The Improbable Road of Return

Enjoy This Excerpt From The Novel…

Sauvey is seventy plus. He certainly didn’t put his hands on me. I don’t even have to say such a thing, or even think for a minute that he might. But then isn’t that it? Men with restraint?

Isn’t that what men always are? They are always holding back their power.

He was dealing with me, too, God. What would I have done had I been him? Probably the same thing. Stand there like a jackass, pretending to reach up and grab the clapper, mime ringing
the bell vigorously, welcoming me home.

High above his mockery the bell hung still.

But even in the silence of that one bell I couldn’t stand it. Where were all the bells in the whole city? Sauvey was a history buff enough to be a respectable citizen of Philly, that city of so much resounding separation, but I should have shouted back asking where were they all—all the bells. When I was like that mosaic tile-work of what it means to be me Sauvey was a city of bells. How I hated his insistence for me to be loved. But then it was there, the whole of it, every still bell in the whole city was his love for me that I never even had to rip apart. It was always there—the love I pushed away—and I left it stunted, thwarted, and not quite laughed at like all the still bells, the never ringing history. How was it my right? Why did I deny the man? That was my Sauvey, city of bells somehow just too loud, too old, and still too much as if a single bachelor bell in one cupola could be part of my city’s silenced carillon.