Nowhere but Home (35 page)

“Thank you, Coach Blanchard, for recognizing Paragon Ranch. We are truly proud to call ourselves members of the Stallion Batallion,” Everett says to more applause. Everett continues, “I'd like to bring out the entire Coburn family to help with tonight's coin toss, if you don't mind?” The entire Coburn clan trots onto the field, gathering around Everett. I know I should probably look at this family with disdain. I know Merry Carole, Fawn, and Dee are doing just that right about now. But I can't. I can't take my eyes off of Everett. He turns around and looks at his family as they wait expectantly behind him. He turns back around and looks out into the crowd. He continues, “You know . . . we're actually missing one person. I'm going to ask that person to join me down here on the field. It's the woman I love, and as most of you already know, have loved my entire life.”

All eyes shoot to me.

Dee shoves me into a standing position. I look at Merry Carole, who's sitting there with her hand clapped over her mouth. I smile at her and look back down on the field. Cal has taken his helmet off and is looking from Everett to me. I just stand there.

“Queenie Wake, come make an honest man out of me,” Everett says, staring right at me.

And before I can think, I thread my way through the various feet and knees of the packed bleachers, the muffled sound pounding in my ears. I hop down the stairs and run across the field looking at no one but Everett. He hands the microphone to Reed and steps forward. I leap into his arms and he catches me. I knew he would.

This is you. This is now.

Damn straight it is.

Acknowledgments

I think as I get older I begin to ask questions about what it's all about, why we are here, and what it is I'm searching for. And then Neil deGrasse Tyson goes and says it way better than I could ever imagine: “We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that.”

This life is about connectivity. People. Love.

Period.

I am thankful—like a quivering mound of flesh when I think of them thankful—for my family. Mom, Don, Alex, Joe, Zoë, and Bonnie. And Poet, of course.

Thanks to everyone at Fletcher and Company.

Appreciation to the team at HarperCollins: Carrie Feron, Tessa Woodward, Lauren Cook, Jean Marie Kelly, Mary Sasso, Seale Ballenger, and on and on.

Thankful praise for Kerri and her adorable fam, Marilyn, Christine, Paige, Henry and Norm, Kim and the Crazies, Kim and Mark, David and Kathie, Nicole and Bekka, Dave and Jen, Mark and Sara, Alyssa, Michelle, Kurt, Matthew, Milly, Mia and Nikki, Scott, Larry and Ricca, Sharon, Jane, Juanita, Donna, Glo, Kit and Margaret, Lynn and Rich.

Thank you to Randy Barbour for helping me not embarrass myself when it comes to all things Texas. Thanks to Nina and Matt for showing me around Austin. Thanks to the Katy House in Smithville, Texas, for putting me up while I soaked in their beautiful city.

Thank you to my readers. You make me teary just thinking about how great you are.

And thank you to Mariage Frères tea, the open road, and great music.

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .

About the author

Meet Liza Palmer

L
IZA
P
ALMER
is the author of
Conversations with the Fat Girl
, which became an international bestseller during its first week of publication and hit number one on the Fiction Heatseekers List in the UK the week before its debut.
Conversations with the Fat Girl
has been optioned for a TV series by HBO.

Palmer's second novel is
Seeing Me Naked
, about which
Publishers Weekly
says, “Consider it haute chick lit; Palmer's prose is sharp, her characters are solid and her narrative is laced with moments of graceful sentiment.”

Entertainment Weekly
calls her third book,
A Field Guide to Burying Your Parents
, a “splendid novel” and
Real Simple
says it “has heart and humor.”

More Like Her
is Palmer's fourth novel. The book received a starred review from
Library Journal
in which they said, “The blend of humor and sadness is realistic and gripping, and watching Frannie figure out who she is and what matters is gratifying.”

After earning two Emmy nominations for writing during the first season of VH1's
Pop Up Video
, Palmer now knows far too much about Fergie.

Nowhere but Home
is her fifth novel.

About the book

One Last Meal

by Liza Palmer

 

W
HEN
I
FIRST
started writing
Nowhere but Home
, I had no idea what my last meal would be. Do you know yours? It's a weird thought, right?

One last meal.

It took writing this book for me to understand what it is we're trying to capture—much like lightning in a bottle. We're trying to re-create a moment, a perfect moment when, as Frank Ocean so beautifully put it, “time would glide.”

