Hope's Boy
Chapter One
My earliest memory of my mother was her absence.
The white clapboard house stood quiet. The sun hung in a barren blue sky. Beyond a patch of
yellowing grass was a road, beyond that a great plowed field of stubble. Not a curb nor fence nor
even a ditch separated them. Later, the swath of loneliness would remind me of the San Joaquin
Valley, the great sink of farmland that descends across California's backside like the dent down a
lying man's spine.
I was not a baby, though I had only begun to grow into a boy. Someone must have been left to
watch me. Yet, the emptiness lay uninterrupted. If I had been told why I was there, I had
forgotten. I remembered only that I was supposed to wait.
"I'll come back for you," my mother had said, kneeling to give me a kiss. "I'll come back for
you, Andy. I promise. I'll come back."
IF I HAD answered the questions at school, if I had told the truth and been as honest as my heart
had wanted, what words would have come from me? Where would I have started? Everything
would have begun with Mom.
She grew up on the eastern plains of Col ... read full excerpt from Hope's Boy ebook
