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    Life Expectancy
    Life Expectancy
    Life Expectancy
    Ebook38 pages33 minutes

    Life Expectancy

    By Holly Goddard Jones

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In Girl Trouble, acclaimed writer Holly Goddard Jones examines small-town Southerners aching to be good, even as they live in doubt about what goodness is.

    A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant--with his child. A lonely woman reflects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.

    In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.

    Written with extraordinary empathy and maturity, and with the breadth and complexity of a novel, Jones's stories shed light on the darkness of the human condition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 1, 2009
    ISBN9780061966446
    Life Expectancy
    Author

    Holly Goddard Jones

    Holly Goddard Jones's stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best American Mystery Stories, and various literary journals. She is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

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      Book preview

      Life Expectancy - Holly Goddard Jones

      Life Expectancy

      a story from Girl Trouble

      Holly Goddard Jones

      logo.jpg

      For Brandon and my father:

      two good men

      Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

      —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

      • Contents •

      Cover

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Life Expectancy

      About the Author

      Acknowledgments

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      • Life Expectancy •

      Coach Theo Burke was standing outside his classroom during morning break when he noticed Josie across the hall, pinned up against a locker. One of the varsity basketball players, Jatarius, was doing the pinning—his near seven feet making Josie seem short in comparison, big hands straddling her shoulders, too-handsome black face leaned in to kissing distance. The worst thing—the thing that felt like a punch in the gut—was the look on Josie’s face, a look Theo knew well. Her head was tilted, and she was smiling, but just a little: that smart smile, that sexy half-smile with the bottom lip barely caught under her front teeth, an expression that Theo recognized as the smallest bit calculated but mostly genuine. Mostly the only way Josie knew how to be.

      He strode over, hands shoved so deep in his khakis that his watch got caught on one side. He cleared his throat.

      Jatarius, Theo said.

      Yeah. A slow breath, dusky, directed on Josie and not at him.

      Move it along.

      Jatarius pulled to a slow stand, languid, his skin gleaming as if oiled. Just talking, Coach, he said, and Josie giggled. Theo turned to her, and she looked away.

      You’re supposed to be swapping books now, not talking, he said, realizing as he said it how ridiculous—how old—he sounded. Josie was losing interest in him, and all he had to cling to was his authority as her teacher and her coach. Her better. And how false that felt, watching her now, knowing what her breasts looked like beneath that T-shirt and hooded sweatshirt: small, spread apart—a tall girl’s breasts.

      Jatarius pulled his book bag up over his shoulder. See ya, he told Josie, and she fluttered her fingers at him as he sauntered off.

      What are you doing? Theo whispered, looking around to make sure nobody was watching them.

      She tried to laugh again, but her voice caught a little, and she stopped. Her eyes were overbright, her shoulders stiff, but

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