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  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  CARRY YOURSELF BACK TO ME

  “Deborah Reed’s novel, Carry Yourself Back to Me, tells the compelling story of long-held family secrets, romantic entanglements, and a small-town murder that starts it all unraveling. With deft humor and insight and a marvelous sense of pacing, Reed explores the limits of trust and loyalty, the enduring nature of family bonds, and the clash between illusions and truth in the quest for lasting love.”

  —Jim Tomlinson, author of Things Kept, Things Left Behind (Iowa Short Fiction Award)

  “Carry Yourself Back to Me is a beautifully written, thoroughly engaging novel. Deborah Reed’s prose is lyrical, elegant, and vivid—she is a standout among new American novelists.”

  —Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and Drinking Closer to Home

  “Deborah Reed has written here a novel peopled with real, flesh-and-bone characters—men and women both as good and delightfully flawed as our best friends, our spouses, ourselves. And the icing on this cake is Reed’s lucid, lovely prose. Carry Yourself Back to Me is, simply, a pleasure to read.”

  —Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, author of This Life She’s Chosen and Swimming with Strangers

  “Carry Yourself Back to Me marries gorgeous and wise prose with a can’t-help-but-read-one-more-chapter plot. In it, Reed weaves a complex story of love and longing that’s mysterious, intelligent, and full of heart. She had me from page one.”

  —Cheryl Strayed, author of the novel Torch, and Wild, a memoir

  “Deborah Reed writes beautifully about the interlocking puzzles of romantic and family love and the patterns that play out from generation to generation. While her protagonist is a master of the sad song, Reed achieves a symphonic effect—rich, intense, and surprisingly joyful.

  —Dawn Raffel, author of Carrying the Body and Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

  CARRY YOURSELF BACK TO ME

  CARRY YOURSELF BACK TO ME

  A NOVEL BY

  DEBORAH REED

  PUBLISHED BY

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2011 Deborah Reed

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-935597-67-4

  For my parents

  There’s nothin’ you can send me, my own true love,

  There’s nothin’ I wish to be ownin’.

  Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled,

  From across that lonesome ocean.

  —Bob Dylan, “Boots of Spanish Leather”

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Annie lifts her father’s old binoculars off the porch. Out past the cornfield a lime-colored pickup idles in the fog of Mrs. Lanie’s tangelo grove next door. The driver’s side hangs open, but no one is behind the wheel. Clutter juts from the truck bed, vapor rises from the tailpipe. Annie knows most of Mrs. Lanie’s pickers, but she doesn’t know this truck.

  A ridiculous thought occurs to her. Owen’s come back. He’s sneaking through the grove and coming around the back of the house to surprise her. He’ll cup her eyes from behind and say something stupid like, “Guess who needs glasses?” Or “Who turned out the lights?”

  It’s early. She hasn’t brushed her teeth or concealed her dark circles. She hasn’t washed her hair or even pulled it back. The ropey ends catch on her mouth as she sips her coffee. She scans the grove for the shape of a person stealing tangelos. There’s no one she can see.

  The last thing Annie wants to do is think about Owen. But it’s like one foot tumbling over a slippery edge of earth the way she unexpectedly falls again and again into the same opening. Her thoughts have become flimsy, sentimental, throwaway songs. Nursery rhymes. Where oh where have you gone?

  Steam rises to her lashes from the coffee stalled at her lips. She lowers the cup and presses its warmth into her chest, into the pocket of chilled bare skin above the zipper of her fleece.

  It’s not as if their five years together were perfect. They were riddled with rough patches, cruel things slipping from their mouths. She watches the fog shift over the field and remembers all those brassy, merciless words. No doubt she’d use them again, given the chance.

  The problem is the nights she couldn’t sleep for all the pleasure rushing through her. The malty scent of his skin, like freshly cut grain, something meant to be eaten. The feel of his cuff brushing her wrist made her greedy for sex and food and music to be played even louder. She’d spent years floundering in smoky, mediocre venues hoping for a crowd to show, and suddenly, here was her muse, her good luck charm, making her old hopes seem puny, amateurish in comparison to what she had with him.

