The Shortest Distance Between Two Women: A Novel - Softcover

Radish, Kris

 
9780553805413: The Shortest Distance Between Two Women: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 055380541X ISBN 13: 9780553805413
Verlag: Bantam, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Bestselling author Kris Radish takes the emotional measure of mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends in her wise and wonderful new novel of a woman unsure if she’s on the verge of a breakdown—or a breakthrough.…

After all these years is there any way you would see me again? When Emma Lauryn Gilford heard the voice on her answering machine, she thought, How dare he? She’s put a lot of distance between herself and Samuel, filling her life with work and family, lavishing her attention on her lovely nieces and a garden that’s the pride of Higgins, South Carolina. So why does his voice still have the power to make her heart skip? Why can’t she stop thinking about this man she’d forgotten so long ago?

Emma has always been the dependable daughter, the mediator of the controlled chaos always surrounding her high-strung sisters and her widowed mother, Higgins’s own senior citizen seductress. But with the annual Gilford family reunion just around the corner, at least two of her sisters approaching meltdown, and her favorite teenage niece taking sanctuary in her home, Emma’s concrete wall of self-denial is showing cracks. And on the other side is a life she can’t put off living a moment longer.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kris Radish, author of six novels, now lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she is at work on her new novel, which Bantam will publish in 2010.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One


THE FIRST QUESTION:

After all these years is there any chance in sweet hell you would see me again?

The very moment Emma Lauryn Gilford presses the play button on her answering machine and hears the voice of a man she has not seen or heard from at least two pant sizes ago boldly asking her if there is any chance in sweet hell that she would see him again, she feels something physically dislodge itself from a space just below her heart and swirl through her body like a wild Frisbee.

The Frisbee first cruises through her head, erasing every normal thought and feeling that her usually sane, and usually predictable, mind might create. Emma can feel it race past her chest and twirl its way towards her stomach—ignoring, of course, her heart, which she mistakenly thinks has been on solid and safe ground during the past fifteen-plus years since she’s seen the actual face of the man who just dared to leave her a phone message.

That bastard.

How dare he.

Peaceful, poised, restrained, controlled, happy, and usually quiet and lovely, Emma Gilford has a sudden and totally unexpected urge to scream and hit something at the same moment. If only she could move. If only she could really do what her mind has imagined.

What in the world is happening to me?

Emma tries to slow her breathing, knows it’s beyond imperative to regain control over her forty-three-year-old body and mind before his face rises up from the now ancient space just behind her concrete wall of denial, where she placed him all those years ago amid a mess of other events and people.

What Emma cannot see and does not admit is that after all these years Samuel’s head is still peeking at her from the top of her inner concrete wall. There is now a hint of gray edging out from the natural part that runs down the left side of the top of his head, but it is surely his head. His head with its strands of hair bleached at the edges from hours and days and weeks and years in the sun doing his work. His eyes as dark and seductive as dancing shadows at midnight. His nose that some might consider too big but a nose that Emma always thought made him look the part of the serious intellectual. His neck supported by a shaft of muscles that made it impossible for him to ever find a shirt that fit properly. His head always tipped to one side when he was listening to her and he did always listen to her like no one else had ever listened to her before or since. His brain filled with stories and light and a passion for his work and for her that made her knees weak and her heart lurch. His lips that could dance across her body in a ballet of love that Emma thought, wished, hoped and prayed had finally disappeared from her mind after all these years of working so hard to forget.

All those years since the last time she heard his voice.

All those years when the seconds, minutes and hours of her life have surely created new stories and experiences that even Emma would call living without realizing her heart has remained suspended.

All those years when the nieces and nephews have grown higher, their mothers—her sisters—a bit wider and amazingly even louder than when they were growing up, and her mother, as the leader of all things Gilford, has remained as boisterous, often hilarious and always entertaining.

All those years when Emma buried herself so enthusiastically in her own work, the lives of those same three sisters, and all those soccer, football and volleyball games, school plays, junior high arguments, voice changes, and first crushes as if she were the real mother and not just the beloved and always available auntie.

All those years.

“Damn you, Samuel,” Emma finally manages to say again as she wills the swirl of emotion to stop slicing the bricks off of her sanctuary where even more of Samuel is revealed.

His shoulders.

His arms.

The two absolutely astounding and terribly masculine bones just below his throat where Emma loved to rest her fingers.

The way he would simply take her hand and place it there, right there, when they were sitting, standing, lying, breathing, talking, laughing.

And they did laugh.

She remembers it now, while she places her hand across her own throat where the laughter seemed to rest back then as if it was waiting for any opportunity to spring loose, as an intoxicating mix of joy and lightness that astounds her as much now as it did the last time she recalls Samuel’s laughter mingling with hers. It was back when everything seemed possible, when romance was as much a part of her day as brushing her teeth, when Samuel was so much a part of her present, and so, she thought, of her future as well.

Emma was finishing up graduate school and living not unlike a cloistered nun in an efficiency apartment that was the size of a large shoebox. She had not yet moved back to her hometown and had not yet stepped back into the comfortable shoes of sister, daughter, beloved auntie. She was single and free and young and she had Samuel.

Emma allows herself one sweet smile as she remembers Samuel shuffling out of her tiny bathroom in her ratty flowered bathrobe, wearing her pink bunny slippers after having sprayed his hair with half a can of her hairspray so that it stuck straight up. He’d looked as if he had just touched an open electrical circuit.

“Oh my God, Samuel, what are you doing?” she’d gasped.

“I’ve decided to be one of your sisters today,” he said as if this was something he did every other Friday.

“What?”

“You are homesick, Em. Yesterday you called all of your sisters in the morning and again at night. Oh yes, and your mother at least twice that I know of. So I thought if I could just be your sister for a day, you might feel better, get some work done, and that would be enough to keep you happy until you get back home for a visit.”

“But you are too tall to be a Gilford.”

“I’m adopted,” he shot back.

“Adopted,” Emma repeated, laughing so hard she rolled off the couch, which was also her bed.

“Yes, your mother wanted five daughters, not just four, because four girls and their periods and all that fighting and jealousy and giggling and emotions were not enough for her.”

“You know all about sisters and girls?”

Samuel winked and opened up the bathrobe to expose himself and said, “Yes, darling, I know all about girls.”

Even as Emma knew that he knew more about some of her sisters than she wished he did, she could not stop laughing. She laughed as he made her breakfast and he started the lapel of the bathrobe on fire. She laughed when he went into the lobby and picked up the mail and had a long talk with the landlady without once acting as if his feminine costume was anything unusual. She laughed when she realized that she got more work done in that day than she would have if he had not made her laugh, had not helped to make her so happy, had not known without being told that she really was just a bit homesick and missed her sisters and her mother terribly.

Emma now realizes she may have laughed more in that one lovely day than she has laughed in all of the days since.

“Damn you, Samuel,” she says yet again as she pushes herself away from the counter where the answering machine seems to be staring at her. She wonders how in the world he managed to find her even as she realizes it is not as if she has been hiding. It is not as if he cannot use the resources of the university, if he is still researching in some jungle for them, to trace the address and phone number that the alumni association keeps on file. It is not as if he...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Bantam
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
055380541X
ISBN 13 
9780553805413
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar