BASED ON A TRUE STORY—A sudden widow and a single mother both have a habit of hiding from hard truths, until a brutal accident in an unforgiving Texas town forces them to face what they’re hiding, and fill the vacancy in their own hearts.
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A SUDDEN WIDOW. A SINGLE MOTHER. BOTH HAVE A HABIT OF HIDING FROM HARD TRUTHS.
Helen is childless and widowed after a long marriage and gets a second chance with a long-lost love. But she’s grieving her hidden regrets. She bonds with her quiet kindergarten student and doubts the girl’s struggling single mother, Charlene, is fit to parent.
Charlene’s hiding a secret of her own, and she resents Helen’s interference. She’s determined to make a better life for her young daughter, the teenage boy her ex left behind, and the baby on the way when a scarred veteran offers to lend a hand.
A tragedy no one sees coming forces the two women to unite, as small-town bias threatens to destroy innocent lives. But first, Helen and Charlene must confront the vacancy in their hearts. As they do, can they find new strength, acceptance, and a second chance at love?
INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS
BASED ON A TRUE STORY—A sudden widow and a single mother both have a habit of hiding from hard truths, until a brutal accident in an unforgiving Texas town forces them to face what they’re hiding, and fill the vacancy in their own hearts.
_
A SUDDEN WIDOW. A SINGLE MOTHER. BOTH HAVE A HABIT OF HIDING FROM HARD TRUTHS.
Helen is childless and widowed after a long marriage and gets a second chance with a long-lost love. But she’s grieving her hidden regrets. She bonds with her quiet kindergarten student and doubts the girl’s struggling single mother, Charlene, is fit to parent.
Charlene’s hiding a secret of her own, and she resents Helen’s interference. She’s determined to make a better life for her young daughter, the teenage boy her ex left behind, and the baby on the way when a scarred veteran offers to lend a hand.
A tragedy no one sees coming forces the two women to unite, as small-town bias threatens to destroy innocent lives. But first, Helen and Charlene must confront the vacancy in their hearts. As they do, can they find new strength, acceptance, and a second chance at love?
INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS
January 2006
HELEN
To the narrow-minded among the throng assembled for the spectacle, those responsible had already been convicted without benefit of trial, judge, or jury, and all that remained was to lay the innocent victim to rest.
Two men labored inside a dirt-banked rectangle, dwarfed by oversized family monuments. BECKER. ECKHART. BANKS. WHITAKER. The chinks from the men’s shovels contrasted with the syncopated thuds of fresh earth hitting the dry sod as the gawkers, the press, and the few actual mourners exited in one solemn swarm through the arched iron gate. Mud-splattered pickups, worn cars, and scores of media vans from as far away as Tulsa to Amarillo to Childress edged toward town. Helen, preoccupied with the Panhandle’s wide and lonely span—the sole grain elevator to their east, the low, flat grasslands to the west—failed to notice the bruised purple sky, threatening to spit rain. She stomached a stab of remorse, stepped forward, and placed a pink rosebud on top of the casket.
Shivering, Helen opened her black umbrella for shelter from the spatter of drizzle, and chanced a glance at Charlene, wishing she could tamp down her doubts. No one could protect Charlene from the guilt sure to entangle her. Helen struggled in its grasp, too, since Hal’s death.
What passed for Charlene's family stood braced in a mournful huddle around the casket and hugged her to them. Charlene’s eyes were fixed into space, no doubt unaware of the hell about to descend.
The same invisible wall had surrounded Helen, trapped in her regrets, when she’d buried Hal. She’d been blind to anyone, or anything, around her then. No sound, no breeze. Some ten months after her husband’s unexpected death, she recalled little about being at Hal’s graveside.
But she remembered her vow, to never, ever misjudge a cry for help again. Yet here she stood, blindsided, at another burial. How did she get it all so wrong?
Five months earlier, August 2005
Late on a Friday afternoon, Helen stood at Hal’s grave with a knot of orange and yellow Gerbera daisies she had no memory of buying.
The first week of school had left her unmoored, between two places. She’d thought children’s energy would revive her, but she was drained down like a dying battery until a strange thing happened after a summer of feeling no feelings at all. One tiny, quiet girl with huge brown eyes equally bright and sad, mirrored Helen’s grief.