For me it comes down to three foods. Three foods that transport me, calm me, and surround me with love. These three foods are what I would want in my last moments, not because they're the best things I ever tasted but because in eating them I am loved once more.

 

Poppa Don's Gnocchi

For Christmas dinner every year my amazing stepdad makes his homemade gnocchi and a beautiful filet. My mom puts out the good china, and we gather around the table in the sparkly light of the season. We talk and laugh. My parents' ridiculous French bulldogs snuffle under the table for scraps. We are tired from Christmas morning, and yet we are all showered and most likely wearing something we were gifted that very morning.

Not only is Poppa Don's cheesy, mouth-watering gnocchi at the center of the Christmas table, it's at the center of the entire season.

Sitting around that Christmas table, we are a family.

 

Alex's Chocolate Chip Cookies

She's one of those bakers who says, “It's easy. It's just the recipe off the back of the chocolate chip bag!” Yet I try to make the same cookies, and they come out sad, flat, and tasteless. (I still eat them of course! I'm not an animal.)

My sister's chocolate chip cookies are the stuff of legend. My family sends urgent texts—
ALEX IS MAKING HER CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
—and we all drop everything and beeline for her house where we are met with that smelllll, oh the smelllll. Is there anything better than the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the oven?

During a crisis, Alex will bake. She will put the chocolate chip cookies in little baggies and present them to you when you're sad, hurting, sick, or just having a bad day.

They are love embodied.

 

Mom's Bean and Cheese Burritos

This is probably the food that defines me. It's my all-time favorite food in the world and only my mom
really
knows how to make it.

The pinto beans simmering in the pot, the white cheese (or “Monterey Jack” as some people call it), the flour tortillas my mom would flip on the burner with her deft hands.

This dish is home. Love. The feeling of being safe and sound.

Well, this dish is my mom.

Read on

Have You Read?
More from Liza Palmer

F
OR MORE BOOKS
by Liza Palmer check out

 

MORE LIKE HER

What really goes on behind those perfect white picket fences?

In Frances's mind, beautiful, successful, ecstatically married Emma Dunham is the height of female perfection. Frances, recently dumped with spectacular drama by her boyfriend, aspires to be just like Emma. So do her close friends and fellow teachers, Lisa and Jill. But Lisa's too career-focused to find time for a family. And Jill's recent unexpected pregnancy could have devastating consequences for her less-than-perfect marriage.

Yet sometimes the golden dream you fervently wish for turns out to be not at all what it seems—like Emma's enviable suburban postcard life, which is about to be brutally cut short by a perfect husband turned killer. And in the shocking aftermath, three devastated friends are going to have to come to terms with their own secrets . . . and somehow learn to move forward after their dream is exposed as a lie.

 

An Excerpt from
More Like Her

Prologue

 

Operator #237:
Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?

Caller:
I'm a teacher at the Markham School, there's a man here with a gun. He—[shots fired in the background]

Operator #237:
Ma'am? Ma'am?!

Caller:
[unintelligible screaming] Oh my god. Oh my god . . . Is she dead? Oh my god . . . [unintelligible]

Operator #237:
Ma'am, please—

Caller:
You need to hurry . . . please. Please, god. Hurry! [unintelligible] Noooooo!!!! So much blood . . . there's so much blood!

Operator #237:
Ma'am, I've sent them— the police. Now—tell me where you are in the school.

Caller:
[unintelligible] The teachers' lounge. Upstairs. We're on the balc—
Just stay down! Stay down!

Operator #237:
Ma'am, please, I need you to calm down. Is the shooter still in the teachers' lounge with you?

Caller:
Calm down?
He's . . . oh my god [unintelligible] Is he dead, too?

Operator #237:
Ma'am, I just want you to stay on the line with me until help gets there. How many people are in danger?

Caller:
What? All of us! All of us are in danger! He's got a gun?! What do you think?
Stay down!
Oh my god! No!

Operator #237:
Ma'am, is there any way you can block the door?

Caller:
The doors are glass, there's no point.
No! Stay down! Frannie!?
No . . . oh my god. Oh my god . . .
Did he get her? Did he get her, too?
[unintelligible sobbing]

Operator #237:
Ma'am, please. Please.

Stay with me. Please. Ma'am?!— Dial tone—
Total time of call: 1:23:08

Chapter 1

 

Lipstick and Palpable Fear

 

I'
M NOT THE GIRL MEN CHOOSE
. I'm the girl who's charming and funny and then drives home alone wondering what she did wrong. I'm the girl who meets someone halfway decent and then fills in the gaps in his character with my own imagination, only to be shocked when he's not the man I thought he was.