  She can’t forget this is the porch where most of the songs for Gull on a Steeple were written. Detour the same old dog that howled at the harmonica. These Adirondack chairs the ones whose red paint Annie and Owen wore away from so much use. Annie circles the rings of coffee and wine with her finger, the oily bug spray sealed into the arms like evidence of mornings, evenings, late nights spent trying to get it right. He made an honest-to-God singer-songwriter out of her. She made a sought-after music producer out of him. Rolling Stone declared Gull on a Steeple “An instant classic filled with vivid tales of love and loss without the slightest hint of sentimentality.” Depression magazine claimed, “Annie Walsh’s painful, clear-eyed, storied songs are woven with a voice reminiscent of the great Patsy Cline, Lucinda Williams, and Aimee Mann, all spun into one.” The comparisons flattered her for the first few minutes, but after that and ever since she’s done nothing but worry about measuring up. Even when Entertainment Weekly came along and knocked her down to something of a Disney production. “A sprightly, nearly elfin frame that charms its way across the stage and into your heart.”

  Now it’s hard to even listen to music, let alone play it.

  Cold fog quiets the birds and shifts like hot steam above Lake Winsor to the east. Minutes earlier hailstones sliced past Annie’s bedroom window and skipped off
the ground like pearls on concrete, escaping in all directions. The timer on the coffee pot had already gone off, and Annie dressed quickly in a fleece and jeans, her red rubber boots with the knobby black soles. She emerged onto the porch as if from a cave, coffee sloshing down her wrist, Detour stumbling at her heels the way old dogs do, scared old dogs, with no direction. Annie wanted the hail to prick her skin, to shake loose the stubborn reveries pinned behind her eyes. But in the time it took to pour coffee, the hail had already moved on.

  She flips on the small radio she keeps on the porch. It’s set to a station she found by accident at the end of the dial, thinking she was turning up the news. It runs crackly old serials where salesmen and seamstresses make their way through hard times–characters who do things that don’t always make sense. But then you hear the backstory the next day, something to do with an aunt’s dying wish, or an orphan on the side of the road whose true identity is just becoming clear. Today it’s a butcher in New York and a young boy, his nephew, the son of a brother the man hates. He seems to love the boy in spite of this. “You remind me of me at your age,” the butcher says. The accents are a little overplayed.

  Backstory. A word she’s been trying to think of. She ought to write a song called Backstory. Some days it feels as if every cup in the kitchen, every tree in the yard, patch of crabgrass, anthill, the pine planks beneath her feet, even the sky itself is buzzing with backstory, existing for the sole purpose of reminding her of Owen. The songs, the jokes, the curious observations resonate like a tuning fork to the head.

  Detour heaves himself up and lets loose a sharp, single bark at a chase of squirrels in the live oak tree. Acorns tumble and click in their wake. The bark pierces the quiet like a gunshot.

  “You’re a big man when it comes to little squirrels,” Annie says. He’d trembled when hail struck the cedar roof. But he’s a good dog. Bulky and older than he has a right to be.

  It takes her a moment to realize he wasn’t barking at the squirrels. At least one of his senses is still keen. Annie barely sees the man in the grove. He quickly hops into the truck and shuts the door as if he’s gone out there to relieve himself and doesn’t want anyone to know.

  The truck starts on the road toward to her driveway. Annie knocks the binoculars into the spongy grass, hops off the porch and snatches them up. It’s hard to focus on a moving target. She quits trying when the truck reaches her gate. Her driveway is at least an eighth of a mile long. But the far-off, tinny sound of music reaches her ears.

  Detour lumbers down the steps as if each leg is made of a wooden cane. He strains his hips in the muddy driveway. “Stay here, boy,” Annie says. “Over here.”

  All at once the sun bores a hole through the fog and glares off the filmy windshield, hiding whoever’s behind the wheel. But she can see that the clutter sticking out of the back of the truck is rakes, shovels, a mower, and a mess of brown clippings, and she knows just who it is.

  Detour knows too. He escorts the truck toward Annie, so closely his tail thumps the door. Her brother hangs his hand through the open window and touches the tip of Detour’s nose.

  The music on the stereo is The Beautiful South doing a cover of “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” “They’re the cheeriest bunch of sad songs you’ll ever hear,” she’d said when she gave it to him years ago.

  The truck comes to a jerky stop. Walsh Landscaping is spelled out in bold, cursive script beneath an outline of a live oak tree on the door.

  My name is Annie Walsh. She used to say this, gently, after walking on stage. Then came the applause. The swirling whistles. The screams.

