Woman Refusing to Leave

Richard Duggin

Description

A gripping psychological drama of delusional love, obsessive desire, and broken ties, Woman Refusing to Leave moves through thirty-six stormy hours for Catherine Harper and her two former husbands. Feeling the build-up of years of loss, including the death of her son, the divorce from her first husband, and the loss of her college teaching job, Catherine now faces yet another loss as her current husband, Steven, abandons her. As an unexpected spring blizzard builds in force and intensity, Catherine begins to believe that only if she stops her impending divorce from Steven can she save them from certain catastrophe. As she battles the force of the storm within her, she unwittingly puts all three on a course to collide tragically with one another.

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 28 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645364764
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Woman Refusing to Leave
Richard Duggin
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-02-28
Woman Refusing to Leave About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgement Part I Thursday Evening Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Part II Friday Afternoon Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Part III Friday Night / Saturday Morning Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22
About The Author
Raised in New England, with degrees in literature and writing from the University of New Hampshire and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Richard Duggin spent 55 years teaching fiction writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he founded a four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program in creative writing, and a two-year low residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. He is still teaching and writing.
His published books include the novel, The Music Box Treaty ; a short story collection, Why Won’t You Talk to Me ; and this novel, Woman Refusing to Leave . A new novel recently completed, The Snipe Hunters: Boys in Exile , is yet due to be published. Other stories of his have appeared in periodicals such as Playboy, American Literary Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, Laurel Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Sun, and elsewhere.
Dedication
For Cynthia
My wife
My lifelong companion
My literary provocateur
Copyright Information ©
Richard Duggin (2020)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Duggin , Richard
Woman Refusing to Leave
ISBN 9781643786452 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781643786469 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645364764 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019920973
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28 th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
[e-mail]
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Acknowledgement
I am truly grateful to the following for their invaluable and gracious support of my need for cloister while I am in the solitary labor of writing:
Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
The University of Nebraska at Omaha Research and Grants Committee
The Nebraska Arts Council
The National Endowment for the Arts
Ragdale Foundation Residency for Artists
Yaddo Corporation Residency for Artists
Part I Thursday Evening
Chapter 1
The cold front swept down through Wyoming, gathering momentum as it entered Nebraska in squall lines of thunderstorms that lit up the insides of dense clouds with stroboscopic flashes of lightning. With each spectacular explosion of light, the gray underbellies of the clouds glowed, as if they were loosely woven duffels stuffed with light itself. But instead of pouring down rain, it snowed. It fell in flakes the size of pillow feathers. Behind the first violence of the passing front that drove temperatures down from the morning high of 65 to 32 by early evening, the clouds stretched out low and flat, settling like slate on Platte City.
Catherine Harper’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Holly, was exultant when after the first hour it seemed the snow was going to stick to the ground instead of watering in. “Bet there’s no school tomorrow!” She was kneeling on the sofa in the living room, leaning over its back to peer through the parted drapes over the bow window. “It’s still snowing like mad out there!” There was a tinge of admiration in her voice for the craziness of the event.
Catherine scowled. “It can’t possibly last this late in the season. It’ll melt by morning.”
“But, Mom, check it out.” Already, the snow was lacing the edges of the mullions. “It’s piling up big time.”
“You’re going to school tomorrow. They will not close school,” Catherine said firmly, as if Holly’s observation was a matter of poor mental discipline.
