Four Corners - Softcover

Freund, Diane

3.37

68 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0967370183 ISBN 13: 9780967370187

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage, 2001

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When ten year old Rainey Dougherty's mother is hospitalized for mental instability, Rainey and her four siblings find themselves at the mercy of Merle, their irreverently funny and bitter aunt, who comes up to the country from the Bronx with her troubled fourteen year old daughter Joan, to take care of that goddamn bunch of nuts she knows these children are. For Rainey, this starts a summer of enlightenment where she learns about the realities of life through the eyes of innocence. We chart Rainey's course through a year that is often harrowing, sometimes hilarious, but always hopeful. Merle's voice is the one clear note in Rainey's head as she begins a season without her mother, a season that brings both Joan and Rainey again and again to the brink of disaster.

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About the Author:

By the age of 23 author Diane Freund found herself with five children and spent the next 18 years as a waitress in order to support her brood. It was while working as a waitress that she saw quite clearly what her future would be if she did not make an extraordinary effort to change her life. In an amazing story of triumph over adversity, she returned to school and now holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Arizona, Tucson and is the Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona South in Sierra Vista, AZ.

It was August 10, 1953, David’s twelfth birthday, but we didn’t celebrate it. We would, my father said, when my mother came home. That would be when David was ny thirteen, but we didn’t know this then. We only knew what our father told us that night as we sat shivering in the summer heat around the kitchen table: our mother needed a good long rest. I pictured this as another one of the extended naps she had begun taking since we’d started summer vacation. For the time being we all had to pitch in and help. David, because he was the oldest, would be in charge. David got up then and went to the refrigerator and brought out a bottle of milk. “I’ll make some cocoa,” he said and reached into the pantry for the can of Hershey’s. Just where the top of his head brushed against the woodwork my mother’s thumbprint was imbedded in the paint. My father liked to tease her about it. He said that’s where she kept us all, under that thumb. We were under her heart, she corrected. Under her skin was more like it, Merle said.

Merle was our aunt. She came up several days later with her daughter Joan, to take care of the goddamn bunch of nuts she knew we were. Merle told us this, Em and me, two mornings later as she stood brushing our hair and drinking a beer, for courage, she said, in the face of the rat’s nest before her.

She’d left Uncle and Wayne, Joan’s older brother, behind in the Bronx, she said, to come to this frigging sorry excuse for a Shangri-La because we had finally succeeded in driving her sister crazy. And it would behoove us to learn and she would beat the bejeesus out of us if we didn’t, to take care of our own damn selves and leave our mother the hell alone. She said this with one eye squinted shut, holding a cigarette between her fingers as if it was a dart she was planning to throw at us.

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