Going to Bend: A Novel - Hardcover

Hammond, Diane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038550943X ISBN 13: 9780385509435

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2004

Synopsis

In the small coastal town of Hubbard, Oregon, your man may let you down, your boss may let you down, life may let you down . . . but your best friend never will.

Welcome to Hubbard, where Petie Coolbaugh and Rose Bundy have been best friends since childhood. Now in their early thirties, both are grappling to come to terms with their age and station in life. As they struggle to make ends meet and provide for their children and the good-hearted but unreliable men in their lives, they take jobs cooking for a brand-new upscale restaurant, Souperior's Cafe, starting from scratch every morning to produce gallons of fresh soup from local recipes. The proprietors of the cafe, Nadine and Gordon, are fraternal twins from Los Angeles with adjustments of their own to make, but Rose’s warmth and the quality of the women’s soups quickly make them indispensable despite Petie’s abrupt manner and prickly ways.

The strains of daily life are never far, however, and the past takes its toll on the women. Petie’s childhood as the daughter of the town drunk—a subject she won't talk about—keeps her at a distance from even her best friend, until an unexpected romance threatens to crack her tough exterior. And despite Rose's loving personality, the only man in her life is a loner fisherman who spends only a few months of the year in town.

In this fishing village, friends are for life and love comes in the most unexpected ways. As the novel draws together lovers, husbands, employers, friends, and family, each woman finds possibilities for love and even grace that she had never imagined.

About this title

About the Author

DIANE HAMMOND has worked as a writer and an editor. She was awarded a literary fellowship by the Oregon Arts Commission, and her writing has appeared in such magazines as Yankee, Mademoiselle, and Washington Review. She served as a spokesperson for the Oregon Coast Aquarium and the Free Willy Keiko Foundation and currently lives with her husband, Nolan, and daughter, Kerry.

From the Back Cover

"Diane Hammond is a fabulous storyteller. Her portrait of small town life is full of humor and detail, and in her characters Petie and Rose, a relationship so original and real, you root for them from page one. I loved this heartfelt story and I am sure you will too."
-Adriana Trigiani, author of the Big Stone Gap trilogy and Lucia, Lucia


"In this remarkable first novel, Diane Hammond brilliantly captures the subtle nuances of everyday life in a small Oregon town and the friendship between two extraordinary women. Funny, heartbreaking and wise."
-Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes

From the Inside Flap

In the small coastal town of Hubbard, Oregon, your man may let you down, your boss may let you down, life may let you down . . . but your best friend never will.

Welcome to Hubbard, where Petie Coolbaugh and Rose Bundy have been best friends since childhood. Now in their early thirties, both are grappling to come to terms with their age and station in life. As they struggle to make ends meet and provide for their children and the good-hearted but unreliable men in their lives, they take jobs cooking for a brand-new upscale restaurant, Souperior's Cafe, starting from scratch every morning to produce gallons of fresh soup from local recipes. The proprietors of the cafe, Nadine and Gordon, are fraternal twins from Los Angeles with adjustments of their own to make, but Rose?s warmth and the quality of the women?s soups quickly make them indispensable despite Petie?s abrupt manner and prickly ways.
The strains of daily life are never far, however, and the past takes its toll on the women. Petie?s childhood as the daughter of the town drunk?a subject she won't talk about?keeps her at a distance from even her best friend, until an unexpected romance threatens to crack her tough exterior. And despite Rose's loving personality, the only man in her life is a loner fisherman who spends only a few months of the year in town.
In this fishing village, friends are for life and love comes in the most unexpected ways. As the novel draws together lovers, husbands, employers, friends, and family, each woman finds possibilities for love and even grace that she had never imagined.

