the book

"Someone once said every good story starts with a quote."

"Who said that?" Marcy looked up from her salad. "And what's your point?"

Honey looked at her daughter with an impatient frown marking her thin lips. "I don't know who said it, but the point is, maybe you should start with a quote." Vickers. Their last name was almost as forbidding as its religious roots where the older woman was concerned. She matched it very closely. A middle-height woman with a rounded mid-section, curvaceous if one were being politically correct. "You can't keep going on about writing and never do anything. If you don't like your job, change it."

"Who said I don't like my job?" Marcy sank further into her plastic chair, leaning to the right to avoid the direct sunlight which crept around the edge of the outdoor umbrella over their table.

"You say it all the time. You don't like kids. You should get out of teaching," Honey added with a vicious thrust of her fork at a shrimp on her plate.

Marcy remained silent, studying the hangnails on the tips of her fingers. A puff of smoke wafted between the women and Marcy tracked its meager beginnings to the charcoal grill set up on one side of the yard. Her brother-in-law, a handsome, sturdily built man of about thirty-five was tending it, and supposedly the kids. The children, however, were running rampant; the oldest, a seven-year-old with a shock of red hair was tormenting his sister via a plastic pump water gun. Marcy turned back toward her mother.

"Are you going to sulk, now?"

She turned away from Honey and watched her sister, Annabell, waddle out of the house, pushing the screen door closed behind her, a plate half-balanced on her basketball-shaped belly. "I told you, I don't want kids. It doesn't mean I don't like them, or my job."

In truth, she hated her job, but admitting so would be tantamount to admitting her mother was right about everything she had said. At least, Honey would take it that way. Junior high had been fun to teach for the first five months. In month six it had occurred to Marcy that if she heard one more fart joke or squeal of an eleven-year-old girl telling on the boy behind her for poking her with his pencil, she would happily strangle the offending child. Month seven it had gotten better, but had never returned to that initial glowing feeling of molding children. As soon as she sent them home, their mothers quickly undid whatever good she had done in class.

"Then stop complaining. I'm tired of listening to you complain all the time."

Marcy watched her mother snatch up the paper plate and plastic cup and stalk away, over to where Annabell was supervising the wiener roast. She wasn't offended. Too many of their conversations had ended that way for her to be offended. It was, most likely, Honey's disgust at Marcy's determination to keep her bereft of a full dozen grandchildren that caused the older woman so much rancor. Usually she got along with Marcy very well--especially when her daughter was taking her advice about makeup or clothes or dating.

But Marcy didn't date. When asked, she stated so as though it were a moral statement; a permanent state of martyrdom through which she was proving that a woman didn't have to be attached to be fulfilled and happy. But she stared at the plastic fork in her hand, knowing that if it could speak it would say quite plainly that she, of all people, wasn't happy.

And why should she be? She was clearly in torment. She had a well-paying job, a wealth of friends, new and old, siblings and nieces and nephews to keep her company when her friends or health failed her. Even her job, in reality, was enjoyable most of the time. There was just something nagging at her to constantly focus on the shortcomings of her life. In reality, it was what someone famous had once said; that it wasn't really failure that stopped you, but the fear of it. In fact, almost everything she had tried, she had been successful at. It was those little things she had not tried that nagged and nagged at her.

The Book. That seemed to be the recurrent theme of late. There was a book to write. It was sitting right there at the top of her list of "Things To Do Before I'm 40." Write a book. In carefully printed blue ink. She had been trying to write a book since she was twelve. No. Not trying. She had been writing. She had dozens, maybe hundreds of chapter ones and twos and threes. Inevitably they petered out around page forty. Something distracted her, or she got another idea in mind, abandoning the last for the next. She could hardly even pinpoint why it was so important to her. That was, probably, the scariest question. Why.

"Hey, Marce, you still hungry?" Annabell called across the lawn, but interrupted as a spray of water soaked her skirt and the food on the plate she was holding, "Nathan Daniel Pemberly Junior, if you squirt me with that water gun one more time you're going to be using it as a crutch."

Marcy shook her head and got to her feet. "Thank Annabell, but I have to get going."

"She's sulking about the kids again," Honey said from beside Nathan Senior's side.

"I'm not sulking. I have to get some ideas down on paper." She ignored Honey's snort, crossing the lawn and leaning down to kiss her mother's cheek and hand then her sister's. "Thanks for lunch," she added to the latter, and slipped through the screen door, amidst the sounds of squealing from the kids and outrage from the adults as another spray of water hissed in protest at hitting the grill.

She dropped her plate in the trash and patted the dog's head on her way out the front door, digging past the notebooks and loose papers in her bag to find her keys.

It was, in reality, unlikely that she would write anything worth keeping, or even worth writing. But at the moment, even facing The Book seemed less taxing than dealing with her family on a Sunday afternoon, post-church. She climbed into the driver's side of the silver hatchback, wincing at the heat of the sun-baked steering wheel against her hands, and started the ignition. As she turned around in the cul-de-sac, words began running through her head--only an alternate reality, really--and she thought again that she should really get a hand-held recorder.