Kathryn Lang, the editor at SMU Press, has quietly been putting together one of the best outputs of fiction around the past nearly two decades, and Andrew's Book Club reminded me back in April that I had not so long ago received a review copy of another example of this - Tracy Winn's story collection, "Mrs. Somebody Somebody."
The story "Another Way to Make Cleopatra Cry" has a child narrator, something Winn does in exemplary fashion (another excellent example is an earlier story in the collection, "Smoke"). Kaylene, the youngest of two sisters, and middle child if you count the not quite step-brother Dooley (the sister's father is bedding Dooley's mom, and they all live together, but, no marriage, no step in the title), tells the story of when her older sister, Cleopatra, lost their not quite step-mom, Dawn's, purse. Turns out it was on the day she was planning to leave their no-good father, also the day, though she didn't know it at the time she was planning to leave, that said no-good father was locked up for giving an Arab gas station owner the beating of his life (predominantly for being a foreigner that came in and took over a station where he had learned how to pump gas as a child).
Kaylene is doing her best to make sure she and Cleopatra don't end up in a foster home or worse as this story moves towards its conclusion, and within the tale, Winn does an excellent job of writing about class.
"Next to our house, the trashcans spilled over into the weeds by the fence. My bicycle, which was also Cleopatra's, laid right where I'd left it after the last blast downt he canal path out back. The bike had been pink once and had rainbow-colored clickers on the wheels that went like castanets. I knew just how the weeds poked up between the rusty spokes and how the cockeyed pedal that rubbed the chain-guard when it went around -- thunk-a-swish -- stuck up like a broken foot. The bike waved one handlebar at me."
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