I'm the girl who hides who she really is for fear I'll fall short.

 

S
O, WHEN
E
MMA
D
UNHAM
introduces herself to me as the new head of school, I automatically transform into the version of me who doesn't make people uncomfortable with her “intensity,” who doesn't need any new friends and who loves being newly single and carefree. In short, the version of me that's as far away from the genuine article as is humanly possible.

“Headmistress Dunham,” she says, extending her hand. To my horror, Emma Dunham is cool, like take-me-back-to-the-fringes-of-my-seventh-grade-cafeteria cool.

“Frances Reid,” I say, extending my hand to hers. I won't slip and introduce myself as Frances
Peed
, the moniker given to me as I lurked on the fringes of my seventh-grade cafeteria.

“You're the speech therapist,” Emma says, her smile easy.

“Yes,” I say, allowing a small smile.

“It's a pleasure to finally meet you,” Emma says. I let the silence extend past what is socially acceptable. I take a sip of coffee from my mug—now stained with pink lipstick and palpable fear.

“You two have met, I see?” Jill asks. Her face has
that look
, the one that threatens to reveal all my closely held secrets. All it takes is a simple well-placed smirk from a close friend who knows exactly what you're feeling and thinks it hilarious when your carefully constructed disguise is threatened. I won't look at her.

“Jill Fleming, this is Emma Dunham. Jill is the other speech therapist here at Markham. Emma's the new head of school,” I say, averting my eyes from Jill's omniscient gaze.

“Sure. Jill and I met earlier. We're all certainly going to miss Mrs. Kim,” Emma says, her white teeth momentarily blinding me.

“Kali is doing just fine, I'm sure. She finally got her dream job at Choate,” I say, rebelling slightly by not formalizing an old friend's name.

“Of course with Mrs. Kim gone there will be an opening as the head of the speech therapy department,” Emma says with a smile.

“Will there?” Jill asks transparently.

Headmistress Dunham merely sniffs and tightens her mouth into a prim line.

Jill continues. “Any thoughts you'd like to share with Ms. Reid and I on your hiring process for that position would certainly be welcomed.”

“In time, Mrs. Fleming. In time,” Emma says. I look past Emma's alabaster skin and beautifully tailored suit as teachers and administrators of Pasadena, California's Markham School for the Criminally Wealthy stream into the library for this year's back-to-school orientation.

“Lovely meeting you, Headmistress,” I say, excusing myself from Emma Dunham and her lipstick that never smudges. She gives me what can only be described as a royal nod and quickly falls in with a pack of eager upper school faculty.

“I'm not looking at you or speaking to you for the next ten minutes,” I say to Jill as we find a seat in the back of the library. I straighten up and tell myself that my enviable posture is on par with any of Emma's myriad accomplishments.

“Why are you sitting like that? What's wrong with you? Do you have to fart?” Jill asks, her voice dipping with the word
fart
.

I immediately slouch, plummeting back to reality. Even my mimicked perfection looks like I have gas.

“No . . . no, I don't have to fart,” I say, clearing my throat.

Jill continues without missing a beat. “She's thirty-four. Originally from Michigan, moved to San Francisco in college. Married to Jamie Dunham— she took his last name. He's a professor at UCLA. I'm humiliated I don't have a picture of him. A wedding picture would have been nice, but there just wasn't any time . . .” Jill shakes her head in frustration. “No kids. This is her first time as headmistress.” I “ignore” Jill—meaning I inventory every piece of information relayed to me yet act like I couldn't be bothered.

“Why does it not shock me that you're far more concerned about Emma's marital status than the head of department opening?” I ask.

“It really shouldn't,” Jill says, taking a bite of her bagel.

“Is this seat taken?” Debbie asks, motioning to the empty seat just next to mine. Debbie Manners: school librarian and self-proclaimed welcome wagon.

“Yeah, sorry,” I say, forcing myself to look apologetic. Debbie walks away in search of another empty seat, preferably next to some unsuspecting fool to whom she'll propose an innocent back-rub. A seemingly chaste request that'll ensure you never let her sit next to you again.

“What are you going to do when the orientation starts and that seat remains empty?” Jill asks. Debbie sits down next to the new lacrosse coach. He instinctively leans away from her as she whispers in his ear that he looks tense.

