Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [0]
Michelle Huneven’s
Round Rock
“Classy, absorbing … thoroughly old-fashioned in its likable characters and its fine writing.”
—The New Yorker
“Like a fat, comfortable chair, [a book] you can forget yourself in.… [Huneven] lays bare the human heart’s deepest fears and yearnings.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Characters that fit like a pair of jeans and an old T-shirt—this is a book you can live in. It is wise, witty, and charming—and, ultimately, deeply moving. Brilliant.”
—T. Coraghessan Boyle
“Warm and absorbing.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“I’ve not read so knowing and pleasant a book in years … superb!”
—Barry Hannah
“A wonderfully rewarding good read.”
—Alice Adams
“Huneven is an audacious novelist.… [She] approaches the inhabitants of Round Rock with the same curiosity through which Brian Moore or Graham Greene or Muriel Spark might explore characters in their novels.”
—Los Angeles Times
Michelle Huneven
Round Rock
Michelle Huneven is the author of Round Rock and Jamesland. She was born in Altadena, California, studied at Grinnell College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and makes her living as a freelance writer and restaurant critic. She has received a GE Younger Writers Award in Fiction and a James Beard Award. She now lives (again) in Altadena.
Copyright © 1997 by Michelle Huneven
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.
A portion of this work first appeared in Willow Springs.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Peer International Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Hello Stranger” by A. P. Carter, copyright © 1938 by Peer International Corporation, copyright renewed. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Huneven, Michelle, [date]
Round Rock: a novel/Michelle Huneven. —1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS355.U4662R68 1997
813_54—dc21 97-5831
eISBN: 978-0-307-78797-2
Author photograph © James Fee
Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com
v3.1
For their expertise and support, the author would like to thank James Beetem, Bernard Cooper, Gary Fisketjon, Amy Gerstler, Maxine Groffsky, Arthur Huneven, Tom Knechtel, Bia Lowe, Jeffrey Luther, Arty Nelson, Holly Pilling, Nicole Reilley, Lily Tuck, Ellen Way, and the MacDowell Colony.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Prologue
One
Two
Prologue
AMONG the inhabitants of the Santa Bernita Valley, it is commonly believed that nothing there ever goes according to plan.
The valley was settled by two families back in the late 1850s. Henri Morrot arrived from southern France with his wife and infant son to plant vineyards. Discouraged by the adobe soil, he spent thirty years growing lima beans and sweet potatoes before filling the valley floor with citrus.
Tom and William Fitzgerald, two adventurous, often drunken brothers from Chicago, received a land grant for the northern foothills and grazed sheep in a haphazard fashion while Morrot grew rich during the citrus boom in the nineties. Now, a century later, eighty percent of the groves are in the Fitzgerald name, and the only two Morrots left in the valley live in the government-subsidized Buena Vista Rest Home in Buchanan, a small city in the valley’s western mouth.
In the narrower, less-developed eastern end, particularly in and around the town of Rito, fate is said to be especially capricious.
In 1947, the Army Corps of Engineers paved the road and erected a pretty little bridge over the river just outside of town. That very winter, the Rito flooded, washed out the bridge, and changed course, using half a mile of new roadway as its streambed.
In 1958, Victor Ibañez purchased a small corner storefront in downtown Rito