The first day of school, the girl sat cross-legged at the furthest edge of the alphabet carpet, as though a moat separated her from the exuberant gaggle of kindergarteners who crowded Helen’s reading chair. When the girl gave her name, Jillie, her voice was as slight as a dry prairie breeze. Helen leaned in and was flooded by longing for the child she’d lost.
It was her biggest sorrow of the many petty regrets she’d suppressed during her long marriage to Hal.
During recess Friday, Jillie stood in the shade near the fence, her small arms crossed over her sparkly My Little Pony T-shirt. Some of the older girls ran over to her, and Helen’s heart lurched when Jillie shrunk into the fence as they chanted, “Cat’s got your tongue.” The girls ran away, giggling, after a reprimand from another teacher. Corralling her class back inside after recess, she noticed Jillie had vanished. Helen stifled her panic as she searched the classroom for Jillie, then the hallways.
Relief rushed through Helen when she found Jillie tucked behind a stack of paper towels in the janitor’s supply closet.
“Why are you hiding in here?” Helen pulled Jillie up by her hand and crouched to look straight into Jillie’s solemn deep brown, almost black eyes. Would her daughter’s eyes have been so rich?
“My momma always says to be safe.” Her voice was a whisper.
“Your momma is right, but hiding where your teacher can’t see you isn’t being safe.”
“I didn’t want the cat to take my tongue.” Jillie’s eyes widened in fear.
“Sweet girl, cats can’t get your tongue. They don’t even want your tongue. Understand?”
Jillie was quiet. Helen took her hand, marveling at how this little hand fit inside hers. She gave it a gentle squeeze. “Let’s get back to class. Remember, being safe means an adult always knows where you are.”
Jillie didn’t budge.
“Come on, now, you can sit at the special table next to me,” she said, firm this time, and as Helen tugged on the child’s hand, Jillie tugged at Helen’s heart right back.
Helen refocused. Why had she even come to the cemetery?
She pulled off her sunglasses and squinted at her watch. It was dinnertime, but she wasn’t hungry. She was lonely. From the one-way conversations she had here, where she imagined Hal’s responses from a lifetime together. She knew what he would say to everything she asked him, except when she asked what the hell had he been thinking when he’d turned in front of the concrete-mixing truck.
She didn’t know how he would answer that one.
Either he hadn’t been thinking at all, or he’d been thinking he was invincible in that over-confident way he had, or he’d been thinking he was fast enough to make the turn before the truck barreled into him.
Or maybe he’d been thinking, Bring it on.
It was scary to allow herself those doubts. As if any of us could read a death wish into another’s inattentiveness.
In the sleepless nights after Hal died, she promised herself she would never miss the signs of someone in trouble again.
She had turned over the days leading up to his death last March in a horror of realization. Things that were so innocuous at the time. Like the fact he’d spent a week before the accident organizing and labeling all of their financial files, investments, accounts. He’d made it very easy for her to see where things stood that surreal week when everyone had said yes, she should try to get a handle on her finances now. Hal had prepaid four months’ worth of household bills. Because they had planned to be away for the summer—she'd thought. The guilt tore at her. She hadn't noticed anything amiss.
Hal was unusually quiet, and kept whatever it was to himself. Surely it was another one of the many moody phases she’d seen him through during their long marriage. When he wasn't talkative, she'd come to accept it. She prided herself on how well she could read him, even if Hal's thoughts emerged days later.
Hal! Were you trying to tell me, and I didn’t hear you? Hal?
She thought they were having this conversation just between them, but maybe she had yelled out loud because a family at a stone across the next row turned in her direction. Embarrassed, she put her sunglasses on in case the tears came. The ones she hadn’t mustered in five catatonic months of widowhood. She flung the flowers down onto the hard brown mound his body lay under.
No tears.
August 2005
CHARLENE
There was no hiding from this one hard truth—a baby was coming as sure as the 9:55 freight train bound for Denver would throttle through Twist Junction in seconds.
Charlene ignored the whistle blast and gunned it, hurtling the ancient Volvo across the tracks beneath the closing gate, not even glancing in the rearview when the bar clanged on the trunk.
The temperature was nearing ninety already in Hartless—that’s what the DJ was sayin on the AM—and she hadn’t even gotten to work yet. August in the Texas Panhandle was never a pretty affair—the sun closed in to wrap you like a glove, and the prairie grasses no longer swayed on the flatlands. Any breeze that did blow just kicked up a cloud of brown dust to coat the bushes, the few scattered trees, the cars and pickups. Take a deep breath and dust choked your throat, left grit on your teeth. And a gully-washer would be as likely as winning the Lotto Texas jackpot.
