smart-- she's now at or above grade level for pretty much every category on her report card.  That Let's Read sign?  Yeah. She can do that.  Her dad and I are SO PROUD of her.

Because seriously--

See how she's grown!

But look at her expression-- Squishy to the last.  For the record?  My Squish gives the best squishy hugs of any kid around.  (And that white thing she's carrying is the alpaca bunny named Unicorn.  And now you know.)

And if I sound a little maudlin, it's because I had a sudden attack of Chicken-sans today.  There I was, driving to go get the little kids, and suddenly I was remembering that, in the past, every time I've gone and had a little mini-school's-out-party, Chicken was there.  And suddenly I wanted my Chicken home, very very badly.

So badly in fact that Mate tried to move up her ticket--and, in fact, spent money we don't have to move it up three days.  Chicken was grateful too--but seriously.  Who gave children permission to grow up and the world permission to change?  Oughttabeafuckin' law.



 And, of course, Zoomboy continues to be my little monkey man-- can you tell?

This picture, was, in fact, taken when Chicken sent me a request for a picture of him acting like a monkey.  I tried to send her this one, but she sent back, "No, mom, I need one where I can see his face and he's not so fucking creepy!"

I had to give her credit-- she sort of nailed it in one.  But that doesn't keep Zoomboy from being damned clever too.  This morning, he was petting the dog as it slept in my shirt, and he said, "There is no training bra for this mission, soldier-- booby-diving is always in the deep end!" I almost died.  Damned funny, that one-- can you tell?

So, aside from that--and the post I made for RRW that you can find here, which is sort of kicking ass-- not much is doing.  I did have a funny moment on Twitter though, that led to the next part of this post.

This picture here is why we sent Chicken to school.I was listening to Pandora when Aimee Mann's song, "Momentum" came on.   I tweeted that Pandora read my mind again-- I love this song, and it's a little obscure.  And then Stephanie Grober-- the publicist for Riptide-- replied that she loved Aimee Mann.  Sensing a kindred soul, I told her that I had named myself after the singer, and that's when I realized-- hey!  Not everybody reading this blog knows this story.  Those of you who have been around for a while might, but those of you who are new?  Well, I figured I'd tell it again, just for Stephanie, cause she's nice, and for shits and giggles in general.


So, about 2.6 zillion years ago, I had moved from Loomis to San Francisco to go to school.  I was living with my grandmother and taking bus from Daly City down the peninsula.  Daly City was not a great place to be in the late 80's, especially not at ten o'clock at night.

I was SO fresh off the turnip truck I can hardly stand it.  I had a braid of red-rabid-squirrel down my back and freckles and big brown eyes, and, essentially, I was a lot like Chicken without the confidence or the travel under my belt.  And I was also much thinner, and I was getting hit on.

So there I was, listening to Aimee Mann, wanting to be back in the foothills with my boyfriend (who is now Mate) when I got chatted up again.  And I didn't want to tell the guy to piss off, so I gave him the equivalent of a fake number-- a fake number and fake address.

I said my name was Amy Lane-- Lane is Mate's middle name.

Back in those days, before texting, e-mailing, chatting, tweeting, blogging, Facebooking, or cell phones that wouldn't break a window instead of the other way around, we had two options.  One was the insanely expensive long distance call, and the other was the letter.

I wrote Mate a letter a night.  (And he, the romantic that he is, saved every one of them.  I didn't know this until we moved in together.  *sniffle*)

That night I told him that when we were married and done with school, I'd be a writer, and I'd go by Amy Lane.  I kept that as sort of a hope.  When I wrote my first books-- not actually Vulnerable, even before that when I thought I'd write for Harlequin, I submitted Amy Lane as my pen name.  When we decided to self-publish Vulnerable, publishing under Amy Lane was a no brainer.  Amy Lane was still a hope, right, that this thing I'd always dreamed of could come true.  I think I realized that it takes a while for dreams to come true when I had to change my pin number.  It occurred to me that anyone who knew me knew of Amy Lane, and that a whole lot of people who didn't know me still knew Amy Lane, and maybe I should change it to something else.

So, you know, it wasn't a pin number and it wasn't a pipe dream and it wasn't a fake name a 19 YO made up to get an unwanted douchebag off her back.

It was me :-)

If You're Going to Live Outside the Law...

