Everywhere Saviors

Frank Dewey Staley

Description

Everywhere Saviors leads the reader from light to dark and back again. The novel’s characters are vintage Frank Dewey Staley: saviors and those in need of saving. This story is written with a caustic and erudite pen.
Everywhere Saviors is Frank Dewey Staley’s fourth novel and is clearly his most expansive. This story reconnects with the life of Dobro Temple, agent to the Los Angeles glitterati and his daughter, the effervescent and precocious Sara. For light to appear there must be darkness as contrast, and Everywhere Saviors explores a darkness both frightening and consuming. Experiences within this book will keep many readers up at night. But this book shows us more than simply an underbelly of who we are; Everywhere Saviors reminds us again and again that so many of the faces that surround us are there to smile at us and offer us a helping hand.

Sujets

• Thrillers
• En perdition
• Family
• Suspense
• Danger
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 26 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663244383
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by Frank Dewey Staley:
Ocracoke
A novel
Saving Women
A collection of short stories
Orphans
A novel
Eat No Evil
A novel
EVERYWHERE SAVIORS
FRANK DEWEY STALEY


EVERYWHERE SAVIORS
 
 
Copyright © 2022 Frank Dewey Staley.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4437-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4438-3 (e)
 
 
 
iUniverse rev. date: 08/22/2022
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Author’s Note

To Leni and Kate

And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Lennon and McCartney
CHAPTER ONE

