Synopsis
Mary-Esther Sloat is a woman with a patchwork past—three failed marriages, misspent youth, and a series of dead-end jobs. When she attempts to donate a kidney to her dying mother, she learns a life-altering truth: Loretta Boudreau Day is not her biological mother. After Loretta dies, Hurricane Katrina destroys Mary-Esther’s only tie to New Orleans—her beloved Nana’s house. For a while, Mary-Esther lives in a battered Chevy van. Armed with a faded birth certificate, she finally corrals the courage to unravel the mystery of her birth at a small hospital in the panhandle of Florida.When she finds the site of the hospital, she is dismayed to learn it now houses the Gadsden County Sheriff’s office. Sergeant Jerry Blount befriends Mary-Esther and helps her locate a retired nurse who once worked at the small hospital. After meeting with the senior in a near-by assisted living facility, Mary-Esther visits the county courthouse to research records for children born on the same date. She discovers a baby girl with a similar last name—Sarah Davis of Chattahoochee, a small town in the same county.Hattie Davis Lewis lives with her husband Holston and adopted child Sarah Chuntian Lewis in the old family homestead three miles south of Chattahoochee, Florida. She often thinks of her older sister, a child also named Sarah who died shortly after birth. Hattie’s older brother Bobby Davis, wife, and son live nearby on the family land. Bobby battles his own demons that threaten his hard-won sobriety.Mary-Esther camps out in her van at a lake near Chattahoochee, hesitant to confront the family she suspects to be her own. She takes a server job at the Homeplace Restaurant in town. Hattie Davis worries about a series of anonymous phone calls and the frequent sightings of a strange van circling her driveway. Is someone casing the house?Instead of welcoming arms, Mary-Esther finds a clannish community and a brother determined to keep her from claiming her birthright.The strange and twisted journey between her old life in New Orleans and her new life in Chattahoochee forces Mary-Esther’s darkest fears and deepest longings to the surface.Is it possible to blend the person she believed she was with the person she never had the chance to be?
About the Author
Rhett DeVane is a true Southerner, born and raised in the muggy, bug-infested forests of the Florida panhandle. For the past thirty-plus years, Rhett has made her home in Tallahassee, located in Florida's Big Bend area, where she splits her workdays between her two professions: dental hygienist and novelist. Rhett is the author of five published mainstream humorous fiction novels set in her hometown of Chattahoochee, a place with "two stop-lights and a mental institution on the main drag": The Madhatter's Guide to Chocolate, Up the Devil's Belly, Mama's Comfort Food, Cathead Crazy, and Suicide Supper Club. She is the coauthor of two novels: Evenings on Dark Island with Larry Rock and Accidental Ambition with Robert W. McKnight. In addition, Rhett has released two books in a series of middle grade fiction, Elsbeth and Sim and Dig Within. Suicide Supper Club won first place in 2014 for fiction from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association. She'd wear the medal every day if it wasn't so heavy and perhaps a bit braggity. Plus finding earrings to match, there's that. Rhett writes to stay balanced and reasonably happy. The way this world is today, it's a must. "Humor lifts me. As long as I am on this side of the dirt, I will find a way to laugh, and to share that with as many people as possible."
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