Reviews

Lifelong friends Petie Coolbaugh and Rose Bundy laugh, love and try to make ends meet in the "no-account" Oregon coastal fishing town of Hubbard in Hammond's shining first novel. Petie, the mother of two boys, is "small and hard and tight and flammable, like the wick of a candle," while Rose, the single mom of a teenage girl, is "a big soft woman of calm purpose and measurable serenity." They've just started supplying homemade soup for the new cafe in town, Souperior, owned by Nadine and Gordon Erickson, fraternal twins fresh from Southern California. Petie, a scrappy survivor of poverty and an abusive father, is given to spot-on observations: Nadine, is "all nerves, snip and anxiety" and "living proof that some people shouldn't give up smoking." Rose, with her gentle heart and tranquil solidity, has compassion for Nadine and especially for Gordon, who is dying of AIDS. When Gordon gives Rose the opportunity to write a cookbook-which she insists Petie illustrate-the women's lives radically change, as they give expression to their hidden talents and the future seems full of hope and promise. But life is never uncomplicated, and Hammond shines an unwavering light on a group of people who struggle to make do, yet who live their lives and cope with hardship with grace and dignity. Her clean, sharp prose, idiosyncratic dialogue and deep insight into relationships embellish this heartfelt debut.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Hammond's debut novel about two thirtysomethings struggling to get by in an isolated Oregon beach town feels at first like a working-class weeper, the sort of female buddy story that Oprah's fans would love. Lurking between the Kleenex, though, is something considerably more subtle. As she follows the constricted lives of Rose and Petie, soup makers for a cafe called Souperiors, Hammond offers a nuanced look at the strains of daily life in a world of diminished possibilities. Rose and Petie live on a different planet from their employers, twins from California who can't understand why their trendy eatery holds no allure for the hard-bitten locals. The common ground is pain, and gradually these very different characters unlock for one another a kind of hard-won courage. What makes the novel work is the details: Petie and Rose "picking crabs" ("the only sounds were the cracking of shells and cartilage and the sucking, wet sound of meat being extracted"). Yes, the novel ends with the possibility of new lives, but what lingers here is the unflinching look at dailiness. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1



Hubbard was one of the oldest no-account towns on the coast of Oregon. Men there fished commercially or helped others deep-sea fish for sport; they worked in the woods cutting timber, or they worked in the mill over in Sawyer, making paper amidst a great noise and stink. They lived hard, bore scars, coveted danger and died either young and violently or unnecessarily old. The women worked, or not. The children belonged to them.

Hubbard was one of those places where you could still have your choice of oceanfront trailers--old rusting aqua and silver tunafish cans with moisture problems. Highway 101, the West's westernmost route from Canada to Mexico, was the town's only through street, a straight and single shot lined with gift shops and candy shops and kite shops and a Dairy Queen, shell art and postcards and forty-six flavors of saltwater taffy, homemade right here. There was everywhere a spirit of cheer, clutter and nakedly opportunistic goodwill: what Hubbard had it would happily sell you, and if you didn't see it, just ask. Everyone loved a tourist, and the fatter the cat, the better. To a point. The locals maintained their own entrances to the Dairy Queen, Anchor Grill and Wayside Tavern: unmarked doors around back by the service entrances, where there was no parking problem.

In this town, beautiful even if no-account, lived two women, old friends, Petie Coolbaugh and Rose Bundy. Rose was a big, soft woman of calm purpose and measurable serenity. Petie was small and hard and tight and flammable, like the wick of a candle. They were both thirty-one, and ever since grade school had been celebrating good times, hunkering down in lean ones, hiding truths from each other's families, sitting up with each other's babies. In the last six weeks they had also become business partners. They made soup for a living now.

Two months ago a cafe and coffeehouse had come to Hubbard by way of a brother and sister, fraternal twins from Southern California who'd had the idea of coming north to slow down. They had bought the old barbershop at one end of town and moved in tables and church pews and giant green ferns. They bought crockery dishes, an espresso machine, quilted tablecloths and posters for the walls. They sanded the old fir floors and built a mahogany counter of great beauty and grace. They installed a tiny kitchen, named the place Souperior's, and then, instead of hiring a cook, they held auditions.



Bring your best soup (they invited all of Hubbard, on index cards in city hall, the post office and the Quik Stop) to Souperior's next Saturday afternoon. Winners get on our menu. Grand winner gets a job offer.



Although Hubbard loved its tourists, resident newcomers were a source of suspicion. For a week or so the little index cards--tacked up fresh and bright among the curling notices about firewood and crab pot repairs and handmade dog figurines--excited a lot of comment, most of it skeptical. On the other hand, an invitation to compete against your neighbors didn't come along often except for the county fair, and in the end, sixty-four soups were entered in the contest and were judged during an open house and soup-feed by the cafe's owners, Nadine and Gordon Latimer. Petie and Rose won with a jointly submitted bottomfish stew born of desperation the year Eddie Coolbaugh broke his foot and couldn't work for three months. A fisherman Rose had been dating then had fed them all from the junkfish left behind on a sportfishing charter boat. Two more of Rose's soups also made it onto the menu. When she was offered the job of soup cook, she asked if she and Petie could share it. The deal was that they would supply the cafe with two fresh soups each day, Tuesday through Sunday, and they could work from home. Breads came from the Riseria in Sawyer; Nadine handled the salads herself. Every day the soups would be different until the menu was exhausted and they could start again. New soups would always be under consideration.

Rose had been working at the time as a waitress for the Anchor Grill, 3 a.m. to noon shift--a job from which she'd come and gone for years. Bad hours, good tips. Petie had been cleaning motel rooms at the Sea View Motel: bad wages, good people, good location. In either case, cooking sounded better and the money was only slightly worse. Plus as long as they could stand a steady diet of soup, they could feed their families for free.

