Guest Post: How I Got My Novel Published

The year I turned fifteen two things happened that took me by complete surprise: my mother moved out and my father decided to run a marathon. My mother left first. In the middle of February, I came home from school and found her packing two suitcases: one with clothes, the other with her old typewriter and drafts of the novel she’d been working on for the last four years. She told me she was moving to Venice, Florida to help run her parents’ 9-room motel and finally finish her novel.

Of course, I wanted to go with her, but she said she wouldn’t be gone too long, that she was only staying down there until her father was able to hire a new manager, and I should finish the school year here in North Carolina. Maybe if she was still living in Florida when school got out I could spend the summer with her.

Part of me wanted to believe she moved down there because of the reasons she had said. But the other part of me, the part I tried not to listen to, knew this was a separation of sorts between my parents. While I had never seen them fighting or yelling at each other, which is how I thought married people with problems acted, I rarely saw them do much together in the months and years before she left.

Six weeks after she left, my father came home from work one Monday night, and without a word to me, changed out of his light blue nurse’s scrubs into sweat pants and a long sleeve T-shirt, stretched for five minutes on the front porch steps, then ran out of our yard.

It occurred to me as he rounded the corner, and I lost sight of him, that he might not come back at all. And I thought if he didn’t come back Mom would be forced to either return home or let me live with her in Florida.

But that first night, he did make it home in about thirty minutes. He stood out on the porch, hands on hips, covered in sweat, breathing like a man taking his last few breaths. When he came inside, he poured himself a tall glass of tap water and drank it all down in one mouthful. “I needed that,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant the exercise or the water.

For dinner I had made meatloaf and corn. I didn’t think my cooking was anything special, but it was food, sustenance, and he never complained about it. The first few weeks after she left, my father would bring home pizza or maybe a box of chicken from KFC. He’d even forgotten about dinner a couple times.

When this happened, I would knock on his bedroom door and ask, “Dad, what’s for dinner?” There would be a long silence, then he’d say, “I could go get something.” I would tell him not to bother and head to the kitchen and make grilled cheese sandwiches or hot dogs or hamburgers again.

That may sound like some teenagers idea of a perfect meal, but I missed my mother’s nightly servings of vegetables and chicken or fish. Mom had always been the one who cooked in our house, and I usually helped her. She loved to drink wine and listen to music, especially Van Morrison, and dance around the kitchen when she cooked. She’d showed me everything I knew about cooking, the important parts of any recipe and how certain things you could leave out. She told me to never cook chicken on high, but to always cook steak on high. That it was okay to cover chicken with tin foil, but if you covered steak it would turn grey and rubbery.

So once it became clear that my father would not be taking over the nightly cooking chores, I went in the cabinet, pulled down Mom’s old cookbooks, her little box of recipes, and started cooking for my father and me, more out of necessity than anything else.

As my father and I sat at the table, after his first night of running, he picked at the meatloaf I’d made and said, “Julian, I’d like to run a marathon.” His face was still pink and his dark hair was wet in spots. My first thought was that he might hurt himself.

“A marathon?”

“Twenty six miles.”

I knew how many miles a marathon was, but in my opinion, he had no right to think he could do such a thing. It wasn’t that he was incredibly out of shape, or fat, but he was soft and looked nothing like the men I’d seen out jogging through our neighborhood. The closest thing I’d seen him do to exercise in the last few years was mow the yard.

“There’s one in six months, over in Charlotte. I think I can do it. It’ll be a lot of work.” He rolled a forkful of meatloaf around in his ketchup. “I’ve got to do this.” His eyes were bright, brighter than I had seen them in a long time.

He ate the rest of the meal quick, like a man starved, then walked back to his room. His nightly routine, since Mom left, was to take a shower as soon as he got home from work, then eat a silent dinner with me before disappearing behind his bedroom door, listening to Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” CD until he fell asleep.

Alone in the kitchen, I realized that was the longest conversations we’d had since our big fight two weeks earlier. I can’t say why I picked that particular morning to confront him about her leaving since she’d already been gone a month. But as I listened to the shower running, for some reason I grew angrier and knew I had to find out what was going on. When I’d asked before, all he’d said was to ask her, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with that this time.

I had always been much closer to Mom. I spent most of my time with her, cooking or walking or talking. She liked to talk about her novel and I liked to listen to her, particularly after she’d been drinking and the words seemed to slide out of her mouth, her soft southern accent rising to the surface. Dad worked fifty to sixty hours a week so Mom could stay home and work on her writing and be there for me when I got home from school.

As far as I was considered, if there was someone to blame for her leaving it had to be my father. By the time he made it home from work he’d be so exhausted that he never did anything with us. And it always seemed to me that he was somewhere on the periphery of our family life instead of in the middle of it.

The morning of our fight he walked out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around his waist and seemed shocked to see me standing there in the hall. “Morning,” he said.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“With you and Mom. And I don’t want to hear anything about a stupid motel.”

“Julian, I don’t want to talk about this now. I’ve got to get to work.”

“You always have to go to work. That’s the problem. That’s why she left.”

His eyes narrowed on me and for a moment I thought he might hit me, though I couldn’t remember him ever hitting me before. “Did she tell you that?”

“No. She didn’t have to. I’m not stupid. We never did anything together as a family,” I said.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Be honest with me. Admit it’s your fault.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it. If you want to believe it’s my fault she left, then fine believe that.” He shook his head and walked in his room to get dressed for work.

I went outside, shaking with anger. I paced back and forth in the backyard, barefoot in the cold, trying to calm down. When I finally heard his truck pull out of the driveway, I went back inside and grabbed the first thing of his I saw. On the mantel, in our living room, was an empty ceramic pot, about a foot tall. It was white, wide at the bottom, but it tapered toward the top where there were painted purple and yellow flowers. And about half-way up there were a pair of blue lines, like racing stripes, circling the pot.

This piece of pottery had been in the center of our living room for as long as I could remember and I’d been told more than once by my mother not to touch it, that it was my father’s. But at that moment, what I wanted was to destroy something of his, to make him feel as bad as I did, so I lifted the pot high above my head and threw it at the wall. It shattered. I didn’t bother cleaning it up before I went to school.

When I returned home that afternoon, I swept all the pieces into a dustpan and threw them in the garbage. My father didn’t seem to notice the pot was missing because he didn’t mention it, or the fight and my accusations of blame, and neither did I.