The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

by Robert Dugoni

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It seemed my mother handed me a new book every week: Huckleberry Finn, The Black Stallion, Old Yeller, The Mousewife, The Jungle Book.

catawampus

“Your father worked so hard all his life, and for what? He’s going to end up here? It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

Discretion and self-control were not hallmarks of her personality.

One minute you’re celebrating graduation, and the next your father is near death.

jamb,

Pavlovian.

contemporaneous

David had to agree to stay away from his daughter and his ex-wife until the matter was heard the following week.

This is where I decided that Bateman needed to die in a tragic accident to tie everything up.

“She’s dead,” Montoya said softly.

Boo! I wanted it to be Bateman!

“He shot her. Then he shot himself.”

Good enough. Now who gets Daniela?

Daniela would be raised by an aunt in Tucson,

Of course.

I wanted to believe what every person on the planet wants to believe—that God had a plan for me, and that “God’s will” was not just a parent’s answer to silence a child who asked too many questions.

I was running. I was running from Trina’s death, running from the memory of David Bateman, and running from a faith that seemed to solve every problem not with a solution but with an excuse. “It’s God’s will.”

Orbis’s

I didn’t consider my work as “God’s work,” largely because I didn’t believe in my mother’s God. If anything, I’d classify myself as a Buddhist.

This was my purgatory, to atone for my sins.

“I’ve led a wonderful life, Sam, more wonderful than I had a right to ever expect. God gave me the kindest, gentlest man to be my husband, and he gave me the most precious baby boy.”

escarpment.

Massabielle grotto,

I had not recovered my faith, but I had mellowed with age.

would circumvent the substantial lines that would otherwise threaten to keep me from attaining my goals—having my mother go to confession, receive the Eucharist at Mass, and be dipped in the healing waters, all in a single day.

Act of Contrition,”

grotto.

“Everything happens for a reason, Samuel. Never forget that. Have faith in God’s will.”

The beads were well-worn and misshapen; the gold crucifix and the links between the beads had lost their luster.

second decade,

mantle,

I’ll offer my pain up for some poor soul in purgatory.

Spirito Santo,

Prayers are like coins you put into a piggy bank. You store them for when you most need them.”

There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.

He was offering me the gift of perspective. My father was telling me that while we tend to remember the dramatic incidents that change history—Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Nixon’s resignation, and the Loma Prieta earthquake—we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our

calendars but our hearts: The day we marry. The days our children are born. Their first step. Their first word. Their first day of school. And when our children grow, we remember those moments with a touch of melancholy: the day they get their driver’s license, the day we drive them to college, the day they marry, and the day they have their children.

We realize it is in those quiet moments that each of us has the ability to make ...

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