All the Acorns on the Forest Floor , livre ebook

Turner Publishing Company - Kim Hooper

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

100 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

"All the Acorns on the Forest Floor is a stirring series of stories interwoven by the common threads of human frailty and the complexities of relationships. Poignant and poetic, the characters of these stunning vignettes are guaranteed to haunt and inspire long after the last page is turned. "
–Suzanne Redfearn, bestselling author of In an Instant

" In All the Acorns on the Forest Floor, Kim Hooper delivers an empathetic, compulsively readable book with a cast of characters you'll swear you know. With compassion and great heart, Hooper reminds us that people have histories, and we're all more connected than we think."
–Michelle Gable, New York Times bestselling author of A Paris Apartment

For many women, becoming a mother is the strongest expression of love they know. For others, the conscious choice to not have children empowers them to live their truth. Motherhood looks different for all women in Kim Hooper's All the Acorns On the Forest Floor.

Alex is pregnant with her second child, fearful because her first pregnancy ended at 16 weeks. Deb is reckoning with the fact that she was abandoned as a newborn by her mother. Wendy is wrestling with her early feelings about having children. These stories are interwoven into the stories of other women who are intentionally childless, adults reckoning with adoptions, and unwed women who had to make difficult choices.

This novel-in-stories is designed to tug at the heartstrings but also provide hope, comfort, and insight into women's experiences with the narrative of motherhood and society's expectations. We see the women at their most vulnerable, making decisions that will forever change the course of their lives. As each character's narrative unfolds, the book illustrates how small and connected people's lives are; no one's circumstances are as unique as they feel.

All the Acorns On the Forest Floor is a novel about mothers and daughters and the sometimes difficult relationships they have with those closest to them. These are stories of the deep, abiding love mothers and children have for one another and how fragile those relationships can be when difficult decisions must be made.

Hooper has created a novel that draws you in and doesn't let go until the last page. Readers will be anxious to discover how these women's stories are intertwined and inspired by the strength each character shows as they plunge into the world of motherhood, no matter what that world looks like.

Readers of Celeste Ng and Liane Moriarty will love All the Acorns On the Forest Floor. The stories' depth invites us all into the worlds of these women and shows us that we are all connected, whether we're mothers or not.

Sujets

Literary

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	15 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781684425303
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0800€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

all the acorns on the forest floor
T URNER P UBLISHING C OMPANY
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
A LL THE A CORNS ON THE F OREST F LOOR
Copyright 2020 Kim Hooper.
All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Lauren Peters-Collaer
Book design: Karen Sheets de Gracia
L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN- P UBLICATION D ATA
Names: Hooper, Kim, author.
Title: All the acorns on the forest floor / Kim Hooper.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Turner Publishing Company, [2020] | Summary: All the Acorns on the Forest Floor tells the poignant and moving stories of multiple characters linked by their experiences as mothers, daughters, and lovers. Rife with stunning imagery, masterful character development, and heart rendering storytelling, this book will captivate readers of all walks of life -Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020029256 (print) | LCCN 2020029257 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684425297 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684425303 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.O59495 A79 2020 (print) | LCC PS3608.O59495 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029256
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029257
9781684425297 Hardcover
9781684425303 eBook
P RINTED IN THE U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA
20 21 22 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
all the acorns on the forest floor

