Guest Post: Amy Sue Nathan, author of THE GLASS WIVES By Brenda Janowitz

We’ve been having so much fun taking those old unpublished novels out from under the bed that we decided to ask some of our friends to do the same! Today, I’m thrilled because we’ve got Amy Sue Nathan, whose debut novel, THE GLASS WIVES, is being published by St. Martin’s in 2013.  She’s also the force behind the popular blog, Women’s Fiction Writers.  She’s got an excerpt from her unpublished novel, PICKING DAISY, which I think you’ll love.  The story behind it is pretty interesting in its own right, too!  But, enough of what I think.  I’ll let Amy take it from here…

Picking On Trunk Novels

by Amy Sue Nathan

For me, the best part of an having a novel I’ve tucked under the bed, is that I can tear it to bits, bully, and shove away again without feeling guilty.  There’s a certain amount of power I have over it because no one else is going to read it. The expectations for that book have been tempered. I have nothing to lose.  It’s kind of…freeing.

Somewhere between finishing my upcoming novel The Glass Wives and it selling, I wrote a novel called Picking Daisy. I got the idea for the novel when salespeople and wanderers kept showing up at my front door.  I thought: what would happen if some long-lost relative showed up one day?  We never really know who’s knocking, do we?  And what if there was someone who knew something about me even I didn’t know? Would I let them in? Shoo them away?  I loved the characters in this story: a dark and artist teenager, an eccentric aunt, a workaholic father, and insecure step-mother.  I loved playing with points of view. I loved writing a family who celebrates Christmas -- since I’m Jewish and never have. I only went two rounds of revisions on this book before realizing, with the help of my agent, that it just wasn’t what it needed to be.  The story was scattered and the way to corral it, was to change the focus, and the main characters.  That would change the story so exponentially that I wasn’t interested in doing it. I wanted to tell Daisy’s story and it just wasn’t her time, my time, our time. 

Still, Daisy holds a special place in my writing heart.  She’s a girl who has been kept from her father her entire life and all she wants is to be part of his family – and she’s willing to do just about anything to get it. Even dye the pink out of her hair.

Below is the opening to Picking Daisy. I hope there’s a smidgen of room in your heart for her as well.

PICKING DAISY

by Amy Sue Nathan

For eighteen years and three months Daisy thought of her father as a test tube specimen. Now, she was standing at his front door. 

It was freezing outside, probably way below zero.  She didn’t lick her dry lips, afraid they’d freeze together and she wouldn’t be able to talk.  With fist raised and drawn, Daisy was ready to knock then the door clicked and opened about eight inches. Daisy saw a petite woman in a pink T-shirt with a white Nike swish and fitted black Lycra shorts.  She looked like Martha Stewart, only sweatier. 

“I’d like to speak with Elliot Evans,” Daisy said.  She smiled, opened her black-lined eyes wide and then chided herself for trying to look cute, like a kitten someone would want to bring in from the cold and keep for her own.

“He’s not here. Can I help you with something?” The woman opened the wooden door wide but stood behind the glass storm door holding the handle.  Daisy didn’t know if Martha was unlocking it or keeping it closed. 

“I’d like to meet him,” Daisy said.  “I’m his daughter.” No need pretending she was there to sell cookies.

“Very funny, young lady. We don’t have a daughter. I should know. I’m Maggie Evans, his wife.” 

“Then you are my step-mother. Nice to meet you.”  Daisy held out an invisible skirt and curtsied.

Step-Martha smiled with a closed mouth, looked at the floor and stepped back, pushing the door closed. 

Daisy held up her right hand. She spoke without taking a breath. “My name is Daisy. My mother is Olivia. Olivia Cooper.”  

Maggie opened the door.  Her eyes shot up and she stared at Daisy.  She turned away, wrapped her arms around herself and faced Daisy again. “How do you know about Olivia?”  

“She’s my mother.” Was Maggie Evans deaf?

“Elliot hasn’t seen Olivia in over twenty years.”

“According to my mom, and when she says he moved out, it’s nineteen years, not twenty.”

Maggie rolled her eyes like a teenager. “Yes,” Maggie said. “And they divorced before they had any children.”

“That’s true, but my birthday is August twenty-second.  My mother was eight weeks pregnant the February he left.  What’s so hard to believe? He was her husband.” 