The Coolbaughs lived in a shabby little rental on the north side of town, on a dead-end road called Heyter Place. The house was old and had been no good to start with, but Petie knew how to put a good front on things. Small, exquisite watercolors hung on the walls: still lifes of balloons and baby toys; wildflowers and action figures; cooking utensils, bouquets of keys. She'd painted the kitchen walls and ceiling brilliant white with lemon yellow trim, and even the sickly sun of winter seemed to try a little harder there. Now, in robust late September, the cheap white curtains were so saturated with light they seemed incandescent.

While Petie diced fifty carrots, Rose read aloud from the weekly newspaper about old Billy Wall, who had just been indicted on sodomy charges.

"You know what I think? Hand me that peeler." Petie weighed it thoughtfully in her hand, then pointed it at Rose. "I think if he did what those kids say he did, the guy deserves to have a bad thing happen to him. I mean worse than shame and a jail term. I mean something bad. They should take him just like you'd take a carrot, and peel him down real slow, you know, real careful, layer by layer until you've got him peeled naked as an egg, and then you bring him to Hubbard Elementary and you lock him in the gym with twenty mothers with baseball bats. You put some Gatorade in there, and some high-nutrition snacks, and maybe have an alternate or two who can substitute when one of the women gets tired." She traded Rose the peeler for a paring knife. "The son of a bitch."

For several minutes Petie's knife made sharp regular reports like gunshots on the cutting board. She had thick, strong, shiny black hair--Indian hair, although she was no part Indian--that she'd tied back from her face with an old rolled-up bandanna. Stuffed under it were some straggly ends, old bangs. She was always trying to grow out old bangs or some other hair fiasco. Once, Rose remembered, she had bleached out a central stripe in her hair. She'd looked strange as a skunk with the jet black running up against the peroxide yellow with no warning and no apology. That was back in high school, in their freshman year. Petie's mother had died four years before, and she and her father were living up at the top of Chollum Road in a twelve-foot camp trailer. Old Man Tyler had always been mean, but after Petie's mother died and he had to declare bankruptcy, he'd been even worse. But as far as Rose could tell, even before Petie's mother died, the only time Old Man Tyler had really paid attention to her was when he was yelling at her; otherwise, he took no notice. Petie swore she didn't own a dress until she was twelve, and by then it was too late to get a feel for them. She'd have gotten married in pants if she'd had her way, but Eddie Coolbaugh had balked so she was married in a homemade lace sheath Eula Coolbaugh made for her, a dress that showed how essentially boy-shaped Petie was. And how small. Everyone thought she was bigger, including Rose. In her own way, she took up a lot of space.

"What are you thinking about?" Petie said, scraping the cut carrots into a big plastic Tupperware container to use tomorrow morning.

"That time you bleached your hair out."

Petie chuckled. "I looked just like a skunk."

"That's what I was thinking. I never thought it bothered you, though. You didn't show it."

"Of course I didn't show it. I didn't tell anyone Old Man beat me over it, either."

"He did?"

"Well, he was drunk."

"Oh."

"Then again, you never really knew, with Old Man. Chances are, he would have beaten me anyway."

"What do you think will happen to those boys Billy Wall messed with? I've heard kids don't recover from something like that, ever. Do you think that's possible, that those poor kids have been ruined?"

Petie shrugged. "I don't know. They'll grow up. They'll date, they'll make stupid choices. At some point they'll realize their lives aren't nearly as good as the ones they expected. Same old same old. Everyone's ruined somewhere along the line."

Rose started to laugh. "Oh, Petie."

"Really. Sooner or later something terrible's always going to come along. It's really just a question of timing."

Rose took the carrot peeler and started scraping potatoes, a small mountain of them, into the sink. "Something terrible like what happened to those boys is not going to happen to everyone, Petie. My God."

"Of course not. It could even be something that seems like not much--moving to another town, say, or having bad acne or liking beer too much. Or it could be something quiet like hopelessness or boredom. No one ever said that ruin always comes in a big loud package."

Rose watched Petie tear apart some sprigs of parsley and toss them into one of the pots. "Well, I'm thinking I might start driving Carissa to school."

"Does she worry about the trip?" Petie stirred some heavy cream into one of the pots.

"No."

"Does she complain about having to wait after school?"

"No, but--"

"So she's a smart kid. She can take care of herself. Stir." Petie put her spoon in Rose's hand.

"You worry about the boys," Rose pointed out, stirring.

"I worry about Ryan. I fear for Loose. There's a difference."

Five-year-old Loose Coolbaugh (short for Lucifer, although even that wasn't his real name) was a f...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 038550943X
• ISBN 13: 9780385509435
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336