The Night the Lights Went Out - Softcover

White, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1524756067 ISBN 13: 9781524756062

Publisher: Random House Large Print, 2017

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Tradd Street series comes a stunning novel about a young single mother who discovers that the nature of friendship is never what it seems....
 
Recently divorced, Merilee Talbot Dunlap moves with her two children to the Atlanta suburb of Sweet Apple, Georgia. It’s not her first time starting over, but her efforts at a new beginning aren’t helped by an anonymous local blog that dishes about the scandalous events that caused her marriage to fail.
 
Merilee finds some measure of peace in the cottage she is renting from town matriarch Sugar Prescott. Though stubborn and irascible, Sugar sees something of herself in Merilee—something that allows her to open up about her own colorful past.
 
Sugar’s stories give Merilee a different perspective on the town and its wealthy school moms in their tennis whites and shiny SUVs, and even on her new friendship with Heather Blackford. Merilee is charmed by the glamorous young mother’s seemingly perfect life and finds herself drawn into Heather's world.
 
In a town like Sweet Apple, where sins and secrets are as likely to be found behind the walls of gated mansions as in the dark woods surrounding Merilee’s house, appearance is everything. But just how dangerous that deception can be will shock all three women....

About this title

About the Author

Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including the Tradd Street series, The Night the Lights Went Out, Flight Patterns, The Sound of Glass, A Long Time Gone, and The Time Between. She is the coauthor of The Forgotten Room with New York Times bestselling authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig. She grew up in London but now lives with her husband and two children near Atlanta, Georgia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Playing Fields Blog

Observations of Suburban Life from Sweet Apple, Georgia

Written by: Your Neighbor

Installment #1: A Plague of Bulldozers and White Escalades

A woman at my hair salon today asked me where I’d learned to put on makeup. I considered this a compliment, having always taken good care of my skin for the sole purpose of making it a smooth palette on which to put makeup. I could tell she was a transplant to our north Atlanta suburb of Sweet Apple by her accent. And by her question. Every true Southern mama teaches her daughter about makeup. I think in some parts of the Deep South (like the Mississippi Delta), girls are born with makeup brushes clutched in their tiny hands. This might be hearsay, but have you ever noticed how many Miss Americas are from Mississippi?

She asked me to say a few words for her, like “honey” and “fiddledeedee” and “damn,” to hear my accent, and then actually asked if I’d ever heard of the hanging of an innocent man around these parts. I had the sudden and horrible thought that those who aren’t from around here might think that Gone with the Wind or that song about the night the lights went out in Georgia were true compasses showing what they might discover here in Sweet Apple.

That’s when I decided I needed to write a blog, a sort of tutorial or map for the newcomers here. A way for them to educate themselves on the ways of the South and its natives before they do something heinous like wear white pants after Labor Day or show up at a funeral without a chafing dish full of Southern comfort food.

Just like all polite Southern conversations, this one, I thought, should start with the weather. For those newcomers who haven’t yet experienced what we locals refer to as the furnace, the heat of a Georgia summer arrives suddenly. The cicadas begin their whirring song in the trees as a sort of advance warning, and by the time the tree frogs begin burping in unison, summer is here.

But if you live in one of our new neighborhoods, you won’t be able to hear the cicadas or the frogs because of the incessant thumping of your neighbors’ HVAC systems, rumbling all day long like an endless shouting match.

I’d like to suggest turning off the air-conditioning in the evenings when it’s cooler, to hear yourselves think for a change. Hear the voices of your neighbors, even. It’s easy to think we all live in our own air-conditioned bubbles, but we don’t. We have to share our breathing space with our neighbors. And don’t forget we’re all supposed to love our neighbors no matter how difficult they sometimes make it. Like when they vote to bulldoze another farm, or park in the fire lane at Kroger, or tailgate me in their white Escalade (sometimes it’s a Mercedes or BMW SUV and even the occasional Honda—but it’s always white) even when I’m going the speed limit. Being late for a chemical peel does not give you the right to tailgate, no matter how uneven your skin tone. It’s not very neighborly.

Yes, we’re supposed to love our neighbors. Yet I still can’t shake my daydreams where I come up with a thousand different ways in which I can make some of them disappear. Permanently. Thank heavens they’re just daydreams.

 

Chapter 1

Merilee

Sweet Apple, Georgia

2016

If there was one thing that Merilee Talbot Dunlap had learned in eleven years of marriage, it was the simple fact that you could live with a person for a long time and never really know him. That it was easy to accept the mask he wore as the real thing, happy in your oblivion, until one day the mask slipped. Or, as in Merilee’s case, when it fell off completely and you were forced to face your own complicity in the masquerade.