Daisy knew all of it was hard to believe.  She’d been saying it aloud for seven days, since her mother’s cell phone confession.  Daisy was not a Donor Conceived Offspring. Her mother had not been artificially inseminated because she’d always wanted a child but never wanted to marry.  Her mother had been married to her father for five years when Daisy was conceived the old-fashioned way. During break-up sex.  As if the reconfigured story of her parentage wasn’t bad enough – Daisy could no longer boast being miracle of modern technology.  She could no longer daydream about the comprehensive daddy database from which her blue eyes, black-brown hair, long legs, athleticism, temperament and medical history were chosen. She was nothing more than an unfortunate accident. And a very big secret.

“Look, can I come in?” Daisy asked. “It’s fucking cold out here.”  So much for the cute kitten effect.

“Watch your language, young lady.”

Daisy shoved her bare hands into the pockets of her not-meant-for-Pennsylvania-in-winter fleece jacket.  “I‘ll take a DNA test,” Daisy said again. “If he wants proof.”

“If you don’t go away I’m going to call the police.” Maggie's short, well-manicured fingernail tapped a rapid beat on the “No Solicitors Invited” sticker on the sidelight.  The tapping matched Daisy’s pulse both in tempo and tone. “This means you can’t knock on my door unless I give you permission,” Maggie added through a clenched jaw.

“I’m not trying to sell you something.  I’m your husband’s daughter.”  The final word caught in her throat and Daisy swallowed the last syllable. She shivered and turned away, blinked and tipped back her head to retract the tears and to sort through her thoughts. She looked at the brick driveway and the cobblestone path that had been cleared of snow, and then looked up at the two story French-style house. Chateau.  Mansion.  “I don’t want any of this,” she said, facing Maggie while removing her hands from her pockets. She didn’t. She wanted a family. “I just want to meet my father. He didn’t even know my mother was pregnant. God, I just want him to know he has a daughter.”

This was not going as planned.  The imagined tears of her still-imaginary father replaced by the scowl and disbelief of his wife.

“Elliot doesn’t have a daughter,” Maggie said.

Daisy crossed her arms, lodged her hands under her armpits for warmth and effect, and poked her left eyebrow so high it hid beneath her pink-streaked bangs. 

“He does now.”  

Daisy watched the door close and stared at the engraved brass knocker she hadn’t noticed earlier.  Evans. Daisy hadn’t heard that name until the week before. An internal twist, an unfamiliar blend of cramps and exhilaration. Her birthright was on the inside, not outside standing on the oversized unwelcome mat.  She turned and ran to the idling taxi in the driveway.  Good thing she hadn’t paid the driver and told him to come back later.  Daisy climbed into the back seat.  She wiggled her toes, stretched her fingers and began to thaw.  She looked at the drawn curtains but knew step-Maggie was watching her.

The cab backed out of the driveway.  Unaccustomed to the crunchy sound of snow dust beneath the tires, Daisy listened with intention and heard every crackle, crunch and squash.  When the taxi sat parallel to the house the driver shifted the car into park. Daisy fumbled in her pocket.  Gum. She held out a stick of Juicy Fruit to the driver.  He turned and accepted it, smiling.

“You okay, miss?”

“Not really,” Daisy said.

“You’re prettier than her,” he said. “That woman at the door.”

Daisy sniffed and smiled. “Thank you.” 

“We can just stay here if you like.”

“No, that’s okay.  I’m ready to go.”

Daisy watched the too-still curtains of her father’s house and beauty-pageant-waved as they drove off. 

New and old money mansions rose out of the snow like castles on clouds. Remnants of well-manicured, gardener-tended bushes draped icicles like pearls on a string around a graceful neckline.  Who knew it snowed in November?

Daisy pictured the house she grew up in tucked into the current landscape.  She smiled.  That house was pale and bold with sharp lines like her mother and sparse like their time together.  It was a rectangle that sat over a cliff and overlooked the beach -- nothing like the brick and mortar monstrosities with turrets, bay windows and chandeliers overlooking the road and more houses.  Daisy’s lifelong backyard was the beach, her view, the horizon.  People flocked to La Jolla to escape the cold and the heat. Daisy had fled La Jolla the day after high school for a summer French immersion program in Paris.  She met her mother at Reed College for move-in day at the end of August.  She had planned to spend Thanksgiving with her mom and favorite aunt, but when Daisy arrived at the Portland airport, she booked the redeye to Philadelphia instead.