You Have to Live Honest~ Bob Dylan

So I had a long conversation with my dad today--he was on his second Mike's Hard Lemonade (or was it third) and was a little mellow and a little nostalgic, and he remembered some of his best moments as a nurse--and as a would-be patient--and I was reminded again of my roots and how I got to be me.

See, it all comes back to Dean and John Winchester.

We've talked about this before-- the American Romantic Archetype, right?  For those of you who weren't here for that, or forgot, because I talk an awful damn lot, I'm going to give a recap.

There are different heroic archetypes-- epic, romantic, Gothic, satiric, tragic--to name the basic ones.  The American Romantic archetype has some ver specific traits:

* a solid belief in the individual
* flaws that make it difficult to deal with (or often just one flaw: stubbornness or hubris)
* a bad romantic track record (see that first and second quality)
* a tendency to live very self-sufficiently
* a definite distrust of much of society's infrastructure-- law, corporate, educational, health services--all bureaucracies have the building blocks of evil built into their very cornerstones
* a firm, uncompromising moral code that has little to do with society's structure but that is still based on an idea of fairness and justice
* a familiar geography-- whether it's rural America, a really tall building, or wilderness
* uncompromising emotional attachments--a sort of sentimental approach to human interaction that's often surprising.

You all know the American Romantic archetype-- he's in our favorite movies and television: Dean and JohnWinchester (but not Sam), John McClane, Arrow, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Hawkeye (all three of them, actually-- Hawkeye Pierce, Nathaniel from Last of the Mohicans, and Jeremy Renner's deliciously ripped archer superhero) , the entire crew from The Italian Job and even The Expendables-- they are our American Romantic heroes.

We worship them.

People like my dad have spent their lives being them.

Some stories about my father:

*  He makes Deacon Winters and Dean Winchester look like whiners:

  He once got his foot stepped on by a horse--popped his little toe open like a grape, you could look at the squished sides of it and see bone.  He hobbled into the house, my mom gave him a vicodin, and he took a shower.  Yes, you heard me right.  He was like, "I'm not feeling pain, and I don't smell good.  Shower first, doctor's second."  He walked into the hospital, reluctantly accepted a wheelchair, and when three different doctors and two nurses looked at his foot, said, "Oh shit!" and then wrapped it up again, he simply nodded and said, "Yup, it's bad."  When the nurse's aid came in to clean it, she started out by gently immersing it in a saline bath.  He said, "You know, I'm pretty stoned right now--how about you scrub the holy fuck out of that thing so I'm not back in a week because of infection."  He made her get a brush and put her back into it.  They week after they told him he may want to put a shoe back on, he was in motorcycle boots and on the back of a motorcycle.

There's a scene in Forever Promised when Deacon has the skin of his shin taken off by a horse and he doesn't tell Crick until later.  That scene right there?  Has my dad and American Romantic Hero written all over it.  Did I mention self-sufficiency?

Yeah.

*  His best hospital stories are like my favorite teaching stories-- he had a tendency to look at the kids that were easily written off and finding something wonderful about them.  Today he told me about being in the float pool (a common thing for nurses to do before they retire) and giving report to a woman who seemed vaguely familiar.  She said, "You don't remember me--but I remember you.  Thank you."

On his way home, it hit him.  The last time he'd seen her, she'd been an eighteen year old mother of two, and he'd been a pediatric nurse.  Her son had been deathly ill, and he'd told her she was smart, was asking the right questions, was going to do just fine.  Now I know a lot of people who would writer her off as a teenaged mother, but this woman asked my dad if she could be a nurse when her kids got older.  He said of course--she already had potential.

And because of that, she did.

See?  Looking at the individual.

Another example?  The 50 year old heroin addict who came in with an abscess on his ass because that's where he'd been injecting.  Instead of judging the guy, my dad just said, "Man, isn't this uncomfortable?  Aren't you getting too old for this shit?"  And the guy said, "Yeah.  Yeah I am."

Six months later, he came in to show my dad that he'd been clean since that moment.

Again, the individual, not the crime.

*  Uhm, run-ins with the law?

Let's see... which stories, which stories, which stories...

