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Turner Publishing Company - Kim Hooper

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142 pages

English

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Powerful Author: Kim Hooper is the author of the hit debut People Who Knew Me (St. Martin’s, 2014) and has a strong fanbase for her stories about the resilience of the human spirit.

Up Lit: Hooper’s writing is strong enough to make her a dominating presence in the currently popular “up lit” movement.

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Fiction

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Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	11 juin 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781684422449
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0900€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

TINY
T URNER P UBLISHING C OMPANY
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
T INY
Copyright 2019 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: Grant Haffner
Book design: Karen Sheets de Gracia
L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN- P UBLICATION D ATA
Names: Hooper, Kim author.
Title: Tiny / Kim Hooper.
Description: Nashville : Turner Publishing Company, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018049260 (print) LCCN 2018051270 (ebook) ISBN 9781684422449 (ebook) ISBN 9781684422425 (pbk.) ISBN 9781684422432 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3608.O59495 (ebook) LCC PS3608.O59495 T56 2019 (print) DDC 813/.6-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049260
9781684422425 Paperback
9781684422432 Hardcover
9781684422449 eBook
P RINTED IN THE U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA
19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TINY
KIM HOOPER
For Mya .
All the winding roads have led to you .
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
ONE YEAR LATER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
NATE lies flat in bed, staring at the ceiling. When he was a kid, they had popcorn ceilings. He used to find shapes in them-Snoopy s profile, a space shuttle, that kind of thing. When he and Annie bought their house, a beach cottage built in the 1950s, the first order of business was removing the popcorn ceilings. There could be asbestos, she said. The guy from the removal company-there are whole companies dedicated to this now-nodded in grave agreement, and they paid him to strip it away and make them feel safer.
He knows Annie is awake next to him. They re both pretending to be asleep, trying to convince each other that such a thing is possible. It doesn t seem like it will ever be possible again.
There were times-in college, between classes-when he d lie down on a park bench like a homeless person and fall asleep. He could sleep anywhere, anytime. Annie used to make fun of him for doing push-ups in the living room while watching football games and then lying on his stomach for a quick nap. The first time she caught him, she gasped and shook him awake. I thought you were dead, she said, slapping him on the shoulder.
The grief counselor, Pete, had told them it would take time. Nate asked, How much time? in hopes that there was a prescribed formula, a date he could look forward to when they would just wake up and it would be all over.
Pete chuckled in a good-natured way and said, Unfortunately, it s different for everyone.
Annie s eyes welled up. I don t think the next sixty or whatever years I have left on earth will be enough time. Pete put his hand over her clenched fist, like he was paper to her rock.
Annie hasn t gone two hours without crying since it happened. There s a subconscious timer in Nate s brain, counting the minutes, hoping she ll be tearless just a few moments longer than the day before. She hasn t passed the two-hour mark though. Sometimes she ll seem okay, going through the motions of existence, and then something small will happen and she ll lose it. Yesterday, she cried after finding a little pink sock behind the dryer. It s been missing for months, she said, holding it up to him like it was the Hope Diamond.
Nate has never been a crier. He prides himself on this fact, resents the psychology community for implying he has some kind of underlying issue .
Pete had asked him, Where did you learn to hold in your emotions?
Learn ? Like it was an obscure skill like building ships in bottles. Nate told him it was just who he was. Aren t most guys like me? he asked Pete.
Pete responded, with a friendly laugh, You say that like it s a good thing, and Nate thought, but didn t say, Isn t it ?
He doesn t mind being a stereotype, a clich . It s better than losing his shit and sobbing like a little girl. Annie would cry automatic tears-the kind of tears you cry when you pluck a nose hair-if he said this out loud, if he said little girl. She wants him to break down, to join her in misery. Pete told her, as if Nate wasn t sitting right there, He doesn t want to open the floodgates. Nate didn t fight this conclusion, even though he doesn t think there s a flood, rivers of raging tears, waiting to break free. Maybe it s shock. Maybe he s hardened by the need to support Annie. There s an equilibrium to relationships; both people can t be completely devastated simultaneously. They just can t.
Nate gets out of bed, stretches up toward the ceiling. The clock says 3:26 a.m. Lucy, their seven-year-old black Lab mix, stirs in her dog bed on the floor. Nate got Lucy when he was twenty-eight, after breaking up with Stephanie, his girlfriend of four years, the girl he swore he was going to marry. He resigned himself to a man-and-dog kind of life. Then he met Annie. Lucy seemed to approve of her. They got married after only a year of dating. Lucy was their ring bearer.
Lucy used to sleep on the bed with them, but Annie can t bear looking at her since it happened. So Nate tries to keep her out of the way. He feeds the dog, walks her, picks up her poop. Lucy isn t the same either. There is something in her eyes-apology, maybe, guilt.
What are you doing? Annie says, voice soft and falsely groggy.
Going for a run, he says.
Now ? Her tone tells him this is a crazy notion.
Figure I ll make use of the awake time. I ll take Lucy with me. She hasn t been out in a few days.
Annie rolls back over, away from him. Fine, she says. She s used this word so many times before, as a precursor to so many arguments, when she is exactly not fine.
I ll have breakfast ready for you when you wake up, he says. He s trying to make her some version of content in this new life of theirs-a Sisyphean mission so far. What sounds good?
Nothing, she says.
Pancakes?
Pancakes had been their Saturday morning ritual, before.
She sighs something like disappointment. Definitely not pancakes.