She had to admit, aside from the front door fiasco, she liked Gladwyne, Pennsylvania.  It was a touch gaudy and a tad pretentious, but the premature twinkle lights were strewn with good intentions.

Her mother would have disliked it for the same reasons.

Daisy paced her hotel room, no bigger than an inside cruise ship cabin.  She dumped her hobo bag contents on the bed, hoping for an escaped candy bar at the bottom, or her uneaten honey-roasted airplane-peanuts, but all she found was chewed gum balled and half wrapped in paper. Gross.  She took two steps to the bathroom, threw the gum in the trashcan under the sink.  She unwrapped the small cake of soap on the ledge and washed the stickiness she knew would never be all-the-way gone. Daisy pictured the vending machine down the hall, next to the ice machine.  Her stomach growled. Five-star hotels had five-star snacks.  Hotels like this had vending machines.  The best vending machines.  But the snack would wait. She dug for her case of graphites, and drew.

First short strokes, then longer ones, straight and curved and then round, creating her own rendition of step-Martha.  Just a rough image of a woman barricading a door.  Daisy could finish it later, adding the subtle lines around the eyes, revealing the slight twitch in the lip, the sweat on the décolleté.  Daisy guffawed. If she had been speaking to her mother she would have speed-dialed the office and joked about how French language had permeated her thoughts – just like Olivia had wanted.  But she wasn’t speaking to her mother.  Daisy focused on the page, the shadowy bricks, the mullet-shaped snow drifts, the tire tracks, the dark beyond the door, the abyss that was her father.

Daisy struck a pseudo-yoga pose and stretched her feet to her head.  Her back cracked and she got down to the business of piecing together the life of her brother, laying papers in front of in order of importance, not chronology.

She wanted to already know Chase Evans when she met him, like an older sister should. She was only two years older, but still.  Her personality was classic first born.  She had assumed it was because she had donor-siblings scattered across the U.S. or at least California. In reality it was because she had an unintentional sibling on the other coast.

Daisy laid down her head atop the papers.  They were cool and smooth.  She tucked her hands under the pillows above her head and closed her eyes. 

She wanted to make a good impression on her newfound family and was not off to a stellar start. The sarcasm would probably have to go, along with the cursing.  Her mother wasn’t sarcastic at all, it didn’t suit her.  Daisy figured it was just her nature but now she wondered if it was Elliot Evans’ nature as well.  What else about herself she would see in him when she met him? She grabbed her purse. To hell – to heck – with step-Martha. It was time to find out.

#

Amy Sue Nathan’s debut novel, THE GLASS WIVES, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2013.  Amy’s stories and essays have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times online, The Washington Post online, The Huffington Post, Chicago Parent, Grey Sparrow Journal, Rose and Thorn Journal, Scribblers On The Roof, The Verb, Hospital Drive Journal and The Stone Hobo.  In 2011 she launched Women’s Fiction Writers, a blog focusing on the authors, business and craft of traditionally published women’s fiction.  Amy is also a freelance fiction editor, and a reader for literary agents. She currently serves as secretary for the RWA-WF Chapter.

Amy lives near Chicago and is the mom of a son in college, a daughter in high school, and two rambunctious rescued dogs.

Find out more on Amy’s Website and Blog, or contact her via email (AmySueNathan@gmail.com or WomensFictionWriters@gmail.com), Twitter (@AmySueNathan), or Facebook.

Here’s a peek into The Glass Wives, coming from St. Martin’s Press in 2013:

When a tragic accident ends the life of Richard Glass, it upends the lives of ex-wife, Evie, second wife, Nicole, and their children. Still, there’s no love lost between the ex and the new widow. In fact, Evie sees a silver lining in the heartache—the chance to move forward without Nicole in their lives. But Evie wasn’t counting on her children’s bond with their baby brother, and she certainly wasn’t counting on Nicole hanging on to the threads of family, no matter how frayed. And anyway, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Evie and Nicole, both emotionally and fiscally spent by Richard’s death, agree to share living expenses—and Evie’s house. The arrangement, purely financial in Evie’s mind, has its benefits, such as a live-in babysitter. But it also exposes secrets and causes rifts between Evie and her closest friends. Then, when she suspects that Nicole is rearranging more than her kitchen, Evie must decide whom she can trust. More importantly, Evie must decide what makes a family. And if two Glass wives can be stronger than one.