Well, there was the time I was asleep in the back of Brother Bus as a kid.  I was about five, my dad had long hair and was going on no sleep and too much coffee, and the dog was deaf--but not stupid.  The plainclothesmen who pulled him over didn't like the green peace flags he used as curtains to separate the front seat from the back seat.  (This was the seventies-- no seatbelts, no child seats, no airbags?  Not a problem.  The peace flags hanging behind the driver?  Those were a problem.)  Anyway, one guy questioned my dad while the other guy shined a light in the back of the car.  The light hit the floor, no problem.  It hit the dog, no problem.  It hit me, and the dog lunged for the tiny back window of the VW bus, jaws wide open, teeth ready to eat the fucker on the other side.

The guy jumped fifteen feet back, and told my dad to go his merry way.  Either A. they liked him (not likely) or B. the thought of dealing with that scary dog and the now-screaming little girl was a bad thing (more likely) but either way?  My dad really did just invite trouble by being, didn't he?

There's the time my mom had to bail him out of jail because you didn't leave a friend behind even if he started it and was mostly an asshole in the first place.

There's the time he eluded the cop that had been chasing him for speeding over five miles down hwy 80 by diving into our driveway after turning off his lights.  (The, uhm, statute of limitations has run out of this one, by the way.)

There's the twenty-five--odd speeding tickets he accrued over thirty years while my mom wept none-too-silently over their insurance bills.

There's the time the ball joint on his buddy's trailer broke while he was driving up the hill on '80, drifted across three lanes of traffic, flipped over, and ended up on the divider, and his first notion was to run. HIs buddy talked him out of it, thank God, but by this point in his life, he was pretty sure the cops would string up his intestines on a flag pole just to laugh at them.  It was not his fault-- no charges were pressed, but seriously-- that's my dad.

The list goes on.  The truth is, people who go out into the world and try to push at the edges of it end up breaking boundaries.  In our case, those boundaries are mostly legal.  And since our intentions are never bad, well, then, the legal boundaries are mostly just guidelines, right?  Not really rules.

*  And the work thing.

I've told this story before, because I'm proud of it.  After twenty-years working at a place where they really hated him, he went to a place where they didn't.  The boss who interviewed him said, "So, I'm going to have to ask your old employer for your personnel file.  What am I going to find?"

His reply?

"My personnel file has it's own zip code.  It's got wheels to enable it's easy transportation.  They keep it in a separate room."

His boss nodded.  "Okay.  I'll keep that in mind."

He (to his immense surprise) got a call back.  The interviewer said, "You must be the best nurse I've ever met."

My dad said, "What do you mean?"

"They hated you.  I mean, they hated you.  But they couldn't fire you.  Anyone who was hated that much but is still employed must be incredibly good at his job."

Now see-- that's my dad.  He's a rebel, but by now he's a rebel within the system.

I on the other hand, have never understood the system at all.

There's a couple of reasons I bring this up.

One is the response I got to Racing in the Sun.  A lot of you loved it.  Loved loved loved it.  And a lot of you got to the end and went, "No no no no no no no no!!!  Who would do that?  Do we want to encourage that action?  Would we want someone who could do that walking and talking around us?"

It's an interesting question, and, in fact, the question I wanted people to ask and discuss when they read it.  Because the more I write, and the more I look for different stories and (in some cases) have different stories find me, the more I realize that the core of the American Romantic hero runs solidly through my work.  Yeah, those of you who haven't been paying attention are going to say, "Duh!  They're romances, dumbass!"  But those of you who have been with me for the last few hundred words-- and who have read some of my stuff--may have a lightbulb moment.

"Oh my God!"  You might say.  "This totally explains why Dex and Kane wouldn't call the police on Scott!"

Or

"Oh!!!  I get it-- that's why Shane couldn't stay a cop!  He thought outside the box!"

Or

"Okay-- that whole benevolent anarchic oligarchy/patriarchy thing at Green's Hill, where the family runs the show by necessity, but they do it under the social radar?  I get that.  That's an American Romantic hero sort of political structure.  As in, no political structure-- no democracy--the leaders act on behalf of the people because that's what American Romantic heroes do."  (For the record, King Arthur sort of functioned like this too.  So does the hunting community in Supernatural, and, very often, pack dynamics in most of the shape shifting societies we imagine up as a whole.)

Because I tend to write blue collar people.

Now, part of this is because I was brought up a nurse's kid in a community of doctor's kids.

Part of this is because when Mate and I moved out-- and pretty much ever since-- the education/income dynamic has been exactly reversed of that.  Mate and I have been the most educated people in our neighborhood.  Now I take walks.  I get to know my neighbors.  My neighbors are, very usually, not educated at all--sometimes, not even with a GED.  But I like people in general.  I strive really hard to find the dignity in the people I'm talking to.  I've said this before--I think hard work, honest work, is a sacrament, and belittling someone else's work demeans all of humanity.

