The people you’ll meet in my new story collection, That Very Place, find themselves in places where they’d rather not be. Each is bound by a connection they cannot break: an unwanted child, an unloving parent, or the haunting echoes of what could have been. But trouble long avoided brings upheaval, stirring turmoil and compelling them to confront the damage they’ve inflicted and the pain they’ve carried for too long. They must face the direction their lives have taken and the choices left to them.
• In the boxy, drab room of a nursing home, a woman with advancing dementia longs to tell her unsuspecting, middle-aged niece that she is in fact her mother. But will her confession come too late?
• At a wedding in a garishly decorated Laundromat in Queens, a young stock analyst wavers in her decision to give up her child for adoption, knowing that unless she does the child’s father will leave her.
• Waiting to cross 7th Avenue, an aimless college student gets a glimpse of a homeless woman who may be the mother he’s lost but finds instead what may be the gateway to another life.
The familiar in That Very Place is laced with something unruly, something that simply shouldn’t be happening. Though the characters don’t know where these events will lead them, they must respond. What awaits may be a truth they failed to see.
That Very Place reaches bookstores on September 9. You can preorder now on Amazon and Bookshop.org.