The Lonely Manuscript Club by Brenda Janowitz

OCTOBER, 2013:  FABULOUS NEW UPDATE!  THE LONELY HEARTS CLUB HAS BEEN SOLD TO JASON PINTER, FOUNDER AND PUBLISHER OF POLIS BOOKS!  THE LONELY HEARTS CLUB WILL BE RELEASED BY POLIS BOOKS IN WINTER 2014.

This cycle we're talking about books that never saw the light of day. Yes, we published novelists have drawers full of them-- novels that never got finished, never got sold, never got read.

So, today, I'm sharing the first chapter of THE LONELY HEARTS CLUB, a novel I pitched, but never sold. I really loved this character and the idea of the book-- it's about a woman who unknowingly starts a big anti-love movement-- but no editors did. Which is sort of a problem if you want to sell something. Anyway, this one still holds a special place in my heart, so here goes:

THE LONELY HEARTS CLUB

By Brenda Janowitz

Money for nothing

“Jo, you’re fired,” he says.  Just like that.  Fired.  And I’m utterly shocked.  I know that no one ever expects to be fired, but I really didn’t see this coming.  I find myself with my mouth wide open, just staring back at him. 

            “Fired?” is all I can choke out.  The room begins to spin.  That may be because I was out until sunrise last night drinking vodka tonics at an underground club in Williamsburg, but I’m pretty sure that it’s the news that’s doing it to me, not the hangover.

            “Yes, I’m sorry, Jo, but it’s not working out here,” he says.  His skin is gleaming when he says it.  His skin always gleams.  He’s a dermatologist, so it has to gleam in order for him to stay in business.  My skin doesn’t ever gleam.  At the very most, it shines and turns red when I get hot or embarrassed.  I feel it beginning to shine and my hand immediately flies to my cheek, which, of course, only makes it get hotter.

We are in his office when he tells me and he is sitting at his desk, his head framed by his many diplomas and awards that are hung on the wall behind him.  They are, as they are always, shining brightly as if they’d been dusted and cleaned that very morning.  I look at the picture that he keeps framed at the edge of his desk—a photograph of his family taken at a New Year’s Eve party for the year 2000, framed in a sterling silver picture frame that his wife lovingly picked out for their thirtieth wedding anniversary—and then look back up at him. 

            “You can’t fire me,” I say, which I wholeheartedly believe.  I really didn’t think that he ever would or could fire me.

            “I can,” he says, “and I am.”  He begins to toy with one of the pens sitting on his desk. 

            “I’m your best employee!” I plead.

            “You wore a ‘Save CBGBs’ T shirt to work,” he says.

            “CBGBs was a New York institution,” I say.  He gives me a blank stare.  I shrug in response.  Is it my fault that this man has no sense of culture?  Of history?  “What does it matter what I wear under my assistant’s coat anyway?”

            “People can see the prints on your T shirts right through the fabric,” he says.  “And sometimes you wear ones with dirty words on them,” he continues, whispering the ‘dirty words’ part as if his grandmother is somehow listening from up above and would be appalled by this particular bit of information.  “Jo, it’s not just the T shirts.  You’ve called in the wrong prescriptions for my patients more times than I’d like to admit.”

            “Some of those drugs have very complicated names,” I say in my own defense.  And for the record, they do.

            “That doesn’t mean you can give a patient a more pronounceable drug without consulting me first.”

            “Then maybe you and your colleagues should start prescribing more pronounceable drugs,” I argue.  He furrows his brow in response.  “But, I’m your favorite employee!” I plead.

            “You balanced the company checkbook wrong the last three out of four quarters.”

“You know that I’m not an accountant.”  When he hired me for the job two years ago, I knew that there would be some accounting involved.  What I hadn’t realized at the time was that I would have to be quite so specific with the numbers.  Which is a challenge for me seeing as I’m really more of a right brain kind of person.

“But, you know how to balance your own checkbook, don’t you?” he says.

For the record, I don’t.

“Of course I know how to balance my own checkbook,” I laugh, as if to say, ‘Doesn’t everybody?’  “A business checkbook is much, much different than a personal checkbook,” I explain. 

For the record, it’s not.

“I’m your most loyal employee,” I say.  My last resort.  I find myself alternating between staring into his solid gold monogrammed Tiffany belt buckle and his shellacked black hair because I can’t meet his eyes.

            “This is difficult for me, too, you know,” he says, even though I know that it’s not. 

“Do you realize how embarrassing this is going to be for me?” I say as my last resort.