W hen Dobro Temple learned of the cancer cells that had taken up residence in his pancreas, his first thought was of the daughter he had not seen in well over a year. Dobro was from strong family stock long-settled in the Allegheny Highlands of Virginia, and he raised his daughter to grow into a woman capable of looking someone in the eye. Sara was headstrong, but this never bothered her father. Her spine, even as she grew into her teens, was straight as a spear; her handshake was firm.
Dobro’s ex-wife, a genuine beauty blessed with long blond hair and dark eyebrows, had run off within eighteen months of giving birth to Sara. Dobro had met her at the party of one of his clients and fell rather quickly and unapologetically in love with her. Mara was what many young women living in Los Angeles aspired to be. She didn’t work, as she possessed no real skill with which she could have made a living. Education had never really seemed necessary for Mara. The way she looked and the manner in which she carried herself allowed her to remain in the orbit of the rich and famous. She found that once she made her way into the circles of movers and shakers in and around Hollywood, that she was there to stay.
Dobro knew that his young wife was flighty, that it would be a stretch to assume that she would ever truly settle into what his image of what a proper spouse might be. Mara could be apathetic to the way her actions and words affected those around her, Dobro included. She was a taker far more than a giver, and he saw this, as well. But he was entering his mid-thirties focused like a hungry shark on his career and had never really allowed himself a moment of weakness or spontaneity. Mara threw some sexual voodoo at him, and the rest was history. He loved her and she loved the thought of being married to someone so well-connected with the West Coast glitterati.
He had fallen somewhat accidentally into the role of agent to the stars but had flourished once his career path was made apparent. He was honest and his clients were comforted by his unwavering sense of looking after them. That his young wife ran off with one of his clients, an actor who had just jumped from roles portraying strong silent types to roles portraying strong and slightly-damaged silent types, didn’t surprise him as much as it hurt him. Mara, like many of the people he had encountered since taking up residence on the West Coast, had the moral compass of a roulette wheel.
And there was this daughter to raise. The youngest of five children back in Virginia, Dobro had almost no experience in matters such as diapers and doctor appointments. He had gone to Los Angeles to work for an accounting firm which handled much of the tax filings for studios and the directors, actors and crew members employed by them. Two years in, he agreed to help an actress handle an inheritance that out-of-the-blue came her way. She broke her promise to keep the fact that he had helped her on the side between them, and his future was determined. That he was fired came as no shock to him. That word-of-mouth accolades from the actress singing praises for the strong and sensitive way Dobro handled her issue could bring him a string of potential clients so rapidly was a pleasant surprise. Within a year he was earning ten percent of the gross income of five clients. The Dobro Temple Agency was on its way. He trade-marked the name and moved into a rented second floor office suite in Santa Monica. When his lease expired in thirty-six months, he bought the building. It was a red brick, unpretentious two story with dark windows. Situated on a side street not far from the pier, it had no views of the ocean. But it was solid and well-structured and was walking distance to several restaurants and a parking lot loaded with a variety of food trucks. There were palm trees out front.
Dobro was a firm believer in karma; good things happen to good people, and he was certainly near the top of that list. A phone call to a home-help agency which provided au pairs to well-off households in Southern California brought immediate results. Of the three women who visited him in his Santa Monica office, Dobro selected Pei Ling to be the daytime care-giver to his young daughter. She was tall and spoke English with some difficulty. Her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She had come to America to study medicine at UCLA but had been forced to suspend her education when her father was injured at the Shanghai factory which had employed him his entire adult life. With no money coming from home, she was inches from poverty. But she had no intention of returning. In her mind this would be failure, and failure was not an option. She moved from one job to the next with the only criteria being that the size of the new paycheck be larger than the one it was replacing. She didn’t own a car, but that was not important. She had never learned to drive. She lived in a studio apartment on the edge of a truly sketchy neighborhood and walked each day to and from the bus stop.
She lied to Dobro when she told him that she had extensive experience in taking care of children and he knew this. He had an uncanny and very valuable ability to spot dishonesties large and meaningless. But she took pride in the fact that she had never missed a day of school or work, and this offered Dobro a sense of relief. It was not that he couldn’t work from home on occasions that Sara could not be cared for by someone else, he simply needed these instances to be as infrequent as possible.
Pei Ling accepted his offer of employment without smiling. She was serious and stoic, as Dobro knew many Asian people to be. But she also possessed a genuine sadness, and this registered with her new employer.
As he looked back at the day-to-day that was life raising Sara, he could only identify the rare occasion or episode that he would have done something differently. He remembered his parents, many years ago and back in Virginia sitting at the kitchen table discussing some no doubt minor transgression one of his older sisters had committed.
“You have your girls,” said his father to his wife and to the world in general, “you love them. Then they turn thirteen, and you hate them. Then they turn eighteen or so, and you love them again.”
“They come back to you,” said his mother.
But Sara had not come back.
The early years were a blend of frustration and magnificence. Dobro and his daughter lived in a small bungalow in Torrance. Before running away, Mara had expressed a strong desire to catch up on the sleep she had lost through the latter stages of her pregnancy, not to mention the delivery. That Dobro agreed to climb out of bed each time their baby daughter needed attention did not surprise Mara. That he did this so silently and efficiently should have warmed her. It did not. She slept away the hours in a cocoon and probably didn’t notice.
Pei Ling proved to be a blessing. She rode the bus from her shabby apartment many miles away and showed up on time every morning. She entered the house through the kitchen and often found her employer sitting in a chair opposite his daughter’s high-chair. That he spoke in an adult voice to his baby as he fed her with a tiny spoon from a small jar of mush seemed not a bit out of the ordinary. She always offered to take over and let him finish getting ready for work, but this ritual, conducted almost every morning, seemed important to Dobro.
He recognized early on that it would be a game-changer if Pei Ling could drive. Until such time as he could make this happen, he was relegated to leaving his office and driving Sara to this and that appointment. Not that he wished to skirt his way around these responsibilities. He was fully committed as a father and wouldn’t have missed a doctor’s appointment for anything. But there was always the minutia of raising a child that demanded a quick trip for groceries or diapers. And tending to Sara was not Pei Ling’s only task. Dobro had hired her to keep up with the house in addition to that. Although she rarely called him at work with these little emergencies, it was usually a time of noticeable inconvenience when she did.
The Security Driving School was hi