So when I write, I'm finding the dignity in the people I've known, and, very often the people I've taught.

And when I write--and when I live--I tend to believe that the authority structure is often less qualified to solve our problems than the individual.  So, well, that's what my characters do.

It's not always a popular belief system.  It has often gotten me into trouble.

It, in the end, is the thing that resulted in losing my teaching job.

It wasn't just that I let the students read the books--the fact was (and this point was made several times by two different lawyers) that my students could have gotten those books in the nearby library without even an ID check. The thing I did wrong--really did wrong--was break a rule.  It didn't matter that if rule was moral or not, and it didn't matter that my students didn't suffer a negative impact.  What mattered was that there was a rule and it was broken.  

For those of you who are reading this and humoring me, (Yeah, Amy, but it was really about the books, right?  We know it.  It was the sex.  You knew it was bad that there was sex in the books, and that's why the slap on the wrist and the witch hunt!)  I will leave you with this.

I just got the verdict on my teaching credential.  After a 120 day suspension, I am free to teach again--and I take solace in that.  Someday in the future, I will have the option of searching for another low-paying abusive job that will break my heart.  It's more tempting than I'm making it sound--you'll have to take my word on that.

But on the paperwork--and, in fact, on all of the paperwork-- that has followed me through this mess (it's got it's own bookshelf, I shit you not) one of the things that stands out the most is something that I didn't do to be defiant, or even think was going to be a problem at all.

When I was told that I wasn't going to be teaching the next day, I left a note to my students.  I made it light--I said I was in the doghouse, and that I didn't know when I was coming back, but that they needed to respect the sub, and trust that their grades would count.  I felt like this was important to do-- two years before, we'd had a rash of teachers quitting mid semester, and leaving their grades in disarray.  I'd taught a number of kids who had to take a class completely over again for no fault of their own.  That promise was important, I felt.  I knew who their sub was going to be, I knew she wouldn't let them down, but I knew they needed some reassurance or they'd be unmanageable.

Of all the things involved in this case, that note caused me the most trouble.  I could admit that letting the students have the books broke a rule that I understood.  I didn't see the need for the rule, but I understood the rule.

I didn't understand this rule.

The committee was disturbed by the message--and by the "us vs. them" quality of the message.  The idea that it was my students and I vs. the administration.

Well, my peers made their disrespect of me pretty clear.  If I'm getting phone calls from fellow teachers to send kids back because they're not following dress code, my peers are not on my side.  With a very few exceptions (my principal when I left being one of them) my administration was not on my side.  Upper level administration was never on my side, even before the guy who'd never met me, but who called me a pornographer to the press.

But the kids--the blue collar workers of the school system--they were on my side.  They were the population I was serving.

And so I guess that was my flaw.  That I never saw it any other way.

So, I'm not going to save hostages from terrorists.  I'm not going to save the world from the apocalypse.  I'm not going to rescue my love interest from a hostile army.

I've resigned myself to these failings.

But that doesn't mean you can't tell who my heroes are, and why they're important to who I am.  And who the people in my head are.

And who the people in my life are.

And to the way I think the world should work in general.

And why I think literature is important.

And everything I believe, ever.

So, well, yeah.

Those talks with Dad.  They're sort of intense.  There's probably a reason he's drinking the Hard Lemonade and not me, ya think?

A Day in the Life of a Chiwhowhat

I have to pee.  It can wait.

It's dark in the people cave, and warm and--wait!  The young one just bapped me on the nose.  I should move.

It can wait.

Nooooo!  The big squishy one who brings food is leaving.  She's going to the white-tiled front lawn, to do her business.  *sigh*  She never lets me watch.  The cat, yes, but me?  Let me try anyway-- nope.  That cat is laughing at me.  Asshole.

Okay, she's out now, good.  Time stopped for a minute.  It was terrible.

And now to the place with the food and the big flat thing.  And the glowing thing.  I don't like the glowing thing.  She pays way too much attention to that.  Pay attention to me!  Pay attention to me!!!  Pay attention to meeeeeee!