“I thought you don’t get embarrassed,” he replies, looking into my eyes, challenging me.

“I don’t,” I say, frowning like a little girl who hasn’t gotten the piece of candy that she wanted.   

            “Don’t take this personally, Pumpkin.”

            “You can’t call me Pumpkin when you’re firing me, Daddy.” 

#

Thanks so much for reading!  I hope you enjoyed Chapter One.  If you'd like to read more, I've got Chapter Two up on my blog today.

I’m the author of SCOT ON THE ROCKS and JACK WITH A TWIST. (And, ahem, the very unpublished THE LONELY HEARTS CLUB.) My third novel, RECIPE FOR A HAPPY LIFE, will be published by St. Martin's in 2013. My work’s also appeared in the New York Post and Publisher’s Weekly. You can find me at brendajanowitz.com or on Twitter at @BrendaJanowitz.

Tough talking girls from the suburbs by Brenda Janowitz

So, this cycle we're talking about manuscripts that never got published. Every published author has got at least one or two novels laying around that never saw the light of day. Sad, lonely novels that just didn't gel, or just didn't sell.

Today, I've got the first chapter of a book I called LOVE, LOSS AND BAIL ON THE VEGAS STRIP. I was trying to do something different from my first novel, SCOT ON THE ROCKS, and create a protagonist that wasn't me. She was the anti-me. A tough-talking, take-no-prisoners type who was born and raised in Las Vegas.

Problem one: I showed it to my mother, who is always my first reader. I was worried that I didn't quite have the voice down yet. I asked her if it sounded like a tough-talking bail bondsman from downtown Vegas, or if it sounded like a sheltered girl from the suburbs who was merely TRYING to sound like a tough-talking bail bondsman from Vegas. She thought the latter.

Problem two: I debuted a chapter of this in my writing class and the teacher said: This is great! It's just like those Stephanie Plum novels! I said: Stephanie who?! It was only later when I googled Stephanie Plum that I realized that Janet Evanovich had created a cottage industry around a tough-talking female bail bondsman. I didn't think that publishing had room for one more.

I figured this thing was dead in the water. And it probably is. But, just for fun, here goes:

LOVE, LOSS AND BAIL ON THE VEGAS STRIP

By Brenda Janowitz

Chapter one

“Bailbondsman?” a frat boy who can’t be more than twenty years old asks me.  “But you’re a girl.  Shouldn’t you be called bailbondswoman or something?”

He laughs real loud and his three lookalike friends behind him laugh along even though it wasn’t really that funny and they aren’t here for fun and games, they’re here to post bail for their friend who’s being held for manslaughter—a $500,000 bond here in the great state of Nevada.  They are all dressed identically—each one in a different pastel colored Lacoste short sleeved polo shirt and designer jeans that they probably bought already worn in and dirty.  You can get overpriced crap like that at the Caesar’s Forum Shops.  The five hundred grand probably doesn’t even mean a thing to these kids.  But, to me, it’s everything.  I need that 10% fee to stay in business.

            I lean in real close.  We’re eye to eye, but I can see his eyes go down my neck and land squarely on my breasts.

            “I don’t really think there’s any chance of anyone getting confused,” I reply.  As he nods in agreement, his eyes don’t even come back up to meet my eyes.

            My name is Cat and I’m a bailbondsman.  Or woman.  Whatever.  I’m usually not too concerned with people getting confused about it.  I have been running this business for years now—ever since my daddy died.  

We do it all here, we’re a full service shop:  post bail bonds, cash checks….  we can even notarize something for you if you’d like (my Bounty Hunter Donny’s also a notary).  But the bonds are our bread and butter here, so I mostly cover that stuff. 

My best friend, Heavenly, works here with me ever since my daddy’s old secretary, Dottie, finally retired at 75 years young.  I met Heavenly about five years ago when I posted her bond for her killing her husband.  Really.  She killed him.  Cold blood and everything.  She walked in on him sleeping with some other woman, and ever so calmly walked directly to the bedside table, took out her hubby’s gun, and shot them both. 

I like her style.

In the end, she got off practically scot free.  Heat of the moment and all that.  It’s true.  I know this kind of stuff.  I used to date a lawyer.  You see, if she had gone downstairs to get the gun or hesitated for even one minute, they could have really nailed her because it would have been premeditated.  But, since she moved so quickly and without really thinking, it was the heat of passion, and she was set.  Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?

