Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [0]
Amy Inspired
Copyright © 2010
Bethany Pierce
Cover design by Andrea Gjeldum
Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Printed in the United States of America
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pierce, Bethany, 1983–
Amy inspired / Bethany Pierce.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7642-0850-8 (pbk.)
1. Authors—Fiction. 2. Authorship—Fiction. 3. Women college teachers—Fiction. 4. Adultery—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.I346A83 2010
813'.6—dc22
2010016347
* * *
For my grandmother,
who taught me the art of optimistic thinking.
Contents
Prologue
Part 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part 2
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Part 3
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Discussion Questions
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
“Find something you love to do,” my father told me, “and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Optimistic advice from a man who spent fifteen years selling insurance, a job he detested for fourteen. Eventually, my father did follow his passions, out of insurance and into the arms of a local attorney who loved him, presumably better than my mother, and made six figures.
If my parents had anything in common, it was the shared belief that life was good. When Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl left me in a rage, my mother recommended that I read something nice; it was best not to think about things I couldn’t change. She believed in marriage, despite her divorce. She had no pain in childbirth.
In our home, glasses were half full; when God shut doors He opened windows; and you could be anything you wanted to be when you grew up, even—and especially—the president of the United States.
Mostly I wanted to be an astronaut. I studied constellations and memorized planet names and orbits. I hung upside down from the school monkey bars to practice zero gravity and studded my ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars. Grandma’s new refrigerator, a black shiny monolith with blinking green and red lights, functioned as Ship’s Main Computer. Alone in the kitchen, I’d push the flat plastic buttons, whispering, “Red alert!” and “Fire torpedoes when ready!”
“You all right, Sugarpie?” Grandma would ask when she spied me in conversation with the ice dispenser. She later voiced her concerns to my mother: “You’d better get that girl’s teeth checked. All she wants to do is eat ice.”
Mom had heard worse. Only a week before I’d subsisted five days on little more than freezer pops and baby food to train my stomach for an all-liquid diet. “Moon food,” Mom called it, pureeing peas into paste for my dinner. “Moon?” I asked. I had my sights on Mars.
When I was informed we couldn’t afford Space Camp, I realized it was best to have a few backups. A girl has to keep her options open.
My top ten careers in descending order of importance, as outlined at age ten:
1. Astronaut
2. Pilot
3. Stewardess
4. Showboat singer
5. Prima donna in manner of Mariah Carey
6. Forensic scientist
7. Olympic gold-medalist figure skater
8. Wedding cake baker
9. Bank teller
10. Famous novelist
I spent my childhood rehearsing to be an adult, tripping over legs that grew faster than my ambition, testing my abilities with scientific objectivity.
I got motion sick on the merry-go-round, which eliminated astronaut for good, taking pilot, stewardess, and Olympic figure skater (all that twirling) with it.
I had a nice voice but was never properly recognized