  The music dies down in the truck, and the engine rattles off in stages. The air smells like french fries.

  Her heart pulses against the thin wall of her chest, her brain, her ears, her hands. She’s not prepared to see her own brother, no matter how many times she’s imagined him showing up like this.

  He steps out in a T-shirt and canvas shorts. He isn’t wearing a jacket. A sure sign it’s going to be warmer than Annie has hoped.

  He isn’t smiling so much as grinning, just slightly, to one side as if to say, “What do you make of this? Here I am after six whole months, showing up like it’s nothing to nobody.” He has a habit of running his hand through his floppy hair, and when he gets within fifteen feet he stops and does exactly that.

  “Did you see me in the binoculars?” he asks.

  Detour slides his ribs along Calder’s legs like a cat.

  “Detour, come,” Annie says.

  “I was making the pig face you used to laugh at.”

  “Detour, now.”

  “I guess not.” He scratches Detour’s back. “Christ almighty. You’re an old man.” He flings loose fur from his fingers and gently pats Detour’s stiff hip.

  Mrs. Lanie’s house is close enough to see her eyes go wide when she pulls the curtain back in her kitchen window. Her hair is an early morning tangle of gray.

  Calder turns and lifts a meek hand as if he’s embarrassed, as if he’s remembering all that went on the last time he was here, Annie screaming until her voice gave way. How long? At least tell me that! How long did you know he was seeing her?

  Mrs. Lanie waves against the glass, and then the curtain drops and she’s gone.

  Calder sighs and studies Annie’s house up somewhere along the trim of the low-slung roof. The gutters obviously need cleaning, and she expects this is what he’ll say. “Looks like you had the place painted,” he says.

  Annie turns toward the Buttery Cream siding and Dove White trim. Her pale creamsicle of a bungalow, more cabin than house, cloaked by overgrown trees. Maple, tupelo, sweet gum, willow.

  “Looks good,” he says. “Looks new again. Amazing what a little paint can do.”

  He doesn’t say Owen’s name, but it’s there in the air, the thing missing from this house, this picture. It seems to touch Calder’s face, his eyes, which he rubs.

  “What are you listening to?” He gestures to the radio on the porch.

  “You’re too young to understand, son,” the butcher says.

  “Nothing,” Annie says.

  He nods as if he’s just agreed not to ask any more questions. “Well. The hail did a number on that tupelo. It’s hunkering down like a kid getting pelted with rocks.”

  Annie glances at the tree. The limbs are twisted at odd angles, their ends horned and jerking, barbed wire claws.

  “Anyway, I’m doing a job right up the road,” Calder says. “I figured it was like some kind of sign or something, being this close, and being on your birthday and all. Happy birthday. You don’t look a minute past thirty.”

  She’s forty years old today. She thinks of her chaffed hands and clasps them to the binoculars at her back.

  “I swear, Annie. You’re pretty as ever.”

  She’s well aware that another year, one half-filled with a mountain of stress, has changed the way she looks.

  “I heard one of your songs on that Chevy commercial. and someone said another was in that movie with what’s her name, Jessica Lange.”

  “It’s been six months,” she says, keeping her voice in check. “This probably isn’t the first time you’ve been within a few miles of here.”

  Calder chews the inside of his cheek, something he’s done since they were kids. “No. I can’t say it is.”

  Detour hobbles over and leans against her leg.

  “It’s been a long time,” Calder says. “I thought maybe it was OK to come and see you—it’s your birthday. And Christmas less than two weeks away. How have you been?”

  She tucks the binoculars under her arm and shoves her hands into her pockets. “Fine.”

  Calder turns his head as if wishing he could take back the question. He studies her yard. She follows his line of sight, sure he’s taking stock of broken branches and anthills and the fact that the soil doesn’t drain quite right with the tree roots exposed like that. “It’s been a while since you’ve seen Uncle Calder,” he says.

 
; It’s not what she expects. He’s caught her off guard. Her mind tunnels backwards to the first time she lost someone she loved. She and Calder are twelve and eleven, Uncle Calder is wiping her tears, patting the top of her head with his oversized palm after setting flowers on her father’s grave. “It’s going to be all right, squirt,” he’ll tell her more than once. A far off ringing pricks her ears.

  “He’s not getting any younger,” Calder says.

  It takes a moment to clear.

  “You mind if we sit down on the porch for a minute?” Calder asks.