My daddy was a GI stationed in California in 1968.  He hit the newly built Caesar’s Palace in Vegas on the way back from California to his home in the Bronx after his tour of duty and fell in love with a showgirl.  They spent a blissful three days together until his father called him back home to go work in the family business—a bail bonds outfit right near the Federal Courthouse in White Plains.

            He sent love letters to that showgirl every day for three months.  She never responded, but he kept on writing.  After three months, she finally gave him a call to tell him she was pregnant.

            Inside of a week, he was back in town, married that pretty showgirl in a quickie ceremony, and bought a starter house for them to begin their lives.  Six months later, they gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, who they named Elizabeth, after my daddy’s mother.  They called her Bessie.

When my daddy came back into town to take care of my mother, he did the only thing he knew how—bail bonds, just like his daddy had done in the Bronx.  His daddy set him up with a local guy, Louie Stone, who showed him the ropes.  Things were great for a while until Louie decided he wanted to post a bond for the guy who’d tried to shoot Benny Binion in an underground poker game.  My daddy wouldn’t do it—you do not go against Benny Binion in the city of Las Vegas.  It’s just simply not done.  You see, the man is a Las Vegas legend, and you show a man like that respect.  For God’s sake, my daddy played in the first World Series of Poker—Benny Binion’s brainchild—in 1970.  Louie and my daddy parted ways and my dad opened his own shop, Malone and Sons Bail Bonds, right across the street.  (This was before I was a twinkle in his eye and my daddy was positive that his second child would be a boy.)

Business was real tough at the outset, and after a while, that pretty showgirl got tired of clipping coupons and ran off with an LA record exec who has since declared bankruptcy.  My sister was three and I was just a baby.  Our mother never came back, even when our daddy died twelve years later.

“This is how it’s going to work,” I say to the frat boy as he pulls out his checkbook, “You pay me 10% of the bond, I post it for you, and if your friend shows up for his date with the judge, we’re all aces and kings.  If he doesn’t,” I say, careful to pause and make sure I’ve got his full attention, because this is the important part, “you’re on for the whole half a mil.  Got it?”

“Got it,” the frat boy says, eyeing Heavenly, in a microscopic gold skirt and white lace tube top, up and down.  Heavenly smiles back.  Then his eyes turn to me, starting at the top of my white wife beater, traveling down to my used Levi’s all the way to my combat boots.  My usual uniform for the day, all purchased at an Army Navy shop in Henderson, the neighborhood where I live.  I get most of my clothes at that same Army Navy shop, with the exception of my most prized possession—my red leather jacket.  Paper thin and soft as a baby’s bottom, it’s perfect for the mild Vegas weather (except for the summers when it’s oppressively hot, but that’s when I send the jacket to my sister in New York, who brings it to her “special leather guy in midtown” who cleans it up, reinforces the buttons, and makes it look new again in time for September).  It was bought while chasing down a mark with Donny in Italy.  When our mark hit Florence, I told Donny that we had to take an afternoon off to check out the flea market—famous for its top shelf leather goods.  Heavenly had specifically requested that if our mark hit Florence, we get her a pair of leather gloves.  It was there that I picked up my red leather jacket and also nailed my mark—his girlfriend had the same idea to stop and hit the flea market.  We picked them up just as he was trying on a pair of leather jeans.  He was sort of stuck in them and couldn’t run from us fast enough.  I love it when shit like that happens.

“That’s why you’re giving me proof that you can pay the whole half a mil, you get it?”

“Got it,” he says, casually passing me a faxed copy of the deed to his Washington, D.C. brownstone.  His eyes have left me and are back to running up and down Heavenly’s dancer’s bod.  She danced from the time she ran away from home at fifteen until she killed her husband at twenty-five, and she’s got the gams to prove it.

“And if you’re on for the whole half a mil,” I say, directing his eyes back to me, “you’ve got yourself a little date with my muscle, Donny.”

Donny stands up from his desk in the back and looks at the frat boy.  That is, all six foot five, three hundred pounds of him stands up and stares at the frat boy.  Donny’s face wears no expression, but when you’re six foot five, three hundred pounds, your body speaks for itself.  I can see the frat boy trying to hide his fear, in the same way I’m sure he’d learned to when he was being hazed by the older members of his fraternity, but when you’re in my business, you can smell fear a mile away.

