From the author of The Serpent King comes a beautiful examination of grief, found family, and young love.
Life in a small Appalachian town is not easy. Cash lost his mother to an opioid addiction and his Papaw is dying slowly from emphysema. Dodging drug dealers and watching out for his best friend, Delaney, is second nature. He's been spending his summer mowing lawns while she works at Dairy Queen.
But when Delaney manages to secure both of them full rides to an elite prep school in Connecticut, Cash will have to grapple with his need to protect and love Delaney, and his love for the grandparents who saved him and the town he would have to leave behind. JEFF ZENTNER is the author of New York Times Notable Book The Serpent King, Goodbye Days, and Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee. He has won the William C. Morris Award, Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award, International Literacy Association Award, Westchester Fiction Award, been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and UKLA and was a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and Indies Choice Award. He was a Publishers Weekly Flying Start and an Indies Introduce pick. Before becoming a writer, he was a musician who recorded with Iggy Pop, Nick Cave and Debbie Harry. He lives in Nashville with his wife and son. You can visit him online at jeffzentnerbooks.com and on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Chapter 1
The human eye can discern more shades of green than of any other color. My friend Delaney told me that. She said it's an adaptation from when ancient humans lived in forests. Our eyes evolved that way as a survival mechanism to spot predators hiding in the vegetation.
There are as many tinges of understanding as there are hues of green in a forest.
Some things are easy to understand. There's a natural logic, a clear cause and effect. Like how an engine works. When I was eleven, my papaw pulled the engine out of his Chevy pickup and took it apart, letting me help him rebuild it. He laid the pieces out-reeking of dark oil and scorched steel-on a torn and greasy sheet, like the bones of an unearthed dinosaur. As we worked, he explained the function of each piece and what it contributed to make the engine run. It made sense, how he said it.
He wasn't sick then. Later, when he was, I understood that when he used to say Don't nobody live forever when accepting another piece of his sister Betsy's chess pie, that wasn't just a phrase he used. That was when he still had an appetite.
Now his appetite has moved to his lungs, which are always starved for air. His breathing has the keening note of the wind blowing over something sharp. It's always there, which means he has something sharp inside him. People can't live long with sharp things in them. I understand this.
Some things I understand without understanding them. Like how the Pigeon River moves and pulses like a living creature, never the same twice when I'm on it, which is as often as I can be. Or how sometimes you can stand in a quiet parking lot on a hot afternoon and perfectly envision what it would have looked like there before humankind existed. I do this often. It brings me comfort but I don't understand why.
Other things I don't understand at all.
How Delaney Doyle's mind works, for example. Trying to comprehend it is like trying to form a coherent thought in a dream. Every time you think you're there, it blurs.
You'll be talking with her and she'll abruptly disappear into herself. She'll go to that place where the world makes sense to her. Where she sees fractals in the growth of honeysuckle bushes and elegant patterns in the seemingly aimless drift of clouds and the meandering fall of snowflakes. Substance in the dark part of flames. Equations in the dust from moths' wings. The logic of winds. Signs and symbols. An invisible order to the world. Complex things make sense to her and simple things don't.