No, she knew she hadn’t made Michael have an affair with their daughter’s third-grade math teacher. But she had allowed herself never to question any discrepancies in her marriage, content in her role as suburban wife and mother, until the props and scenery were pulled away and she was asked to exit stage right.

“Mommy?”

Merilee turned toward her ten-year-old daughter, Lily, blond and fine boned like her father but with a perpetually worried expression that was all her mother’s. It seemed Lily already had a permanent furrow between her brows from the worry she’d been born with. The last months since the divorce and the stress from the upcoming move hadn’t helped.

“Yes?”

“What if I don’t meet any friends in my new school? And what if I don’t have anybody to sit with at lunchtime? And I’m thinking I shouldn’t be in the accelerated English class, because what if I’m not smart enough?”

Merilee carefully snapped down the lid of the plastic container she’d been filling with her collection of old maps. She’d been collecting them since she was a little girl, when she’d been in an antiquarian bookstore with her grandfather and he’d shown her an ink-drawn map. It had sketches of horses and cows and fences, and a cozy log cabin with smoke curling from its lone chimney.

“That’s where you live,” he’d said, pointing to the cabin.

It looked nothing like the white-columned brick house in Sandersville, Georgia, she’d lived in all her life and she had told him so, only to be made to understand that the cabin and everything else around it had been plowed under to make room for her house and their neighbors’ houses in the twenties, when he and Grandma weren’t even born yet.

For a long time it had given her nightmares, thinking she could hear the cries of the people from the cabin, not completely sure they’d been removed before the demolition. It scared her to think of how temporary things could be, how your life, your house, your family, could be erased like a sand castle at the beach. And when her little brother had died, she’d known for sure.

Her grandfather had bought her the map, unaware he was fostering what would become a lifelong obsession. Merilee wasn’t sure whether her love for old maps was because they reminded her of the grandfather she’d loved more than her own parents or because she’d needed proof that things changed. That no matter how good or bad things were, they were never permanent.

Merilee knelt down in front of Lily, silently cursing her ex-husband one more time. As if making her feel extraneous and unwanted wasn’t bad enough, his inability to keep his pants zipped and his eyes from wandering had added an extra layer of vulnerability to their daughter.

Gently holding her bony shoulders, she looked into Lily’s pale blue eyes. “You’ve never had problems making friends. You’re a nice person, Lily, and that’s why other girls like to include you. Remember that, okay? It’s who you are, and if you stick with that, you’ll be fine. And Windwood Academy is much smaller than your old school, which is a nice thing when you’re the new kid. You’ll know everybody in all of your classes pretty quickly.”

“And if they don’t like me?”

A little bit of the old spark lit her eyes, making Merilee inwardly sigh with relief. “I’m going to make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

Lily laughed her sweet laugh, a sound that evoked champagne bubbles popping, almost eradicating the guilt Merilee felt over having left The Godfather in the DVD player one night. It had been right after she’d learned of Michael’s affair, when she’d felt the need to watch violent movies with lots of blood and bad language after the kids had been tucked into bed. Lily had flipped it on the next day thinking it was The Princess Bride, and in the five minutes it had taken for Merilee to realize what was happening, Lily had been exposed to more violence than she had been in her entire ten years. After much apologizing and lectures about the difference between movies and real life, it had become a secret joke between them. For weeks Merilee had watched her daughter for any signs that she might need counseling, glad for once that her daughter had always had the maturity of a forty-year-old rather than that of the young girl she was.

Merilee stood, her right knee popping, yet another reminder of why her husband had wanted to trade her in for a younger model. “As for the accelerated English class, they put you in there for a reason. You’ll do great. And if you find you don’t like it, we’ll move you—just give it a try. That’s all I ask, all right?”

Lily’s small chest rose and fell with an exaggerated sigh. “All right. Should I tell Colin to finish packing his suitcase?”

“I asked him to do that three hours ago. Where is he?”

Lily twisted her mouth, unsure of her role. She wasn’t a tattletale, but she also liked to keep to a schedule. “He found a hole in the backyard and has been sitting in front of it waiting to see what might crawl out.”

Merilee swallowed a groan of frustration. Her eight-year-old son had always moved to his own clock, content to study his world at its own pace. Merilee found it endearing and frustrating at the same time, especially on school mornings when Colin wanted to study how long it took for toothpaste to fall from the tube without his having to squeeze it.

“Would you please run out and remind him that I told Mrs. Prescott we’d meet her at three o’clock and it’s almost two thirty? She’s ninety-three and I really don’t want to keep her waiting in this heat.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lily ran from the room, blond hair flying, calling her brother’s name with the harsh, authoritative tone Merilee recognized as her own. She bit her lip to prevent herself from calling out to remind Lily that Colin already had a mother.

