Not the Same River

Note from Patricia: At the Faulkner Conference, where I was awarded the Faulkner-Wisdom gold medal for fiction, an agent told me that my literary novel would have popular appeal. It also has crossover potential with a story line involving the 34-year-old protagonist’s 16-year-old daughter. I think it is an upmarket story with book group appeal.

Read Patricia Barone’s full bio.

Chapter One: Malachy Again

August 1969

Addie Kytonen

I had to believe I’d be enough for my own daughter. Turning on my side, I bunched the pillow beneath my neck. Tears pressed against my eyelids. Soothing my face on the cool side of the pillow, I fell into a thin layer of sleep, where I heard myself giving feeble speeches about courage. Excuses really. Everyone sat on beechwood benches around the bandstand and waited for me to explain myself. “Because of my overactive imagination and rotten memory,” I said, “I can’t help reinventing my life.” No one applauded. Not the aunts, the uncles, my high school best friend, the parish priest, the chief of the Ring Lake police. Not even my father.

My ex-husband sighed. A seductive woman, my replacement, kissed his cheek.

The whole town stared at me, my speech in my shaking hands.

“Reinventing your life?” the chief interrogator said. “What about hers?”

The audience conferred amid rustlings, throat clearings, and hearty handshakes. Notes were passed. The mayor whispered with the priest, who declared, “Moving a child away from her father is a sin, even if the defendant has a legal right to do so.”

“I can’t help it!” I repeated, but the chief interrogator— my mother— wasn’t having it.

“You most certainly can!” she shouted. Her chapped red hands rested on each hip.

“I can’t help my life if I stay here!”

Her large blue eyes were each refracted by a single tear.

Addie Kytonen (34) wonders if former priest Malachy Cuthbert (35) is pursuing more than a master’s degree in library science. After marching for civil rights in Northern Ireland, he works for a fellow ex-patriot’s seafood business, traveling widely in the United States. As Addie falls in love with Malachy, who is the second cousin of her ex-husband Vincent Harney (35), she remembers the summers when the three of them played together as children. Malachy was sent to Ring Lake, Minnesota, to escape the violence in Northern Ireland. Vincent, a solitary boy with a secret, welcomes his cousin’s visits, but Addie feels excluded from their games. Vincent is too rough when he tackles Malachy in a football game after Malachy says that Addie is the prettiest girl he has ever seen.

This tangle of emotion plays out in the novel. For Addie, the Mississippi River is her life. Malachy remembers how the three of them went to the source of the river with Addie’s family. Now they have come to the mouth of the river to reveal themselves.

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