THE AIR OUTSIDE is crisp and cold. People say California is always seventy-something degrees, but it s not. There are thirty-eight-degree January mornings like this one. Joggers wear sporty gloves and headbands that keep their ears warm. Nate doesn t have either of these things. And his shoes are a decade old. He s only just started running again. He ran track in high school and college but couldn t manage to integrate it into his adult life. There wasn t time before work, or he didn t make time. And after work, he just wanted a beer and brainless TV. There were occasional years when he made resolutions on December 31 to start running again, but he d maintain his resolve for only a month or so before petering out. It feels good to be back now. Or maybe good isn t the right word. Maybe necessary is the right word. It feels necessary .
He lets Lucy run next to him, off leash. He hates the leash, probably more than she does. Annie always scolds him when he doesn t use it though. She says he has to consider other people, not just himself. He has to think of the little old ladies who are petrified of dogs. He has to remember that dogs are animals and Lucy might attack an unassuming Shih Tzu. And besides, the ticket for having a dog off leash is expensive-four hundred bucks or something absurd like that. At four in the morning though, nobody is out. No cops, no little old ladies, no Shih Tzus.
On those past New Year s resolution kicks, he had a running route, a loop that went by the park and then down to the beach path. He d run two miles along Pacific Coast Highway, ending at a traffic light that marked the start of the big hill trek back home. He could never bring himself to run the damn hill; he always walked it.
Now, though, he can t run by the park. After what happened, it s like it doesn t even exist to him as a place. So he s found another way down to the beach path. He winds through their Capistrano Beach neighborhood, a maze of streets crammed together by city planners who never expected such an influx of humans. There are no streetlights because his hippie-dippie community has an ordinance against them, the board agreeing that streetlights would make it hard to see the stars at night. Annie loves this about where they live-the people who have been there forever, who bake pies for each other and sip wine on each other s porches, talking about the good old days when they surfed in less crowded ocean waters. Nate would prefer streetlights.
He uses the flashlight on his phone to navigate. When he gets down to the beach, the air is cooler. He blows warmth onto his hands, but that helps for only a split second.
Jesus, Lucy, it s a cold one today, he says.
This is one of the favorite parts of his run-talking to the dog. He used to talk to her a lot when she was a puppy, when he lived alone in his bachelor pad, pitying himself after the Stephanie breakup. He d tell Lucy about his day, and she d cock her head to one side, ears perked, like she understood, like she was genuinely interested. When Annie entered the picture, there weren t as many Lucy chats. Sometimes when Annie was in the shower and he was still in bed, taking his time to wake up, he d nuzzle Lucy and tell her she was a good girl and ask her what she wanted for breakfast. I can whip up some steak-and-vegetable kibble, he d tell her. The bag says it s meatier than ev