She picked up the stack of plastic containers and moved to the garage, empty now except for the used Honda Odyssey minivan she’d bought with her own money. She’d let Michael keep the Mercedes SUV and his Audi, wanting the excision of him from her life to be a clean cut, even if it meant not having heated seats or a state-of-the-art stereo system. It was the principle of the matter. And at the moment, the only thing she had in abundance were principles.

Through the open rear door, Merilee spotted the jewelry roll she’d tucked into a back corner of the minivan. It was her brother’s Lego figures. She’d taken them from his room without asking, knowing her mother would never have let her have anything that had belonged to David. Deanne had wanted to claim the grief as her own, dismissing anyone else’s as not big enough to count. So Merilee had taken them and wrapped them in her Barbie jewelry roll and kept them hidden, taking them out only on the anniversary of David’s death, as if somehow that might bring a part of him back. It had been a while since she’d done that, but still she kept them, hidden in her sock drawer as if afraid her mother might find them and ask for them back. As if David were still the precocious boy of seven instead of the twenty-nine-year-old young man he should be.

After tucking the last of the smaller boxes and their suitcases into the back of the Odyssey, Merilee made one final pass through the rooms of the now empty home she’d lived in for less than two years. The rental house was already furnished, so it had almost been a relief to let Michael have all the furniture they’d accumulated over the past eleven years, and she’d felt a ping of regret only when their four-poster bed had been hauled into the moving van. It had been the bed where both of their children had been conceived. She imagined that if she ever had to see Tammy Garvey again, after the woman had been sleeping on that bed with Merilee’s husband for a while, she’d mention that to her.

Having gone back inside, she listened to her footsteps echo against the bare walls as she moved from room to room. The house had never really felt like home to her, just like none of their previous four houses had. Michael thought they needed to upgrade every couple of years to keep up with his job success. They had moved into a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood each time, staying within the same school district to make it easier on the kids. And easier for Michael’s affair, Merilee had realized much later.

Merilee thought she should be thankful for the frequent moves, knowing that leaving a beloved home would be almost as painful as leaving an eleven-year marriage. Or burying a favorite dog. Instead, this parting was as easy as pulling off a Band-Aid—it would sting a little but be forgotten as soon as they’d unpacked the first box in the new house.

The kids strapped themselves into the backseat of the minivan as Merilee headed down the driveway one last time and drove down the street without looking back. No neighbors came out to wave good-bye. She didn’t know them well, having always worked and not had the time to build relationships in each of the neighborhoods they’d lived in, and hadn’t expected any more fanfare when they’d left than when they’d arrived.

She waved good-bye to the guard at the front gate just as the first drops of rain began to pelt the dry asphalt and her dirty windshield, already splattered with the remains of dozens of insects. The rain and bugs were, Merilee thought, a fitting tribute to her old life, the one she couldn’t quite let go of yet had no interest in holding on to, either. She thought of the boxes of old maps shifting around in the back of the minivan, reminding her again of the impermanence of things and how nothing stayed the same no matter how much you wanted it to.

Sugar

Sugar Prescott sat at her dining room table in the front room of the old farmhouse, tapping out a letter to her best friend, Willa Faye Mackenzie, on her 1949 Smith-Corona typewriter, her bottle of Wite-Out sitting nearby. She rarely had to use it but always wanted to make sure it was close by just in case. At ninety-three, she didn’t have a lot of time to waste. And Willa Faye had all the time in the world to sit and wait for a letter. Her daughter had recently moved her to a senior living facility with the improbable name of the Manors. If there was one good thing about not having children, Sugar decided, it was being spared the indignity of being moved into such a place, like a box of old toys that a child has outgrown but doesn’t want to get rid of completely.

She glanced outside, not wanting to miss the approach of her new renters. She hadn’t met Merilee Dunlap or her children before, but the Realtor, Robin Henderson, who’d been handling the rental of the Craftsman cottage behind Sugar’s farmhouse, had only good things to say about all three of them. Robin’s children had attended Prescott Elementary with the Dunlap children, making Robin privy to the unsavory gossip surrounding the Dunlap divorce. Not one to gossip, but a good listener, Sugar had suggested the cottage as a good spot for the family to land while they decided what to do next. It wasn’t as if she had any desire to befriend anyone, but Sugar had the feeling that Merilee Dunlap, whoever she was, was suddenly and unexpectedly on her own and in need of help. And Sugar was in a position to understand that need more than most. She suspected, but would deny if anyone asked, that she was getting soft in her old age.

She typed one last word, then drew the carriage back before standing and approaching the front window. The rain had tapered off, leaving a smoking, dripping landscape, her climbing roses on the front porc...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Large Print
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1524756067
• ISBN 13: 9781524756062
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 608