The Kindness of Strangers (54 page)

When Deborah Ann asked Jordan about his mom, it sometimes made Danny feel nervous. He worried that it would upset Jordan, but he worried more that it would hurt his mom’s feelings. Danny’s therapist said Danny should let those fears go. Did it upset
him
? And if not, he shouldn’t worry. Danny considered:
Did
it upset him? A little? He still wondered about that time, the Kendrick photos. Without knowing it on any conscious level, Danny figured he probably already knew he was different, even then, and feared that there was some flawed part of him, something visible, that had made the Kendricks know he was a target.

Danny brought the boiling water over to the frosting and poured a little in. He stirred, and the group watched him drizzle the frosting over the cake. His brother’s wedding cake. Man. He looked at Nate and shook his head.

Everyone was here. Grandpa and G.G. Grandpa Laden. Ali and Priah. Reece and his wife, Lori. Even Mackenzie and her boyfriend. J.M. and Maya. J.M. came to town one or two times a year, and Jordan went out there just as much. He’d spent a whole summer in Seattle once. Danny worried that Jordan might move there eventually. Nate in Detroit was far enough away. He liked them closer, but they all teased him when he said that. “We can’t all work in Mom’s restaurant,” Nate joked, although they’d all spent summers and breaks busing tables there.

“It won’t be mine much longer,” Mom joked. The Laden Table would end up as Danny’s, everyone knew it. He was already pretty much running the show.

Bobby came in the back door. “Okay, people, is this wedding going to happen or do I need to do some crowd control?”

Nate laughed and took Deborah’s hand and headed for the door, for the backyard where Mom really had hired someone to make a chuppah from Nate’s dogwood tree.

“Wait!” Jordan called. “Bouquet.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Deborah opened the huge Laden Table fridge and pulled out the bouquet. “Danny, thank you. This is perfect.”

Jordan cleared his throat. “Excuse me?” he said with mock indignation. “I helped.”

“He did,” Danny said, grinning. “He insisted on those daylilies.”

Deborah turned to Mom. “Later I am throwing this bouquet straight to you,” she said.

Mom laughed and turned to kiss Bobby. The kiss lasted.

And it was one of those moments Danny wanted to freeze and keep forever. As he followed everyone out to the yard, he tried to drink in every detail: the chairs with their white covers, the garden in full bloom—the tomato bushes bent heavy with fruit, nearly obscuring the old, green gargoyle—the silver ice buckets twinkling in the sun, the ends of the white linen tablecloths lifting gently in the wind, the pile of wrapped gifts under Jordan’s dogwood tree.

A bird sang, and Danny turned his head to search for it. A robin lifted off from Jordan’s tree. Danny watched the bird swoop down to the ground, gathering food. No, it wasn’t food—it was straw from the champagne crates. The robin carried it back to the small tangle it had begun assembling in the crook of Jordan’s tree. If Danny squinted his eyes just right, he could tell that the trunk of the tree still leaned too far to one side, and a thick, gnarled scar—too tough to cut through—protruded from where that limb had ripped away.

But the tree still stood, and a breeze fluttered the leaves on its reaching branches.

Acknowledgments

The Kindness of Strangers
has had a long and complicated journey and many people have touched it along the way. Lisa Bankoff made me believe in the book again and found it a home. Claire Wachtel helped me see the book clearly when I’d lost that ability. Thanks to Tina Dubois at ICM, and to Samantha Hagerbaumer, Kevin Callahan, Jennifer Pooley, Sean Griffin, Susan Carpenter, and all the other good people at William Morrow, and to Maureen Sugden, copyeditor extraordinaire.

For their comments and insightful feedback on various drafts of the manuscript, I thank many talented writers I am blessed to know: Suzanne Clauser, Ed Davis, Chuck Derry, Ben Grossberg, Marian Jensen, Lee Huntington, Sandy Love, Rachel Moulton, Nancy Pinard, Julia Reichert, Barbara Singleton, and Ted Weatherup, with special love and thanks to Nancy Jones and Suzanne Kelly-Garrison.

I owe eternal gratitude to Diana Baroni, Molly Chehak, and Liz Trupin-Pulli for their care, professional expertise, and guidance.

Huge thanks to my Hedgebrook sisters, Ted Lebowitz, Butch & Beverly Kittle, Monica Schiffler, and the Topsail Island crew for asking helpful questions.

