An Excerpt from BEWILDERNESS, the New Novel by Karen Tucker (fiction ’10 )
BEWILDERNESS is the first novel from fiction Alum Karen Tucker. It is new in June from Catapult. Below is an excerpt:
As soon as Luce’s going-away party wound down enough for me to slip off unnoticed, I went outside and sat on the little wooden bench across from the restaurant. I guess I’d always known she was going to leave. Even before that first instant-release summer, when she was nothing more to me than a fellow cocktail server, alone and drifting, you could tell she was the kind of person who needed to scrape more out of life than most.
But Luce was also someone who liked to drag stuff out as long as possible, so of course she wanted to give one final hug to every last co-worker, from the waiters who always skipped out on their closing duties to the hosts who made sure to give you all the worst customers until you snuck them a coffee mug of wine. I figured I had time for a cigarette before she came out and caught me. I hadn’t smoked in months but the past couple days had been more stressful than usual and in a moment of panic I’d bought a pack off one of the dishwashers. It wasn’t my brand, but that didn’t matter. Times like this were when all the old urges came swooping back in. I dug around in my bag for my lighter and though it took a few tries, I got the flame going. Once that first hit of nicotine roared into my bloodstream it felt like some broken-off part of me finally righted itself and slid into place.
By the time Luce came outside, all bundled up in her giant green parka, I’d burned through three Marb Reds and part of a fourth and my head was swimming way up above me. She called to me from the door. “He’s still not answering. You didn’t hear from him, did you?”
I dropped my cigarette in the snow before she could see it. “Wilky?”
She ran her eyes over me. “Who else? Said he’d pick us up by eleven at the latest.”
I hoisted my purse over my shoulder and trudged back toward her. “He’s just caught up in his own going-away deal. Bet he’s standing on a chair and making a big speech or something. You know how he is.”
That earned me a faint smile, but you could tell by the stiffness in Luce’s jaw that she didn’t believe it. She got out her phone and called him again. When Wilky still didn’t answer, her cheeks went splotchy with anger. “Dude better have a good explanation.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind walking,” I said.
Luce and I rented a tiny clapboard bungalow a little less than a mile from the restaurant. Neither of us had a car. Or actually Luce did: an old Chevy Impala that needed at least a thousand bucks in repairs before she could drive it and which was busy decomposing in the side lot, next to the skeletal remains of a tractor the previous tenants had wisely abandoned. When the weather was halfway decent we rode bikes to work. But it had been snowing on and off since morning, so even if we’d been able to make it uphill to Broad Street during daylight, biking back down on slick roads wasn’t our idea of a choice evening, not after the night last winter when Luce hit a patch of ice, tumbled over her handlebars, and fractured her elbow. She lost almost a month of shifts and even then she had to learn how to carry trays left-handed.
At least she had Wilky. They’d been together over two years and lately he’d been working nights at a nearby bar, the kind with painted-over windows and the stink of urinal cakes wafting out of the bathroom. Although me and Luce always started our shifts a couple hours before him, if it was raining or snowing or we just didn’t feel like biking, all we had to do was shoot him a quick text and he’d come give us a lift. Wilky was a sweet, low-key guy who’d gotten himself bounced out of the army for an incident that wasn’t his fault, not really. Which is to say that in some ways he was also incredibly dumb. Don’t get me wrong, Wilky had a head packed full of brains and a college education to go along with it and that’s more than you can say for anyone else in our circle, myself included. But at the same time he was someone who always went around trusting everybody on the planet—no matter how little they might have deserved it.
