Did You Ever Have A Family (26 page)
Read Did You Ever Have A Family Online
Authors: Bill Clegg
Rebecca and Kelly will wear the rings I watched them put on their fingers when they said their vows. And together they will get old. The Landises will come back every year. I will make up their rooms and bring them cookies for as long as I can, and when I can’t anymore, they will still come, with children and grandchildren, girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses. They will knock on our door and I will be there, crooked and old, and one day they will knock and I will be gone. And every time they come, they will tell those who don’t know the story of the young man who was a boy here, who went away and came home and went away, who cleaned rooms and carved a canoe and on its prow painted the faces of a family. And the stories will change and the canoe will become a headboard and the family will be mermaids and the rooms will be mansions. And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. Sand will blow across Pacific Avenue and against the windows of
the Moonstone, and new people will arrive and walk down the beach to the great ocean. They will be in love, or they will be lost, and they will have no words. And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them.
For much more than can be described here, great thanks to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Cathryn Summerhayes, Karen Kosztolnyik, Jennifer Bergstrom, Louise Burke, Wendy Sheanin, Carolyn Reidy, Jennifer Robinson, Michael Selleck, Lisa Litwack, Paula Amendolara, Charlotte Gill, Becky Prager, Chris Clemans, Jillian Buckley, Kassie Evashevski, Martine Bellen, John Gall, Kim Nichols, Sean Clegg, Emma Sweeney, Adam McLaughlin, Cy O’Neal, Jill Bialosky, Susannah Meadows, Stacey D’Erasmo, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Heidi Pitlor, Pat Strachan, Isabel Gillies, Courtney Hodell, Jean Stein, Robin Robertson, Luiz Schwarcz, Kimberly Burns, and to Alan Shapiro for writing a great poem, and Haven Kimmel for singling out the six words that planted the seed all those years ago.
B
ILL
C
LEGG
is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
and
Ninety Days
. He has written for
The New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, New York
magazine,
The Guardian,
and
Harper’s Bazaar
. Visit his website at
www.BillCleggAuthor.com
.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR:
authors.simonandschuster.com/Bill-Clegg
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Bill Clegg
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First Scout Press hardcover edition September 2015
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Jacket design and photography by John Gall
Author photograph by Christian Hansen
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clegg, Bill
Did you ever have a family / Bill Clegg. — First Scout Press
hardcover edition.
pages cm
I. Title.
PS3603.L455447D53 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014037087
ISBN 978-1-4767-9817-2
ISBN 978-1-4767-9819-6 (ebook)