Yes!  Yes!  I'm in her lap, isn't that awesome?  In her lap!  Let me lick!  Let me nibble!  No licking?  No biting?  Not even behind the ears?  Oh good... behind the ears.  Licking behind the ears.  I like that. Ooops... that was in the ear.  Hey... earwax!  Behind the ears!  Behind the-- Oooh!  Down the shirt!

Head first, into the neck, ahhhh... There I am, on the big squishy flesh pillows she carries with her.  Ohmibob!  It's like they were made for me!  Zzzzzz...

Oh hell, gotta pee.  Gotta pee.  Gotta... zzzzz...

Okay, she's getting up.  Good, cause there's gonna be a walk and I gotta pee, and gotta hunch... lemme get on the blanket cave and stare at her.  Makes her move faster.  Stare.  Stare.  Stare.  Zzzzzz STARTLE twitch stare...

Omibob!  Holy shit! Holy shit!  Holy shit!  She's here!  She's here!  She's out of the white-tile-lawn and she's here!  I love her I love her I love her... Go for a walk!

*wiggle* *wiggle* *wiggle* *shake* *shake* *shake*  Go for a walk go for a walk go for a walk--

A LEASH?  What do you mean a leash, no no no no... oh hell.  Okay.  Fine.  Go for a... whathehellwuzat?

Squirrel?  Rat?  Gopher?  Mole? Vole? 

Oh, I hope it's a vole, I don't even know what one--whizz.  Lawn, bush, crack in the sidew--whizz.  Telephone pole-- oh, hey, Dogzilla pissed here!  And the pomeranian on the corner!  And that dog that wants to eat me!  And... hey, don't pull me away-- I had at least six other dogs to ID!  Wait... wait for it... whizz.  

And here we are!  Back home! Time for a dump!  Ahhh...

Inside?  Am I inside?  Oh look!  Skinny guy!  Skinny guy!  Love skinny guy-- is he going left?  Is he going right?  Left? Right? Left?  Right?  Omibob the frickin' choices!  "Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!" Oh yes!  He has my snout!  He's wrestling me to the ground!  Oh joy oh joy oh joy oh joy!  I love this guy!

Outside!  I'm outside!  Oh, I don't like outside, it's too much like--whizz--like outside!

Gotta go inside!  Move, asshole cat, I've got to go inside!  Move!  Move I tell you!  Move? Move?  Please move?  Oh come on, asshole cat!  Don't lay down in front of the door!  Please?  Please?  Please?  Please?  "Yip!  Yip!  Yip! Yip!"  Hey, the skinny guy is there.  Let me in, skinny guy!  Wait?  What is that sound you are making?  Stop making that sound and let me in!  Let me in let me in let me in... "Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!"  Yeah, asshole cat!  Get up off that porch!  Get up! Get up! Get up! HA!  YOU GOT UP!

Where was I going?  Ah, yes.  Squishy woman... let me up let me up let me up... yay!  head in the shirt, ass in the air-- hey, does she like smelling that as much as I like smelling other dogs' asses?  Here, let me wiggle that a little so she gets the whole aroma.

Ah... pillows...zzzzzz..

Go for a ride?  Yes, lets!  Go for a ride!  Get the kids!  Sit in the middle... no, no, can't sit in squishy woman's lap, must remember that.  yay!  Kids!  Now quick!  Go to the place with the big yellow arches, so I can eat fries.  Please?  Please?  Please?  You didn't get any fries?  I like your pillows, lady but you suck!

Oh yay!  The kids!  The kids!  The kids are gonna take me for a walk!  They're great. They let me smell all the dogs at the telephone pole.  Kids are great!  Here, let me crap on the neighbor's lawn, because they don't remember plastic bags!

Oh, it's squishy woman again!  I love that woman!  Let me lick let me lick let me lick-- no licking?  Not even... yeah... behind the ears... it's so good... lick lick lick lick lick lick... love ears.  Love licking behind the ears... tasty tasty tasty tasty skin behind the ears... wait-- there's my pillows!  zzzz...

And omibob!  She's cooking dinner.  Feed me.  Feed me.  Feed me!  Thank you thank you thank you... feed me more?  Here, I'll hop for it!  Hop hop hop hop hop... aren't I cute?  Aren't I?  I'm frickin' adorable.  Ah.  Was wonderful.  Feed me more.  No?  Wait... where's the big kid who likes to sit...

Ah... feed me?  Thank you big kid.  I'll sit some more.  Feed me?  Goooooood big kid.

Thank you so much for feeding me... the risk of starvation was real.

