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Synopsis ...
The year 1964 finds twenty-eight-year-old Alice Washburn living in a small farming community near Moses Lake with her fifty-year-old husband, Clayton, and their ten-year-old son, Donny. Donny, who came into the world with an extraordinary gift, was born with a birth defect that has kept him underweight and sickly. Clayton, injured on the job, is frustrated and angry because he can’t do the work he used to do and because of his disappointment in his only son. Clayton’s mounting dissatisfaction, which is projected onto his family, leaves Alice in a perpetual state of fear. Because of Clayton’s cruel, domineering nature, Alice feels trapped with no other choice than to accept her fate—until a mysterious stranger comes to town. |
Chapter 1 (excerpt) ... In a humble cemetery, surrounded by bunchgrass and sagebrush, mourners gathered around a burial plot. Some dabbed their eyes or stole a few whispers about the deceased, while others remained stoic. Among them stood Alice Washburn. As the stiff October breeze whipped around Alice’s ankles, she shifted weight from one foot to the other just to keep the circulation stirring. Though her coat sleeves were threadbare at the elbows, she neither complained nor shivered. Instead, she gazed at the misty veil sweeping across the thirsty landscape and let her mind drift from the pastor’s words back to the days her life held promise, back to the only time in her twenty-eight years she had taken a joyful breath. It was a small chapter in her life she would never forget, and it all began a month ago in September of the year 1964. * * * On that September morning, Alice had woken with a strange but exhilarating feeling that something out of the ordinary was about to happen. But nothing exciting ever happened on the farm, nothing to match the feeling she now experienced. That was why when she turned their battered truck onto the county road leading to Weber past acres and acres of sugar beets whose leaves lay crisp and withered from the sun, she felt the urge to do something she had never done before—defy Clayton by taking Donny, their ten-year-old son, to Del’s Diner. She had squandered a nickel here and a nickel there without Clayton’s knowledge and had just enough money to treat her and Donny to ice-cold root beer floats. A tickle of satisfaction erupted from the thought of that tiny bit of splurging. Though ice cream at the diner couldn’t match anything as grand as a miracle cure for Donny’s affliction, to Alice it felt like a speck of sunlight on a melancholy day. |