Dayton Police officer James R. Krauskopf took me for a ride-along (which provided me with enough material for a lifetime of stories!) and helped divert some plot disasters. Montgomery County Sheriff’s officer Sergeant David Hale gave me a thorough tour of the Montgomery County jail. Lieutenant Joe Neihaus of the Kettering Police Department (and fellow writer) answered endless questions with patience and clarity.

My cousin Rhonda Love, former Assistant Public Guardian at Chicago’s Cook County Office of the Public Guardian, shared the heartbreaking stories of her job and offered her professional expertise. Julia Levine, beautiful poet and child psychologist, talked me through sessions for my fictional characters.

Anne Lee and Trisha Bennet of the amazing organization Darkness to Light helped check my facts and reinforced my belief that angels do exist. Harriet McDougal, also with Darkness to Light, gave an invaluable edit of an early manuscript. Dr. Sarah Fillingame, Vicki Giambrone, and Susan Brockman of the Children’s Medical Center of Dayton, and Libby Nicholson and Denise Jenkins of CARE House all graciously answered questions, provided resources, and gave me tours. Any blunders or implausibilities that remain are mine alone.

Bill Anderson, the best damn pie baker in all of West Virginia, introduced me to the chocolate-raspberry-caramel frosted cake and supplied the recipe.

Thanks to the generous, supportive community of the Miami Valley School.

I am deeply grateful for grants from the Ohio Arts Council and Cultureworks.

My family—immediate and extended, past and now changed, blood and chosen—sustained and nourished me in many ways. I am lucky.

And finally, special love and thanks are due to two dear friends:

Rachel Moulton wins the prize for having read more drafts of this manuscript than any other person. Thank you for the inspiration from your own writing, for the encouragement on the dark days, and for the “Boy Pass.”

And Michael Lippert—thank you, Pook, for getting me off the floor, both figuratively and literally.

D
arkness to Light is a national nonprofit organization based in Charleston, South Carolina, that seeks to protect children from sexual abuse by placing responsibility squarely on adult shoulders. They educate adults to prevent, recognize, and react responsibly to child sexual abuse. Go online to
www.darkness2light.org
for their free booklet,
Seven Steps to Protecting Our Children,
as a way to begin.

About the Author

K
ATRINA
K
ITTLE
is the author of
Traveling Light
and
Two Truths and a Lie
. She helped found the All Children’s Theater in Washington Township, Ohio, and teaches theater and English to middle schoolers at the Miami Valley School in Dayton,where she lives. Chapters from this novel earned her an Ohio Arts Council grant.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

P
RAISE FOR
The Kindness of Strangers

“A moving novel about the ways in which healing can occur after a child’s sexual abuse; Kittle’s clear prose gives a luminous quality to her story of thriving against the odds.”

—
People

“[A] heartbreaking story [that] encompasses fear, fury, and loyalty. . . . Thanks to the author’s exceptionally fluent narrative skill, [this] novel . . . becomes utterly compelling. . . . Kittle unfurls her tale with absolute devotion.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Unselfishness is at the heart of this most memorable, compelling novel of survival. Kittle’s careful character development and depiction of a loving family situation, along with the variety of statistics offered, help make this tale hard to put down. Although it is a grim, disturbing study of abuse, the conversational style and vividly drawn characters render it a moving portrait of how we heal. Recommended for all public libraries.”

—
Library Journal

“Kittle crafts a disturbing but compelling story line, as Sarah, Nate, and Jordan uncover and come to terms with the horror in alternating chapters. . . . Though the movement is toward healing, there are bumpy roads ahead for everybody in this . . . gripping read.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Katrina Kittle has written a wonderfully moving but distressful book, which is hard to put down but harder still to forget. . . . The story is disturbing but is well written in descriptive prose.”

—
Star Press

“The story is a brisk, lively, intelligent page-turner that gives the proper payoff and never lets readers doubt that they’re in capable storytelling hands.”

—
Dayton Daily News

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. References to real establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
. Copyright © 2005 by Katrina Kittle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First Harper Perennial edition published 2007.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

Kittle, Katrina.

    The kindness of strangers : a novel / Katrina Kittle.—1st ed. p. cm.

        ISBN-13: 978-0-06-056474-2

        ISBN-10: 0-06-056474-1 (acid-free paper)

        1. Boys—Fiction. 2. Secrecy—Fiction. 3. Suburban life— Fiction. 4. Foster home care—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3561.I864K56       2006

    813'.54—dc22

2005049103

ISBN: 978-0-06-056478-0 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-06-056478-4 (pbk.)

EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780062292230

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