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    Parts
    Parts
    Parts
    Ebook42 pages40 minutes

    Parts

    By Holly Goddard Jones

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    About this ebook

    In Girl Trouble, acclaimed writer Holly Goddard Jones examines small-town Southerners aching to be good, even as they live in doubt about what goodness is.

    A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant--with his child. A lonely woman reflects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.

    In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.

    Written with extraordinary empathy and maturity, and with the breadth and complexity of a novel, Jones's stories shed light on the darkness of the human condition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 1, 2009
    ISBN9780061966460
    Parts
    Author

    Holly Goddard Jones

    Holly Goddard Jones's stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best American Mystery Stories, and various literary journals. She is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

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      Book preview

      Parts - Holly Goddard Jones

      • Parts •

      I had a daughter. When she was eleven, my husband and I took her to Spring Acres, the local pool park, for swimming lessons. She wore a purple bathing suit, the bikini I allowed over Art’s grumbled protests, and she bounced on the diving board a little, and leaped, and cannonballed right into the deep end. The splash of blue-tinted water made a fragile shell around her, gorgeous, and then she went under. She was fearless. There was that moment a mother feels when the heart pauses and the throat goes dry, that fear of—or desire for, maybe—the moment of crisis, when everything changes and you have to change, too, to make sense of it all. That’s a strange word: desire. But it’s there. When your wheels catch water on a rainy day and your brakes are suddenly useless, the pedal under your foot mush; when you’re a few swats away from spanking your child too hard, and the coldness in your heart both terrifies and delights you. It’s unexplainable, that desire, and perhaps it should also go unacknowledged, but I’ve decided that the desire is useful, not shameful. Because it keeps you sane when the worst happens. And the worst does happen.

      I felt that moment, and then she broke the surface of the water, and we caught our breaths together. Art, beside me, never looked up from his medical journal—the luxury of fatherhood.

      I like to keep her here: young and alive, so many years away from the horror of that night in the dorm room. Her innocence and mine. She caught her breath that humid July afternoon, and I swear, it was just like the moment of her birth: the intake of air, the shriek of delight and fear. She waved to me from across the water, and I waved back, and we were laughing together. Felicia.

      She was murdered eight years later, in the fall semester of her sophomore year of college. The boy who killed her, who got away with it, was named Simon Wells, and they’d met a few days earlier at a keg party on State Street. He’d made a pass at her, but she went home that night with his friend instead. The story came out at trial, and the boy she went home with, Marty, was the one who did most of the telling. The police put the rest together. It went something like this: The boys went to Felicia’s dorm room—to see if she wanted to party, Marty said. They smoked pot together, talked for a while, and then Felicia and Marty fooled around some, kissing and second-base stuff, not wanting to make Simon uncomfortable. He’s a lonely guy, Marty had testified. I felt sorry for him. After that, Marty claims that Simon got crazy jealous, pushing him out of the way

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