Meet Hildy: an Excerpt from What the River Keeps
Plus giveaways and punny thoughts
Friends,
With the release of What the River Keeps only ten days out, photos of the Pacific Northwest rivers where my reclusive protagonist Hildy works seemed just right for today. You’ll see teasers from story scenes in these reels, too. (Make sure your sound’s on :).
I’ve told you about Hildy . . . but it’s time to introduce you to her, face-to-face. Following is an excerpt from Chapter 1—before either her wondrous healing or that of the Elwha River begins. Hildy’s living in Seattle as this scene opens, with only her canary Butterness for company.
I hope you grow to love her like I do.
Chapter 1
Seattle, 1999
Hildy
Underground
Even if not wedged under her bed, Hildy wouldn’t have answered the door. Instead, she shrank as the clapper struck the metal bell outside her basement apartment. One clang. Two. Loud enough to alert the too-close residents of her Seattle neighborhood that someone stood in the concrete well at the foot of her stairs, bugging her.
Again.
Mouse-like, she peeked from beneath the bedrail, studying the window well closest to the door. Unlikely whoever was ringing would crouch and peer through the slatted blinds, but one never knew.
Something thunked the door. Footsteps scuffed a quick ascent. A truck rumbled and departed.
UPS. Why couldn’t they deliver a package without ringing? They had to know she wouldn’t answer. She never answered. Bad enough that she lived smack in the sightline of all those houses, their windows full of eyes. But a knock or ring at her door? A trespass.
She exhaled and wiggled deeper into the cramped space, where she extracted her latest stone from a row of rocks beneath her headboard. The diameter of a driveway cobble, it size-matched hundreds more crowding the space under her sofa and along her baseboards. Pebbles, both polished and rough, overflowed from galvanized buckets in three corners of her living space. Large or small, she’d assigned a number and a memory to each.
She smiled at this new one—river-smoothed chert, formed in the magic concoction of silica and sediment and time. When this stone had called to her from shore, she’d answered, tucked it in her pack, and returned to count coho smolt heading to sea.
Squirming free of the narrow slot, she opened her bedside notebook, confirmed the rock’s black Sharpie ID on its underside, and jotted more details about the day she found it. Then she squinted into the empty stairwell through the door’s wide-angle peephole and slid the chain from its hasp. Quickly she toed the package inside, relocked the deadbolt and chain, and opened a small box of bagged powders.
“Grit for the tumbler, Butterness.”
Sun through a tilted blind lit the cage on the table, where a canary chirped, cocked his head, and flapped to a higher perch.
. . .
In the bathroom, she snipped open a small packet from the UPS box and scooped a tablespoon of gray grit into a pitcher-sized rubber barrel filled with small stones—twenty-one of them—from her three-week stint on the Nisqually River. She spritzed the rocks and grit with water from a spray bottle, seated the pliable barrel and its lid in the rock tumbler’s metal frame, checked the screws anchoring the polisher to a plywood base, and plugged it in.
The motor hummed. The platform vibrated. Butterness, his throat feathers fluffed and trembling, sang accompaniment. She swayed to his rolling trills and bursts, imbibing their froth like a dessert.
When he finished, she plucked a piece of romaine from the fridge, rinsed, and clipped it to the cage. The canary sidled toward the leaf and nibbled ruffles into the edge. “My little singer,” Hildy said, then squeaked him another chirpy kiss. She jotted bird and song and lettuce into her notebook before she spat on a dried sauce drip on the tiled floor and rubbed it with a stockinged toe. She closed the book and grinned. “I won’t write that,” she said.
She could, though, and no one would know. With the exception of her sister Tess, for the last two of her five years in this apartment, she had allowed no one inside, choosing instead to live alone below the small, hip-roofed main floor where silver-haired Mrs. Kraft padded softly and, evenings, played her harp. Hildy poked rent checks through the slot in the old woman’s door and made no requests. In return, Mrs. Kraft, equally reclusive, never rang Hildy’s bell.
