I’ve decided my book Northern Comfort needed more readers. So it is free for Kindle readers on Nov. 9 and 10. Here’s the link.
Northern Comfort is one of my Hilltown Books. It’s not a mystery, like my Isabel Long Series, but it is set in the familiar fictional hilltowns of Western Massachusetts.
This books is about the harsh realities of rural life — the haves and have nots in a small town. It begins with a tragedy and ends with reconciliation and hope. Let me tell you more.
Willi Miller is a single mother trying to raise her young son, who was brain-damaged at birth. They live in a cabin left to them by the loving grandfather who took them in after Junior Miller, the boy’s father, abandoned them. Willi’s situation is a desperate one. But she’s doing the best she can.
In the opening scene, Willi is home from her job cutting hair at a country beauty shop and hanging clothes on a line in her backyard. It’s the worst of winter, cold and dark, but the job has to get done. She doesn’t have a drier because she can’t afford one.
Willi tries to keep Cody close to her as she works. But then tragedy happens when the boy’s sled quickly takes him into the path of a truck driven by Miles Potter. Willi and Miles have known each other since they were kids, but until the moment her son dies, they were separated by their families’ places in town.
How Willi handles this situation demonstrates her resilience and the kindness of those living in her small town, including Miles. Then, there is Junior, who eventually faces his failings as a father.
That’s what Northern Comfort is about. It’s not the stuff for pretty postcards although I do include a lot of the hilltowns’ traditions like maple sugaring and making old-time music.
Here’s how the book starts.
Willi Miller pinned her best blouse to the rope line, shaking her bare hands to keep the blood moving, as she reached into the broken plastic basket for something else. She should have done this miserable chore before she went to work this morning, but she didn’t have the time. Short and thin-boned like her mother, but yellow-haired like her father, Willi spun around for her boy, who stood a half foot away, staring at the dog whimpering and jerking its chain. “There you are, Cody. Stay near me,” she said.
Her boy, dressed in a one-piece red snowsuit, his mittens packed tightly on his hands, didn’t say a word. He only made noises that sounded like words, and he was seven. His ‘Ma,’ Willi had decided, was exactly as an animal would say it.
Earlier this afternoon, she got Cody at the babysitter’s house, where the van took him after school. Willi was a hairdresser at the Lucky Lady Beauty Shop in nearby Tyler although the running joke among the gals who worked there was it should be called the Unlucky Lady because of the stories the customers told about their men. Cheaters, drunks, and bums, the whole lot of them, it seemed, by their complaints.
The Lucky Lady was busy today with high school girls who wanted their hair curled and piled high for the semi-formal tonight. They were fun customers, so excited about their dates and the big Friday night ahead, she didn’t mind their lousy tips. Willi remembered not that long ago she did the same.
She fed Cody cereal after they got home just to hold him until she made dinner. He ate a few spoonfuls before he began playing with it, making a mess as usual, so she dressed him in his snowsuit and took him outside after she lowered the damper on the wood stove.
Now he walked beneath the hanging laundry toward the dog, named Foxy by her grandfather, who used to own the brown,short-haired, pointy-eared mutt. Willi called to her boy, who moved step by step across the snow, breaking through its icycrust until he sank to the top of his boots. He turned toward his mother. His green eyes peered from beneath the brim of his cap. Yellow snot bubbled from one nostril.
“Yeah, I’m watchin’ you,” Willi said, bending for a towel.
Snow seeped through a crack in her right boot. Cold numbed her toes. She should put duct tape over the brown rubber, but it was her only pair, and it’d look like hell.
“Hey, Cody, where’re you goin’?”
Her boy marched with fast little feet past the junked truck to the back of their house, where his sled, a cheap thing she bought, was propped against the wall. “This is a red sled,” she told Cody in the hardware store.
Her boy uttered a sound that might have been “red” but only she would know. She understood his ways most of the time. He wanted things tick-tock regular when he ate, what he wore.
Her eyes followed her boy, dragging his sled, grunting, toward her. He dropped it at her feet and sat inside. The heels of his boots kicked up and down. “Maaaaa,” he called.
Willi sighed. Cody wouldn’t let up until she gave him a ride. Her boy liked it when she towed him in his sled along the driveway to get the mail. He made happy chirps and flapped his mittens. She wiped her hands on her black jacket, a man’s, too big and open in the front because the zipper was broken. Its bottom swayed against her legs as she walked.
“All right, Cody, but just a little ride.”
She reached for the towrope and pulled Cody in a large circle. His mouth formed a wide, sloppy smile, and he let outgleeful sounds as Willi went slowly, then gained speed. Her feet sank through the snow although the sled glided easily on its surface. She was careful to stay on the flat part of her land, away from the edge of its tabletop, where it plunged onto her neighbor’s property then to one of the town’s main roads below. When she squinted, she could see the Mercy River flowing through its snowy valley like a blue vein on a woman’s wrist.
Round and round Willi towed her son. She slipped on the packed ring of snow, and her straight, yellow hair dropped to her jaw when her knit cap fell. Cody’s head rocked back as he yelped in pleasure. After a while, she stopped, out of breath.
“I gotta finish hanging the clothes before it gets dark. Alright?” she told Cody although she did not expect his answer.
She picked her hat from the snow. The sun was low in the sky, and the dark smudge spreading from the west likely carried more snow. Willi frowned. It would be too much trouble to take the clothes down again. She hated this part of winter, mid-January. It snowed every day, not much, but enough to keep the road crews going with their plows and sanders. Winteralways has a week like this, unsettled weather, the worst of the season, of the year, as far as she was concerned. Often, it happened after the thaw, so that brief warm spell seemed like one cruel joke.
She bent for one of Cody’s shirts. She had to work faster because the clothes were stiffening inside the basket. After she hung them, they would freeze into thin slabs, like shale, and after a day or two, they’ll be dry. If she had any money, she would buy a dryer. She glanced toward her house and saw missing clapboards. She’d fix those, too.
When she was a girl, she used to keep a mental list of what she’d get if she were rich: stuff like pink high heels and a long white coat. None of them seemed practical for a town like Hayward, where half the roads were dirt and fancy things were in other people’s houses. Now she would buy a car that worked without worry and hire a lawyer to make her ex-husband,Junior, pay child support.
Her boy bucked his body while he lay on his belly inside the sled, wailing as if he were wounded. Willi shook her hands and grabbed a pair of jeans from the basket.
“Shit, I hate this life,” she said.
My other Hilltown Books? The Sweet Spot and The Sacred Dog.
Here’s the link again for Northern Comfort.