It was already the fourth week in April. Thursday morning had started out warm and cloudless, with no more warning of change than what last evening’s weather report on the 10:00 news had mentioned as a possibility of a thunderstorm later in the afternoon, associated with an incoming front out of the Rockies. But even with a Nebraskan’s wait-and-see tolerance for unpredictable weather, Catherine, who was keenly sensitive to change and instability in her life lately, never in the world would have expected this. It wasn’t just a fluke of nature, it was an aberration. It had begun as one thing and had become another—a spring rain turned to snow, spring itself snatched back into winter with a cat’s deadly play.
“Let’s see if there’s anything on the radio that’ll tell us what’s happening,” she said.
“Bet they say it’s a blizzard,” Holly said. “I hope there’s three feet of snow coming.”
Catherine opened the wood cabinet doors in the living room that housed the components of her old stereo system, a relic of her college days. She tuned the radio away from Holly’s rock music station to KPLC, the local Platte City talk and news station. There was a commercial in progress for an agricultural herbicide. “Bigfoot is coming, and he packs a wallop,” the sonorous male voice boomed from twin floor speakers.
She had caught the beginning of Speak Out, the local call-in talk show. This night’s topic was: “The rise of gun-related deaths in Nebraska. Will the ease of purchasing guns keep us as safe in our homes as we once were?” Catherine dismissed any interest in the topic, but the moderator began the broadcast with an acknowledgment of the dangerous weather out there. “If you’re out on the streets driving, take it very carefully. Conditions are hazardous, with slippery roads and low visibility. If you don’t have to be out there in your car, good people, stay put at home. Light a fire and spend the next two hours with us speaking out on gun ownership…”
Catherine switched the radio off. She would not even allow a gun in her house. Early in their marriage, Donald had got the wild idea that he would teach their son to shoot a gun when he was old enough to go hunting with him during pheasant and deer season. He bought a big, ugly shotgun the size of a piece of field artillery, with a deer hide scabbard to carry it in. “It’s supposed to help disguise the smell of the gun,” Donald said.
“But the skin of a deer !” Catherine had decried.
His only defense was, “You wear shoes made from the skin of a cow.” As if it were the same thing. As if two wrongs made it right. At her insistence, he’d hung the gun on the pegboard over the tool bench out in the garage. “In deference to your phobia,” he’d told her. As it turned out, by the time Donald Jr. was of an age where other sporty fathers would have taken their sons on first fishing trips or out to target practice, Donald’s brother William had already borrowed the shotgun and never returned it.
“I don’t think we’re going to hear much more until the ten o’clock news,” she said to Holly, who by this time had stretched out on the sofa with a recent issue of Catherine’s Self .
“Doesn’t matter,” Holly said. “I know already what’s going to happen.”
“Oh, well. Good for you then. Apparently, you’re clairvoyant,” Catherine said. “You must have inherited that from me.”
“From Dad,” Holly said.
“Not likely,” Catherine replied.
“Sometimes he knows things that are going to happen. He can tell sometimes when there’s going to be a big fire or when there’s going to be a bunch of accidents and people hurt. ‘They come in threes,’ he says.”
“That’s just statistical data he reads in his firemen’s magazines,” Catherine said. She didn’t want to pursue it, even in banter. Her ex-husband’s obsession as a firefighter with other people’s crises and his long shifts on duty away from home had been the wedge driven in their marriage that finally split them apart when their son Donny died. Ten years old! she thought as the unexpected reminder erupted in a painful catch in her throat. Their son’s life had bled away on the emergency room table, while she was unable to reach his father to be at her side because he was across town attending to someone else’s lesser troubles. Now, being reminded of her former marriage was somewhere she didn’t want to be, especially while her own black premonitions about her court hearing tomorrow were still crawling like ants beneath her skin.
At this same moment, Donna, her eight-year-old, was coming downstairs from her room. She’d been up there since right after supper, leaving most of her meal on her plate. Catherine was not sure if she were ill or if it was a protest over another night of frozen dinners. She had let Donna leave the table without questioning her because she was in no mood herself to either sympathize with or explain to an eight-year-old why her mother was behaving so… un motherly. Steven had been gone from their home for almost three months already, and her eccentric behavior probably seemed almost normal to her children by now.
Holly looked up from her reading and said, “Look outside, Donna-Bonna, it’s a blizzard.”
“Big deal,” Donna said.
“There’s probably no school tomorrow,” Holly replied.
“So? I want to go to school. I don’t wanna stay home all the stupid day,” Donna said and slouched off to the kitchen. But it struck Catherine like an i