“Be relieved,” I say.

“I want to thank you all for being here this morning. On time and ready to work, just the kind of orientation I can get used to,” Emma Dunham says. Her delivery is relaxed and sincere. I adjust my sweater for the umpteenth time. I can't get comfortable.

Emma continues. “I am Headmistress Dunham and am your new head of school. I am originally from Michigan and no, I'm not as young as you think I am.” The crowd laughs and nudges each other. She's funny! She's beautiful! She's humble! She makes me feel like shit about myself! Where's the razor and warm bath?!

“Jeremy couldn't stop talking about you,” Jill whispers.

I sigh. Jeremy Hannon. Another setup. Just what every Labor Day barbecue needs: a forced blind date over corn on the cob and onion dip.

Jill continues. “He kept mentioning that mix you made. Said he wanted a copy.”

“That was a classic rock CD I got at the grocery store for three ninety-nine.”

Jill lets out a dramatic, weary sigh.

I'm letting this golden opportunity slip through my ringless fingers! She's powerless in the face of my indifference! Her unborn godchildren are trapped in limbo and I won't burn a simple mix!

Several people give us looks of deep concern. We are not respecting the new head of school.

“I guess his cousin is also really into music. He says you remind him of her.” Jill's face is alight with excitement.

“I remind him of his cousin?”

“Yeah, isn't that great?”

“No,
Flowers in the Attic
. It is not.”

“That's a brother and a sister, and besides—”

“Shh!” It's Debbie Manners. The librarian. How predictable.

Jill continues. “You never know how something is going to start between two people.” I shake her off, reminding her that we're in the middle of orientation. I don't want to hear about some guy's halfhearted feelings for me. Halfhearted feelings that depend on a mix of overplayed rock tunes of the 1970s. Not quite the modern-day
Romeo and Juliet
I imagined my love life would be.

Jill persists. “I made sure Martin knew that I wasn't like other girls he was dating. He had to work.” I can't listen to Jill's “I made him work” story again. I focus back on Emma just as she smiles, a perfect dimple punctuating her delight. I tried to have a dimple once. It consisted of me sitting on the couch with my finger in my cheek whenever I watched television as a kid. No dimple, just an Everest-size zit where my finger had been.

Jill continues. “He tried to call on a Friday for a date th—”

“I know, but you said that you were reading a book and couldn't go,” I say, interrupting. “I know. Except that you met up with him later at a bar, so . . .” My voice is getting louder.

“Shh!” Debbie again. This time I feel like I should thank her. I look away from Jill and try to focus back on Emma and her ongoing speech about expectations and proper behavior.

“I may have met up with him later, but . . . you know, I told him no first,” Jill says, almost to herself.

The truth is, I haven't been seriously interested in any of the legion of men Jill's tried to set me up with since Ryan dumped me. Of course, this doesn't explain why I have entranced none of them. It's much easier to rebuff willing gentlemen callers than to proclaim, “
I didn't like you anyway!
” after they say you remind them of their cousin. Although rejecting Jeremy had less to do with that than it did with his proclivity for saying
exspecially
.

I'm sure my behavior will have dire consequences. Flash forward: I'm living in some seaside cottage in my old age— possibly made entirely out of seashells. I'm clad in a faded housedress, large sunhat and Wellingtons. I make a meager living selling my seashell sculptures at the local farmer's market for tuppence a bag. The locals make up stories about me: I'm a witch, I'm crazy or talk to myself because I'm lonely or I murdered my lover when I was younger. Okay, fine. I made up that last one.

As Emma Dunham speaks, I scan the library hoping Jill will get the hint that our little conversation is over. I think she's moved on. Apparently someone's put on weight over the summer. I smile at a few familiar faces. Some stare a little too long. A knowing smile here. A rolled eye there. A nervously abbreviated glance from me to . . .
Ryan
. In the front of the library. His leg loosely crossed over his knee. Those white and red vintage Nike Dunks twitch as he struggles to focus. The worn zip-up hoodie and corduroy pants that are a bit too loose for the school's liking yet tolerated (for now) due to an impressive educational résumé that reads like a who's who of top American institutions. The early morning tangle of black hair and the coffee mug he bought in Dublin when we were there last year for his summer internship at Trinity College. I look away. Clear my throat. Sip my coffee. Try to regain my composure.