Verwandte Artikel zu We're All in This Together

We're All in This Together - Softcover

Jones, Amy

 
9780771050657: We're All in This Together
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0771050658 ISBN 13: 9780771050657
Verlag: MCCLELLAND & STEWART, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of Northern Lit Award

Finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour

Quill & Quire "Books of the Year 2016"

Globe & Mail "Best Canadian Fiction of 2016"

A Penguin Book Club Pick


A woman goes over a waterfall, a video goes viral, a family goes into meltdown -- life is about to get a lot more complicated for the Parker family.


Like all families, the Parkers of Thunder Bay have had their share of complications. But when matriarch Kate Parker miraculously survives plummeting over a waterfall in a barrel -- a feat captured on a video that goes viral -- it's Kate's family who tumbles into chaos under the spotlight. Her prodigal daughter returns to town. Her 16-year-old granddaughter gets caught up in an online relationship with a man she has never met. Her husband sifts through their marriage to search for what sent his wife over the falls. Her adopted son fears losing the only family he's ever known. Then there is Kate, who once made a life-changing choice and now fears her advancing dementia will rob her of memories from when she was most herself. Set over the course of four calamitous days, Amy Jones's big-hearted first novel follows the Parkers' misadventures as catastrophe forces them to do something they never thought possible -- act like a family.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

AMY JONES won the 2006 CBC Literary Prize for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2005 Bronwen Wallace Award. She is a graduate of the Optional Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at UBC, and her fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. Her debut collection of stories, What Boys Like, was the winner of the 2008 Metcalf-Rooke Award and a finalist for the 2010 ReLit Award. Originally from Halifax, she now lives in Thunder Bay, where she is associate editor of The Walleye. The author lives in Toronto, ON.

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The first call had come at ten that morning, while Finn was sitting outside with her coffee on the back steps of her townhouse, watching Max the golden retriever run around in the yard.
     “Ms. Parker?” a husky female voice asked. “I’m glad I caught you at home.”
Finn sighed. One of the perils of working from home is that you’re always at home. “Who is this?” she asked.
     “My name is Cassandra Coelho. I’m a reporter with Thunder Bay News. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about your mother.”
Finn felt something like an electric shock spark in her brain. “My mother? Why?”
There was the sound of paper rustling. “You are Serafina Parker, right? From Thunder Bay?” Cassandra Coelho paused. “Your mother is Katherine Parker? The Conqueror of Kakabeka?”
     “My . . . The what?”
     “How is she doing? Is there any word on her condition? We’d love to talk to her when she comes out of the coma.”
     Panic crashed over Finn as she tried to process what she was hearing. Her mother, in a coma. This much Finn could understand, the words lining up with their proper meaning, an entire library of reference points tumbling out of her mental archive. Coma, noun: A state of deep unconsciousness that lasts for an indefinite period, from the Greek koma, meaning “deep sleep.” The rest, she had no idea. She hadn’t been home to Thunder Bay in over three years, hadn’t spoken to her mother in probably six months, with the exception of a few brief emails, which meant months and months of blanks she couldn’t fill in. It had been working for her. As long as she filled her days with the present, then the past didn’t exist – she could pretend she just sprang fully formed from the earth, or just willed herself into being all on her own. But now it was cracking open, this entire potential world of things Finn didn’t know. On the other side of the yard, Max chased his tail, and Finn watched him, mesmerized, as he turned around and around, her own brain spinning along with him.
    “Ms. Parker?”
    “No comment,” Finn mumbled and hung up. There were choices to make now, courses of action to decide on – it was almost as though she could see them all, playing out in front of her like movies over­lapping on a screen. She picked the only one she could handle.
     Her brother, Shawn, answered on the seventh ring, out of breath and annoyed.
     “What the hell is going on?” she asked.
     “Oh. Finn.” Shawn said her name as though he’d just remem­bered her existence. When was the last time she’d talked to him? Two weeks ago? Eight? “Can I call you back? It’s not a good time.”
     Finn made a fist and jammed it into her thigh to keep from screaming. “Not a good time? I just found out my mother is in a coma from a fucking reporter.”
     “I was going to call you.”
     “Of course you were,” said Finn. “I’m sure I was at the very top of your list of priorities.”
     Shawn sighed. “I just got to the hospital. I have to find some­one to cover for me at the restaurant. And I still have to figure out who’s going to pick up the kids.” Shawn’s boys were named Tommy and Petey. That way, Shawn always said, when they were grown-ups they could be Thomas and Peter. And then when they were old men, they could be Tom and Pete. Their names could be modi­fied to fit any stage of life. Finn imagines Shawn likes this because Shawn was just Shawn, you couldn’t even make a nickname out of it except for maybe Shawny, which sounded less like a person and more like a town or a piece of farm equipment.
     Shawn’s wife’s name was Katriina. No one ever called her any­thing but Katriina.
     “First you need to tell me what’s going on,” Finn said. She started pacing the yard, the too-long grass prickling her bare feet. “The reporter said something about Kakabeka Falls?”
     “Yeah.” In the background, she could hear a tinny voice dron­ing over a loudspeaker, an unintelligible din that Shawn practically had to yell over. “She went over.”
     “She . . . went over?”
     “The falls, Finn. She went over the fucking falls.”
     “Oh my god. When?” asked Finn, hoping to hell it wasn’t two days ago, two weeks ago, two months ago.
     “This morning.”
     The droning stopped. In the resulting quiet, Finn could hear her own heart firing off in her chest.        “She got caught in the cur­rent?” she asked hopefully. But somewhere inside her, she knew what the answer was.
     “No.” Finn heard the sound of a door closing. “Kate went over the falls on purpose,” Shawn said, his voice low.
     And there it was. “How do you know?”
     There was a long pause. “She was in a barrel,” Shawn said. “One of Hamish’s,” he added, as if it made any difference whose barrel it was.
     Finn sat back down on the step. She had a sudden, sharp memory of her mother, years ago, standing in her kitchen on Victor Street, talking about something she had seen on television. Annie Edson Taylor, that was it, a sixty-three-year-old woman who was the first person to go over Niagara Falls and survive. Finn remembered Kate sighing, gazing out the window at a far-off place in history that seemed so much prettier from a distance, saying, “I don’t know. Doesn’t it just seem like there’s nothing left to be first at these days?”
     “Finn?” said Shawn. “Are you still there?”
     How would a normal person react to this news? What would someone else’s daughter say? Finn took a sip of coffee and swal­lowed it before she realized it had gone cold. On the other side of the yard, Max was having a stand-off with a squirrel in a pine tree. She couldn’t see the squirrel but she could hear it chattering away, taunting him. “Well, is she going to be okay?” Finn asked finally.
     “No, she’s not going to be okay, Finn. She’s in a coma.” Shawn paused. “You need to come back to Thunder Bay. You need to come home.”
     Finn closed her eyes. “I don’t think I can.”
     “Why?”
     “You know why.”
     Shawn sighed. “Come on, Finn, it’s been three years. Grow up.”
     She wished she was on a cell phone and not the cordless, so she could pretend that the call had been dropped. Shawn still talked to her as if she were a teenager, even though he was only four years older. He wasn’t even her real brother. He was just some street kid who hopped trains and sold drugs and lived in a tent in the woods behind the house where she grew up – until the day he stopped the family car from crushing Kate after she forgot to put on the emergency brake and it started rolling down the driveway towards her. After that, he started...

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Verlag
MCCLELLAND & STEWART
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0771050658
ISBN 13 
9780771050657
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
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