Last walk?  Excellent. No, no no no don't talk to the neighbors!!!  Bored.  I'm bored now.  Here, let me pee in there garage!  Nope!  Not bored anymore, we can go?  Awesome!  Not bored now.  No bored.

Ah, the walks over, the kids are all in bed, finally.  And there she is, squishy woman in front of the big glowing god.  I could go sleep with skinny guy, but he's not comfy.  Okay, squishy woman.  Up one more ti--zzzzz...

We're going to bed?  We're going to bed?  We're going to bed?  Yes.  I feel like dancing!  Let me dance!  Let me dance!  Dancing on the sheets... I'm dancing on the... okay okay okay... into the blanket cave.  Ahhh... Good blanket cave.  Nice and warm.  And dark.  Ohkay, Squishy woman.  Let's curl up and go for it.

ZZZZZZZZZZZ....

Day Trippers!

* First off-- Tracy and Tina, congratulations-- you both won a copy from the paperback pot, so well done!  And thanks for getting back to me so soon:-)

Okay-- now...

Mate is on sabbatical until early July.  His entire plan of sabbatical revolves around fixing the bathroom.  I know my Mate.  I know that he loves to travel.  He can finish the bathroom, and it could be GLORIOUS.  But still, he'd go, "I didn't really do anything."  Now, he's got some other plans-- he's training to run a half-marathon, and we're going to spend the night in San Francisco so I can greet him when he comes in from that, and we'll run around and shop during the day because, hey, Embarcadero, right?

And we're taking the kids to Monterey when Chicken is here.

But, still...  Memorial day was coming, and usually?  We just spend the weekend, well, spending the weekend.

This time, I wanted something different.  "Let's go to Tahoe.  For the halibut."

And so we did.

And Mate was... well, brilliant as always.  He looked up things to do, and the first thing he picked was the gondola ride up the hill.  GLORIOUS.  Seriously-- so pretty.  I can't even... just wonderful.

We got up there, ate some totally decent food, and came back down so Mate and the kids could play miniature golf.  Then we went to Sock City where I bought that terrifying Sock Monkey Serial Killer/Bank Robber mask that he wore for the rest of the weekend.  *shudder*  He promised to wake me up wearing it, and yes, he did.

Squish got herself (with a little help of my bank account) a big fluffy bunny made with alpaca fur.  We bought it about a half a mile from the hotel and then walked back, and, no lie, she TALKED to it, and about it, and extolled the virtues of it's incomparable flufftasticness and it's peerlessness in the realm of fluffantasy for the entire walk back.  She asked me what she should name it, and I said, Unicorn, after that stuffed unicorn in Despicable Me, the one that made the little kid grab it and shake it and shout, "IT'S JUST SO FLUFFY!"  And she took my advice.

Which is how she has an alpaca rabbit named Unicorn.  0.0

And the crowds weren't bad at all, and the day, Sunday?  Well, we didn't realize until the overcast today, Monday, but it was a gift from the Goddess.  Truly.  We went walking along the shoreline, and it was just so pretty I wanted to cry.

The ride home sort of sucked-- there was a car accident in Alta, and we went about a mile in a forty-five minute space, but once that cleared up, it was smooth sailing.

We'd forgotten Zoomboy's medication, but that's okay.  I compensated with a Starbuck's Vanilla Latte before we left this morning, and about the weirdest thing that happened was this:

"Mom, Dad, you know, I've figured out what Darth Vader and I have in common.  We've both suffered a terrible loss."

He was dead serious about this, so his father and I just looked at each other and mouthed, "Terrible loss?"

And then I got it.

"Zoomboy, are you talking about the dog?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding soberly.  "That broke my heart."

Well, I hope he holds out for the sand people taking me out in my sleep before he decides he wants to be an enforcer for the terrorist mob.

Anyway, we're home now, I"m snacking on snap peas and hummus (food of the gods!) and I'm wishing everyone a happy Memorial Day.

V.J. Summers posted a tribute to Memorial Day and mentioned my book, Keeping Promise Rock, and what I felt about Crick four years ago when I wrote that book has not changed.  Thank you, all men and women in service of our country.  I know that some of you (a friend of mine, actually) don't know what to say to this.  My friend says "I just wanted to make my life mean something."  Service to others does that.  Just thinking bigger than you and yours makes your service meaningful, and behaving with honor serves us all.  Well done.