But what if she did ring it someday? Hildy appraised her living quarters as Mrs. Kraft might. The woman’s eyes would first land on beautiful Butterness, piping from his cage. If the woman were to come on a day like today, she’d likely watch the bird bathe in a slant of sunlight wending through a narrow south well. She’d surely appreciate Hildy’s handcrafted bed and desk, too—there, under the west window, where Hildy could see sky above the well’s concrete lip whenever she looked up.
Aagh. Hands at her nape, Hildy wadded her waist-length hair, blonde and kinked from the braid she only unleashed here, in her sanctuary, where no one could see. Who am I kidding? If Mrs. Kraft responded to the shelves and ledges and walls and floor like Tess did, the old woman would likely evict her.
On Tess’s recent spring visit from Sekiu, her sister had eyed Hildy’s rocks and garage sale finds, then plucked a spiral bound notebook from dozens on a long shelf. She frowned at an entry.
“Stop it, Tessie.” Hildy snatched the book. Re-wedged it into the sequence of diaries.
Tess balled her fists. “Do you need to write everything—”
Hildy covered her ears, her mood gone to iron. “You know I do. You can burn them when I die, but don’t try to stop me.”
“Fine, fine. But all this stuff?” Frustration rode Tess’s sigh. “Where did my sweet, funny sister go? Why are you living like this?”
“Like what?”
“C’mon, Hildy. This amped-up hermit thing? All this junk? It’s like a yard sale on steroids in here.” She batted Hildy’s undergrad honor cords and the UW master’s hood hanging between a child’s fishing pole and a kazoo. “No, it’s a doggoned museum. Ever since your boyfriend . . .”
“He has nothing to do with it.” She’d only begun adding physical specimens to her diaries’ detailed accounts two Novembers ago—long months after she and Cole split. He was the least of her worries.
“Well, something or somebody does.”
Hildy’s anxiety surged. Tess’s reaction clinched her growing resolve to refuse her sister’s visits, too. If Tess—who had grown up with her, for heaven’s sake—couldn’t grasp how she needed her records and keepsakes to jog her memory and keep her reality accurate, how could anyone else?
Only at work could she leave all that behind. At hatcheries or Pacific Northwest rivers, the wonder of fish eclipsed everything dark.
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(Through August 11, Baker Book House has the paperback at 40% off—so $11.39! You can preorder it there or at your favorite retailer now. 🧡
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📙📙📙EVENTS . . .
If you’re in the vicinity of the Olympic Peninsula or Whatcom County mid-August, I’d be SO honored and delighted if you could join me at one of these free events!
Tuesday, August 12, 6:30 pm - Lynden Library, Lynden WA - Book Launch!
Save your seat here: https://wcls.libcal.com/event/14807748
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Tuesday, August 19, 7:00 pm - Arts & Event Center - Port Angeles, WA - Book Celebration!
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Wednesday, August 20, 6:00 pm - Sequim Library, Sequim, WA
Meet the Author! Join us for a reading and a Q & A.
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Saturday, August 23, 11:00 am-1:00 pm Connections Christian Store, Lynden, WA
Book Signing!
📙 📙 📙 GIVEAWAY NEWS! Three subscribers have won copies of What the River Keeps ! CONGRATULATIONS, Kim O. Jolita R., and Antoinette M.!
Please send me your postal addresses, and I’ll drop them in the mail to you. 🧡
For lots more upcoming giveaways . . .
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My sister arrives from Virginia this afternoon—and grands come mid-week. Wherever we—or you—are gathering with beloveds, I ‘m praying that nothing gets lost in translation as any of us gather. That happens sometimes, you know?
Hope your barbecue is tasty. 😆
Love,
Cheryl
Don't we know Hildy from your first book? (Brain may not remember correctly).
Wishing so much that I lived close enough to join you in person! This book is so beautiful and I can't wait for the world to enjoy it as I have. Praying for all the release dates and events for you. August will be so full for you but a wonderful book will be released into the wild. Fly Hildy, FLYYYYYY! Or should I say SWIM HILDY, SWIM?!