Real Happy Family: A Novel - Softcover

Wolfson Widger, Caeli

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1477801006 ISBN 13: 9781477801000

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

Part-time actress, full-time party girl Lorelei Branch isn’t famous yet, but she’s perfected a Hollywood lifestyle full of clubbing, fashion, and the latest juice cleanse. When Robin, her sister-in-law and agent, throws a plum job her way, Lorelei jumps at the chance and auditions to be the new girl on television’s hottest reality show, Flo’s Studio.

Enter Colleen, Lorelei’s pill-popping mother, who wants nothing more than to see her daughter win the fame and glory she never had a chance to pursue herself. But Lorelei’s dream of becoming the next reality star is dashed when she loses the spot on Flo’s Studio to a stunning African woman. In an attempt to defend her daughter against what she calls a rigged contest, Colleen goes ballistic and delivers a racist rant on live television, sparking a national media frenzy. Lorelei flees the limelight, humiliated and broke, with her slacker boyfriend Don and heads for Reno where she begins to self-destruct.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Branch family starts to come apart at the seams. Colleen and her husband, Carl, are quietly drifting apart. Darren, Lorelei’s older half-brother, is stuck in Florida working on a contentious film set while his wife, Robin, continues the tedious regimen of fertility drugs meant to help them conceive a child. Desperate to bring the family together again and make things right, Colleen hatches a plan to stage an intervention for Lorelei on the reality show Real Happy Family. Soon the entire Branch family is entangled in a mission to bring the prodigal daughter back into the fold.

Will Lorelei ever forgive Colleen? Will Real Happy Family air their most sensational intervention yet? All roads lead to a seedy Reno hotel room, where a reality TV crew is waiting.

About this title

About the Author

Caeli Wolfson Widger received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine and The Madison Review.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue
No one else in Reno was running on the sidewalk connecting downtown to the Truckee River, but Lorelei had no choice. Something hideous was behind her.
   She was still wearing her Lucky Bastard uniform, the tight black skirt and fitted white shirt unbuttoned too low. The plasticky high heels unsuited to waiting tables, much less running at top speed. Blisters blossomed on both feet and her ankles throbbed, but she pushed on.
   The pain was nothing compared to the fear.
   She was afraid to check over her shoulder, to see if the bartender was following. Up ahead, Reno glittered under a moonlit dome, the Sierra Nevada turned to black M’s on the horizon. Something was different this time; something was wrong. The euphoria and the go-go-go were there, but they weren’t pure. They were cut with panic. The stuff she’d smoked was letting in the feelings it normally stamped out. Not just letting them in, but amplifying them. And the perfect heat that usually suffused her whole body seconds after the drug hit her bloodstream was missing. In its place was a prickly fever in her face and icy sweat in her clenched fists. Her heart was slamming.
   She veered onto Virginia Street, a wide, casino-flanked boulevard that cut down to the river, her heels pocking against the concrete. Her path was blocked by a throng of ponytailed girls in green-and-white jerseys and tall knee socks, some sort of sports team, their pace slow as cattle. Giggles fizzed from their mouths, and for a beat, she wanted nothing more than to be in the center of their pack, linking elbows and bandying gossip, being normal, the way she used to be, back in Fresno. Before L.A., before the show, before she’d cracked her mother’s heart into pieces. Before this.
   But then, when she was a dozen feet from the girls’ numbered backs, the sound of their voices changed from happy chatter to piggish squeals, like the noise her mom’s old cassette tapes made when Lorelei held down play and fast-forward at the same time on the boom box in the basement.
   “Move!” Lorelei yelled to their backs, and when the girls offered no gap in their wall of meshed green polyester, she picked a spot between two of them and plowed through it, her palms shoving their shoulders in opposite directions as hard as she could.
   She heard a smattering of screams, an “Oh my God!” and a “Cara, are you okay?,” but she didn’t look back. She barely even stumbled in her heels. She just kept running.
   Whatever impurities were coursing through her system were causing her senses to work at peak performance, but she couldn’t enjoy the heightened perception, because she’d gotten stuck somewhere terrible, on the border of a regular dream and a nightmare you woke from screaming.
   If you woke at all.
   Lorelei ran harder, fighting for breath. The huge white dome atop the Silver Legacy Casino lit up like a moon dropped from the sky, and she felt snow on her face. A digital billboard flashed smooth-chested Chippendales, drizzled with oil, and then sharp fingernails when it flipped to an ad for Freak Illusion, a live show featuring the goth magician Dave Devlin. The air was cluttered with synthetic light—lots of blue and purple, orange stars—and distant sounds like carnival music, voices sailing and clashing in the high desert air.
   The river was getting closer. She could smell the water. She could smell the fish inside it.
   Go, go, go, she commanded her body. Time was slipping, slipping, and something awful was coming—no—it was already here.
   Pock-pock-pock. She needed to take off her three-inch heels, a half size too small, stolen off some discount rack during a binge with Don. She slowed down just enough to kick the shoes off and lost her balance, tumbling down to the sidewalk asphalt.
   “Mommy,” she cried out as she fell, the asphalt tearing into her knees. Lorelei had felt her mother’s presence from the moment the bartender pulled her into the empty warehouse. Commanding her to survive. She tried to push up to her feet, but everything hurt too much. As she breathed against the ground, deep as she could to slow her heart, an old fact flashed to mind, something she’d heard at a party: it was the single most common word recorded on the black boxes of airplanes before they crashed. Mommy.
   This was not the life she wanted. Lorelei swore that if she made it through this night, she was going to change.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1477801006
• ISBN 13: 9781477801000
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384