Kim Hooper
For Mya. Again and of course. And for Chris. For everything.
contents
notes for a eulogy
what we cannot know
days that used to be
thinking twice
all the acorns on the forest floor
the Craigslist baby
proof of errands
the duck in the kitchen
the exchange
when they were young
only in Hollywood
a good egg
the narrative of us
notes for a eulogy
I LIKE WATCHING Jake when he drives, when he s focused on a specific task. It s one of the few times I get to stare-just stare-at his profile, the sharp slant of his nose, the enviable length of his eyelashes. Once, buzzed on champagne at our friend s wedding, I begged him to let me put mascara on them. He refused.
What s he like? I ask.
We re an hour into our two-hour drive, and we haven t said much. In the beginning of us, this would have made me nervous, the silence. It doesn t anymore. We re good together. We ve embraced that, taken solace in that. The rest of life seems to be a crapshoot, but we re a sure thing. He s not going anywhere and, more importantly, neither am I. My rolling stone of a heart has come to a rest. I ve even let him see me pluck the hairs above my lip.
I don t know. He s a charming type, Jake says. He s short like me.
When we first started dating, this was an unspoken fact-that Jake is shorter than me; he s not short by average standards, but a few inches beneath my five feet, eleven inches. I used to slouch or stand next to him with one foot out far to the side, leaning down to his height. When he couldn t reach something on the upper shelf of the pantry, I pretended I couldn t either. We re done with that now. I stand tall because I don t want to be hunched over like my grandma when I m old. And he asks me to get down the vases from the cabinet above the fridge when he brings home flowers.
Do you look like him? I ask.
He s biting his nails. He does this when he s nervous. He denies it though. Whenever I witness it and ask what s bothering him, he says, Nothing. Why?
I look just like him. Just like him.
He says this like it baffles him, though it shouldn t. We re talking about his father. He didn t grow up calling him Dad, but he s still his father.
The story isn t original. His parents split up when he was young. I ve asked how old he was, and he s never clear-once he said, I don t know, around ten; another time he said, I think I was twelve. He talks about it like it doesn t matter, like the details are meaningless, though they seem like everything to me. My parents are celebrating their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary this year.
After the divorce, Jake didn t see much of his father. Sometimes he d swoop in on weekends to take Jake and his sister for ice cream. Then he married a woman named Linda, and Jake stopped hearing from him. Jake was twenty years old, in college, when his father called for the first time in a few years and said he was divorcing Linda. He needed somewhere to stay because she was taking all his money. Jake offered his couch, reluctantly. He thought his father would stay a couple nights, but he stayed a couple months. When he finally moved out, renting a room in a house shared by two college kids, he said he d never get married again. But then he married Deb.
What s Deb like? I ask.
Jake shrugs. She s loud. Whatever you do, don t try to help her in the kitchen.
Got it. So she s the overbearing type?
That s probably what makes her a good caretaker.
Jake says his father married Deb because he doesn t want to die alone. He was diagnosed with ALS a year ago, right around the time Jake first kissed me.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-I ve learned to rattle off the full medical name easily. Most people call it Lou Gehrig s disease, after the famous baseball player who died from it. I d heard of it before meeting Jake, mostly because I know all things baseball. My dad pitched for the Twins in the seventies before he hurt his shoulder, quit, and then met my mom. He coached my softball teams until I stopped playing sometime before high school.
I d asked Jake, cautiously, what ALS is, what it does, afraid to make him emotional. He wasn t though. He simply said, It makes the muscles really weak. It started in my father s legs. He says his legs are, like, dead, paralyzed. And now his arms are going. I tried not to look horror-struck but failed when Jake said, Eventually, you can t swallow or breathe. You suffocate, in the end.
And when s the end? I d asked.
Probably two years, tops.
It s not fair, really. His mom is ill too, four stages into pancreatic cancer. They re both in their fifties, his parents-not old enough to die. When he first told me about these cards dealt to him, he d said, What are the chances?
Jake s father invited both Jake and his sister to the cabin, but his sister declined. I don t want to be that far from mom, she d told Jake. I was surprised when Jake said he would go-not that he wanted to go, but that he would, as a duty. He and his sister agreed not to tell their mom. It would upset her, her son making an effort to visit his father who was never there and his father s third wife.
Have you told them much about me? I ask.
I doubt he has. He hardly ever talks to his father. When he does, he uses the same tone he uses on work calls: blunt, direct, authoritative. Jake does something with investment banking that I don t even pretend to find interesting. He s all business on those work calls. Sometimes I wonder what his colleagues and clients would think if they heard how he talks to me, saw how he gives me baby kisses on my cheeks and combs stray hairs out of my eyes.
He looks at me, takes his eyes off the road for a moment.
I ve told them you re my match, he says.
I suppose I don t need them to know anything else. He reaches over, puts his hand on my leg. He turns his eyes back to the road and says, This probably isn t a good time to tell them we re pregnant, right?
I used to hate when men said We re pregnant, as if they were too. But there s something about the way Jake says it, the way he takes ownership of this human growing inside me, that makes me smile. One life going, another on its way-the math of it all could be a comfort. But maybe there is no sufficient comfort at this time, this time that isn t a good time.
We re only a few weeks into it. It s bad luck to say anything this early, I say.
I put my hand to my stomach. It doesn t seem real yet, the pregnancy. The only thing keeping me from complete disbelief is the nausea, the saltines on the nightstand.
When we tell people, I think they ll assume it wasn t planned. We re not married, not even engaged. We will be. It just isn t a good time to be planning a wedding, the biggest party of our lives. That can wait. Some things can t. We re halfway through our thirties. Jake told me, when I moved in four months ago, that he wanted a family. Life is too short, he d said. And I d said, Let s have a family.
They re going to put us to work, just to warn you, Jake says.
Their cabin is near Lake Arrowhead, a weekend getaway from Los Angeles. His father told him he wants his ashes scattered at the cabin, in the backyard under the pine trees. He s leaving the cabin to Deb when he s gone. Jake s worried she ll sell it and when we take our future child to see Grandpa s resting place, Jake will have to knock on the door of strangers and explain: My father used to own this place. Mind if we walk around back?
We ll have to chop some logs, clean up the yard. My father can t do any of that anymore. Obviously. I don t know why they don t hire a gardener.
That would be admitting defeat, I say.
We hear Jake s mom say this often: I know I can t drive, but selling the Camry is admitting defeat and Buying those damn nutrition shakes is admitting defeat. I can eat real food. Though she can t. She s ninety pounds.
I was thinking the other day about how I don t know a single thing to say for his eulogy, Jake says.
It s like him-to plan ahead like this, to already be thinking about his speech at the funeral. Ever since I ve known him, he s been calendar obsessed, scheduling weekend camping trips and day hikes months in advance, like he s de