“I’ll take her with me,” said Joe Wear.
Anybody who looked through the window—and people did peer in, a month after the murder, they dared each other to—would have seen an angular older man climbing atop a stool steadied by a stout middle-aged man, handling what would have looked like to a suspicious eye the corpse of a child, rigor mortis set in, something ghoulish—no. A doll. Two men with a doll. Well, that was even more suspicious, wasn’t it.
The two men laid her out on the glass of a pinball machine, a newish one, Disco Dan.
“I’m sorry,” said Roy. “She’s lovely in her way. I wonder how she got here. Thank you,” he said. “Mr. Wear. We’re very thankful.”
Bertha. Joe’s Bertha. She would surely need restoration; there were toothmarks in one ankle. The head that Dr. Sprague had made was so dear, and so bad—it couldn’t be replaced but perhaps, perhaps. Or not. Leave her as she was. Her skirt was split down the middle, for cycling; her limbs were willy-nilly. Stretched out on the darkened pinball machine, she looked as though she had just dropped out of the sky. She should: she had. We all fall out of the sky. That’s where we come from. Joe Wear gathered Bertha Truitt in his arms, and took her out of the bowling alley, out of Salford, out of Massachusetts, out of New England, so they could start again.
Acknowledgments
This book is highly inaccurate, even for a novel, but two books helped make it a little less so: The Game of Candlepin Bowling by Florence E. Greenleaf (as told to Paul C. Tedford) and Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo. My remarkable late great-aunt Jessica Bernstein’s unpublished memoir of her World War II service, “Sir, I’m from Indiana,” was hugely helpful and inspiring. Thanks, too, to Colin Dickey, author of Ghostland, for some timely ghost advice.
And many thanks to: Paul Harding, Paul Lisicky, Ann Patchett, S. Kirk Walsh, and Michael Taeckens; Henry Dunow, Arielle Datz, and everyone at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner; everyone at Ecco, including Daniel Halpern, Miriam Parker, Sonya Cheuse, Emma Dries, Sara Birmingham, and particularly the wonderful Megan Lynch.
I have been very lucky to work with Robin Robertson for literal decades: I cannot thank him enough.
About the Author
ELIZABETH McCRACKEN is the author of five books—Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (stories), The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, long-listed for the National Book Award)—three of which were New York Times Notable Books. McCracken has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.
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