Unkept

By Clay, Ericka

Book Id: WPLBN0100750780
Format Type: PDF (eBook)
File Size: 1.39 MB.
Reproduction Date: 03/02/2015

Title:	Unkept
Author:	Clay, Ericka
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, Religion, Women's fiction, religious fiction
Collections:	Authors Community, Literature
Historic Publication Date:	2015
Publisher:	Ericka Clay

Member Page:	Ericka Clay
Citation APA MLA Chicago Clay, E. (2015). Unkept. Retrieved from http://self.gutenberg.org/

Description
As the live-in manager at her father’s funeral home in Burling Gates, Missouri, Vienna Oaks has succumbed to the mediocrity and abject loneliness of her life. Her days are suspended between the mundane and the misery of her clients’ throttling grief, of changing light bulbs, and encountering strangers as bereft as she. But after orchestrating the funeral for a little boy named Parker prompts a severe panic attack, she finds herself at a personal crossroads in which she is forced to confront the pregnancy she’s been hiding, her childhood nemesis, the boy she never stopped loving, and the deep-seated secret surrounding her mother’s death more than a decade before. In another part of town, Heather Turnbull has just learned from her estranged father that her mother, a lifelong recluse, has died. When making arrangements for her funeral, Heather chooses Oaks Family Funeral home, where she comes face to face with Vienna – the woman she tortured throughout grade school, the woman who has recently had an affair with her husband. Together, Vienna and Heather navigate through a makeshift friendship born of circumstance and devised to assuage their ambivalence towards motherhood and their tenuous relationship with reality, discovering, in tandem, the art of forgiveness and the will to go on. With humor and poignancy, Ericka Clay’s debut novel, Unkept, explores the thorny landscape of childhood trauma and the ferocious politics between little girls — and the adults they become.

Summary
Two former grade school enemies are brought together during the planning of a funeral only to make a jarring discovery about the man they both love.

Excerpt
The smell is sweet, and when I was younger, I had a hard time not thinking of pickles. Oblong, green. Floating in jars of brine. And that’s what pops up now when I look down and take account of Parker’s five tiny fingers. Little gherkins. It’s a mistake looking at his hands. I throw up a small puddle at my feet as my father walks in, and discontent pulses between us. He leaves and comes back with the mop and bucket and streaks through vomit while Parker watches. “I told you not to have the tuna,” he says. “You know how she loves her bargain basement mayonnaise.” I nod and pretend it’s the mayonnaise, and he looks at me looking at Parker. “Don’t get too attached. Into the fiery pit with this one.” “You can’t be serious,” I say. I glance at my father’s mopping hands that are a red sort of raw from the saccharine formaldehyde. The salty streaks at his temple tell me he’s getting older, and I have a “When did this happen?” moment. Just a few hours ago I was twelve and standing on the curb at the Manor Market, the squeal of wet tires stinging my ears. And now we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, peering into the casket of a dead boy. “It was in the notebook.” The leather-bound book on my father’s desk—the one Loretta calls “The Death Bible” —is stained with notes about impending wakes before they’re logged into the computer. I’ve checked it like always, but the details blurred with the truth of Parker’s combed strands of doll hair. “Picked out a nice mantle urn from what I remember,” he says. He taps out the organ beat piping through the speakers with a mop-free hand, and I watch his raw fingers ravage the wood. He leaves me to dump the dirty mop water in the guest bathroom, and the nausea doubles with the image of Parker’s mother with her boy in a jar in her arms. “You ready to lug this thing to the back?” He walks to the opposite end of the casket carrier and gives it a little push while I take one last look at Parker’s alabaster face. I feel the second wave of vomit rising before I can even lie and say yes.