SUMMER OF THE STOLEN DOG
Synopsis:
A coming-of-age novel set in the summer of l955, in a hardscrabble neighborhood inhabited by both white and colored people, (back when the word colored was used), it has a host of characters ranging from the ordinary to unlikely to the bizarre, in the Hudson River Valley town of Neverskill, New York when Lolly Morici turns thirteen. She is a feisty, innocent, tender-hearted girl who has seen a lot, exposed as she's been to the often insane, antisocial and outrageous antics of the grownups around her. The heartbeat of the story is a gentle black coonhound her father, Frank, tipsily steals from an abusive owner and gives to Lolly for her birthday. The dog has a limp and walks in a buoyant, endearing way, inspiring her to name him Hop. Hop is the embodiment of love, loyalty and goodness as dogs are. Lolly's next door neighbor and best friend is Zephyr Jaworski, better known as Z. Tom, is her younger brother, whom she hates at the beginning of the summer and loves by the end. Lolly, Z, Tom and Hop witness an unfolding drama precipitated by Frank's infidelity with Judy, an unhinged, fatal-attraction waitress who wheedles her way into Lolly's family, befriending Mona, her cussed and ailing mother, and ultimately is out for revenge when Frank tries to break things off. The plot revolves around how to get rid of Judy. It's a story of the complications of love. How good people sometimes do bad things and bad people sometimes fool you. The time span is brief, a mere summer, yet is filled with adventure, tension, redemption and forgiveness.
Excerpts:
I was pretty sure my father was planning on having Judy murdered or at least somehow make her disappear. Not that he was the sort of person inclined to hurt even a bug, but that's how bad the situation had become. Pacing, chain-smoking, his coat-black eyes narrowed with hard thinking much of the time. All things pointed in that direction. For one, Judy was hellbent on destroying his marriage, which he would never tolerate considering he was deep-down crazy about my mother, saying on a regular basis to Tom and me "your mother is a some kind of saint and don't you kids forget it." He would have been lost without her. She handled all the money, such as it was. Every Friday he turned his IBM paycheck over to her, which she'd put in a small drawer of the secretary, a purposeful piece of furniture in the dining room, (which you felt might also hold the truth of who she was, my mother, but that's another story), until first thing Monday morning when she could get to the bank. He didn't even know how to write a check.
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Mona often said to me: “I wash my hands of you, Lady Godiva,” which I counted on her saying. It made me free to roam the neighborhood in my bare feet in the black of summer nights and do whatever the heck I wanted. To look in the windows of the bars down on the corner and watch the colored people dance and have the time of their lives. To climb the thick boughs of Octavia's black cherry tree to spy on the drunks staggering in and out of The Broken Barn. Free to go down under the bridge with Z to do things nobody had to know about, such as taking off our shirts and practicing our kissing techniques. But, mostly free to go places with Frank. Things happened with Frank. Unimaginable and sometimes dangerous things. Not the sort of things you would expect to happen with your own father.
© 2013 Joan Embree
