Sarah Ockler's Sneak Peak at NEW BOOK!!

Fixing Delilah Hannaford (Spring 2010)
Excerpt #2:

" I trace a bead of leftover rain as it races along the passenger
window, my breath fogging the glass around my finger. Sometimes I
think about telling Mom how much I miss her. How I hate coming home
alone every afternoon, turning on the television just to pretend
there’s company. All those dinners at the big dining room table,
chairs empty, invisible guests eating invisible soup and drinking
made-up wine in my head. I want to shake her and scream and tell her
that the god damn plants in the foyer know more about my life than she
does; that I’d be willing to strike a single match and raze the whole
place to the ground if it meant we could start over.

I watch the rails along the highway and think about that trip to the
ocean again — the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches Mom packed for
the car ride. On the way back to Pennsylvania, late at night on the
road, she smoothed her hand on my cheek and sang classic rock songs
with the radio while I pretended to be asleep so she wouldn’t stop.

“At this rate, we’ll never get there,” Mom says, turning her head to
check the passing lane. I steal a glance at the lines on her face. In
the stifling beige-ness of the car, she looks weak and defeated and
ten years older than she did yesterday. She wears it like makeup; a
paper-thin layer of unwavering resolve flaking away to reveal all the
broken parts underneath.

I hate seeing her like this. I hate the secrets between us. I hate
that I’ve screwed up and disappointed her again.

“Mom, I’m… I’m really sorry about — ”

Bzzzz.

“Hold that thought, Delilah.” Mom keeps one hand on the wheel, the
other searching for the right button, fingers poking around the dash
like a bird for worms as the unsaid end of my apology stumbles and
slips back down my throat. On the phone, Claire Hannaford Speaking
betrays none of our troubles, but as she engages her award-winning,
smile-as-you dial communication skills for the caller, a thing that’s
been sitting like a rock at the bottom of my stomach all morning grows
heavier. Dread.

Cold and unmoving, it drips with the murky memories of that place
we’re going to. That place where she and Rachel shared their
childhoods and, though my recollections are a bit hazy, part of mine.
That place I was ordered to forget right in the middle of my
grandfather’s funeral more than eight years ago, yanked out of the
memory archives with all those tattered old broken hearts and
black-tarred Hannaford secrets still stuck on it like giant,
un-dustable cobwebs.

The silent, inescapable tension is creepy-crawling across my skin and
making me itch.

I dig a Snickers bar from my backpack and offer Mom the first bite,
but she refuses, waving her hand in front of me as if shooing a fly.
After her call, she lets out a long and loaded sigh, yanking the phone
device from her ear and flipping the GPS back on.

“Recalculating route for. Red Falls. Vermont in two hundred. Four. Miles.” "

Thank For this mouth-watering teaser Sarah.

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