The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“I guess the act was going really wrong, but there was Mom, dismembering herself and smiling.”


He talked to me before the sun was up, about the way her hair looked that night. The way she blushed. Like a ripe peach. How he’d ditched Frank with some friends from the marina and waited around for hours until the show shut down for the night. He’d lingered outside the magician’s tent until he saw her in shorts and tennis shoes, her hair in a ponytail. Like a normal girl.

“He told her he’d come by every night, just for her, and that if she didn’t go for a walk with him he’d spend the rest of his life wondering if she’d been real.”

“Doesn’t sound like Dad at all.”

No, not the Dad Enola knew, but the one before, the memory who told stories about fish so big they’d swallow a little boy in a single gulp. Mom went walking with him. He took her down to the harbor and under the docks. I’ve done it myself when the tide is out and the air is sweet with the smell of ocean and the sound of boats pulling at their moorings. It’s a rite of passage for Napawset boys to take girls down there, to lean against a piling and wrap their arms around them. That was the sort of thing my mother loved—rituals in place for years that never changed. She’d been used to living in trailers, RVs, hotel rooms. He hoped that the lure of a home would be strong.

“He promised Mom the house,” I tell her.

“Well, he could have bothered to take care of it.”

I shrug and drain the last of my coffee. “Maybe with her gone there was no reason to.”

She smirks. She doesn’t have to say it: we should have been reason enough. She stretches and shakes her head. “You fucked things up with Alice.”

“I know.”

She swirls the coffee around in her mug. “She’ll forgive you, though. She just needs time.”

“You think?” During dinner she’d seemed unbending, disgusted. It’s hard to recover from disgust.

A shrugged shoulder. “Sure. If you want her to. But you can’t take money from Frank.”

“I don’t really have a choice.”

“You do, you just don’t like making choices. It used to take you forty minutes to pick out a shirt.”

“It’s the house, not a shirt.”

“Exactly. You could just come with me and Doyle, forget the house, and give Alice time to cool off.”

“I can’t do that, okay?”

“Fine. Suit yourself,” she says. “Oh, I looked at your book some more.”

“Tell me you didn’t tear out any more pages.”

Her eyes roll. “I bet you don’t know what you have.”

In point of fact, I don’t. “I know it’s old. The earliest date in it is 1774. It follows a circus—well, not exactly a circus since there wasn’t really circus in America yet. It had multiple owners, I don’t know how many. A lot of it is ruined.”

“It’s an owner’s log. Thom let me see his. Circus masters, carnival guys, they all keep them. You put in everything that happens on a show, who signs on, who leaves, what they make, where you travel, dates, everything. It doesn’t stay with one person; it stays with the show. Thom’s book is from his father. He’s got a case of books that go back to the sixties. His dad bought the show when the last owner retired to Sarasota. It helps you keep track of the important shit.”

“I figured it was sort of a show history.”

“It’s kind of like a family Bible. Yours, though,” she nudges the book. “That’s weird. It’s not supposed to be like a diary. Thom’s isn’t sketched up that way, either.”

“It’s old. There probably wasn’t an established way of doing things.”

She taps her fingers two at a time, pinkie and index then middle and ring. Dad did that too. “Maybe. Still, you shouldn’t have that book. The way it’s all ruined in the back it looks like it survived a flood or something. Maybe that’s why it’s not with the show or with the family.”

“What do you mean?”

“Books like that aren’t supposed to leave a show. It’s all inside information, history kind of stuff. Valuable. If there was a flood or fire, though, maybe somebody left it behind.” She chews her lip and I can hear the unspoken words. Its owners left in a hurry, or its owners died.

“It’s with family, kind of. Mom’s relatives are in it.”