Things are black and white in my business, much like life.  You’re either guilty or innocent, you can either pay your bail or you can’t, you either stay for the hearing, or you run. 

My mother, that pretty showgirl, taught me that.  You either stay or you leave.  You show up or you don’t.  That’s just the type of person you are.  One or the other.  It’s practically out of your control.  I’m the type of person who stays, and I try to surround myself with other like-minded people.

“Understand?” I ask the frat boy.  He shakes his head ‘yes’ and Donny sits back down and goes back to the newspaper he’d been thumbing through.

I’ve known Donny since the day I was born.  Daddy grew up with him back in the Bronx.  When he went out on his own after breaking away from Louie, my daddy brought Donny out to Vegas and hired him to be his muscle in the shop.  Most people wouldn’t hire an ex-con, at that time Donny had already done some time for a bunch of petty crimes—fights and the like—and my daddy was the only one in Vegas (and the Bronx, and the greater New York metropolitan area, incidentally) who would give him a shot.  They were closer than just friends, than just business colleagues, they were like brothers.  My daddy was the best man at Donny’s wedding, and served as the godfather to Donny’s little baby girl.  Donny’s godfather to my sister and me, too.

As per my daddy’s will, Donny was supposed to be our legal guardian should anything happen to him.  Unfortunately, at the time that my daddy died, Donny was at the tail end of a five year stint (ten really, but five with parole) in the Federal Pen for killing the drunk driver who had killed his wife and kid.

In Donny’s absence, our daddy’s secretary, Dottie, took my fifteen year old sister, Bessie, and me in until one day Social Services came calling.  I never was sure who turned us in and I try not to think about it too much.  That night, at three o’clock in the morning, my sister grabbed me and her boyfriend and put us all on a bus bound for New York City. 

We got a fifth-story walk up studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen right on Ninth Avenue near the bus terminal.  It was by no means a safe neighborhood, but we had my sister’s fifteen year old boyfriend, Dez, and a kindly Super named Sammy who watched out for us.

About a month before Dottie’s life savings had run out (which Dottie had given to us—my sister’s a lot of things, but she isn’t a thief), Bessie had scored a role on the daytime soap The Sun Never Sets on Tomorrow.  I wasn’t surprised at all when she got the role.  For one—I was twelve years old at the time, and when you’re twelve years old, you tend to think that anything is possible, even impossible dreams.  For the other—by fifteen, her boobs were already bigger than mine are now, and she had the same silky black hair and big blue eyes that I have.  Dez and I found Bessie a fake ID that said she was sixteen and had Dottie mail in parental consents to get her on the set. 

Bessie was tutored on the set until she was eighteen and she somehow got me a scholarship to a fancy Upper East Side private high school.  I don’t know how she did it, but my sister is one of those people who can make anything happen.  From my fancy Upper East Side private school, I was a shoe in to get into Harvard.  They didn’t offer me a scholarship, but by then, Bessie was making enough money as a soap star to foot the bill for me and it was my dream to go.  I know that she never would have paid if she knew that the real reason I wanted to go to college was to get a degree in business and re-open my daddy’s shop in Vegas, but by the time I graduated and told her of my plans, it was already too late.  When we argue, she sometimes tells me that she wants the Harvard money back, with juice.  I try to be careful not to argue with her.

            “Just sign here and we’re all set,” I say to the frat boy with a smile.  Usually, I have Heavenly take care of the minutia like this, but with a bond so high, I want all my “i”s dotted and “t”s crossed.  I cannot afford to lose this money.  The 10% I’m collecting on this bond is enough to keep my lease on the building and the business just barely in the black.  This business is all I have left of my daddy, and it’s not going anywhere as long as I have something to say about it.

            I look over his paperwork as he examines mine before signing.  This frat boy is attaching his two million dollar brownstone in D.C. as collateral for the bond.  I see from his application that these kids go to Georgetown.  I try not to think about the fact that this kid who is ten years younger than me owns more real property than I do as he signs his name—Albert Thomas Finnegan, the third.

I’m the author of SCOT ON THE ROCKS and JACK WITH A TWIST. (And, ahem, the very unpublished LOVE, LOSS AND BAIL ON THE VEGAS STRIP.) My third novel, RECIPE FOR A HAPPY LIFE, will be published by St. Martin's in 2013. My work’s also appeared in the New York Post and Publisher’s Weekly. You can find me at brendajanowitz.com or on Twitter at @BrendaJanowitz.