Sweet Jillie hadn’t complained of the heat when they drove to her new school, her first week as a kindergartener, even though the air conditioner was busted. Ray had promised to have it fixed with the next paycheck, but there were too many piled-up promises for Charlene to believe that one. The shop’s semblance of air conditioning would keep her comfortable until it was time to pick Jillie up after school, and it offered some peace and quiet, too, from Ray’s wellspring of good intentions—the ones they both danced around so she wouldn’t have to accuse him of never making good on a goddamn promise and he wouldn’t have to acknowledge what a failure he was before he got another beer from the refrigerator. She’d better remember to pick up more beer today when she grocery-shopped with Jillie, or there’d be another fight later. Over what, she couldn’t ever say.
She hadn’t found the words—or the nerve—to tell him yet she’d missed her period. Missed a few of them. And how it was too late to do anything now but have the baby.
When she missed her June period, she’d panicked and asked around as cautiously as she could in this busybody town. The place she never noticed before on Sixteenth Street was where they might could help.
The grandmotherly lady filing her nails inside the dingy Pregnancy Center was the last person Charlene had wanted to approach, but she was patient with her questions, like she’d heard it all.
“Excuse me, ma’am, I’m asking for my friend. She thinks maybe she’s pregnant ... Can you tell me where she can get an abortion?”
A knowing look replaced the boredom in the woman’s eyes for an instant. “Dallas. That’s the closest clinic. Albuquerque, too, if you’re—if your friend’s real far along, but that’s a long ways, almost a day away.”
Startled, Charlene found a chair. “Dallas? Ain’t that six hours? How would I—would my friend get there?”
“There’s the Greyhound in Amarillo. The girls tell me it’s about seven hours from there.”
A three-day trip, at least. She’d need a lift to the Amarillo bus station, for starters. And how to explain her absence to Ray?
“What’s the clinic charge? Can my friend get some aid to pay for it?”
The woman eyed her steadily as she stood up. “There’s a better way.”
“There is? Somebody here in town can do it?” Charlene felt a rush of hope.
“We’ll do all the tests for free, honey, right here, we do the ultrasound to see how developed the baby is, no charge. We want your friend to deliver a healthy baby,” the woman said, her eyes on Charlene’s belly as she reached inside her desk drawer for a pamphlet. “We can help with adoption, too, if that’s what your friend wants.”
The woman’s voice had become a monotonous drone. Charlene’s mind drifted. She’d have to leave town after all. Where would she get the money for the bus, motels and food, and the abortion clinic? There’d be time off work without pay, too, and Ray would be livid about that. Even if she could afford the abortion, who’d mind Jillie? Would Ray be mad enough to bust her jaw, like he threatened to do when crossed? The obstacles swirled around her head like buzzing mosquitoes for so long she quit trying to think it through.
She focused again on the woman still speaking tonelessly, offering to say prayers for the baby and pushing the pamphlet into her hand. Charlene’s chest tightened. Did this woman think prayers and adoption could protect her from Ray’s anger? She rushed out, suppressing her instinct to spit, Thank you for nothing.
By July she’d noted the second missed period with a rising dread.
The first time she’d been pregnant, she couldn’t wait to tell Ray. Back then, her accidental pregnancy had been the most exciting thing to ever happen in that tired trailer park town she’d grown up in. Where she ached for something, anything, to spring her from its dead end.
When Ray appeared before her that summer night of her seventeenth birthday at the Hartley Coliseum, she’d resisted rubbing her eyes, his arrival felt so much like the visions the minister predicted each Sunday morning before calling out the snake handler.
And suddenly there he was. Stepping onto her dance floor and asking her to step on out.
His fancy black Wrangler shirt was crisp, with pearly snaps, embroidered with pink roses and stretched tight across broad shoulders. His black cowboy hat was tucked low over his right eye, and he tipped it her way with a cocky grin. She took in his scent, aftershave patted on over the mingled odors of saddle soap, horse, and leather, drawing her like a monarch to milkweed. She was in his arms on the dance floor before Rambler’s lead guitarist had stroked the next lick.
“Hey there, pretty lady,” he started out. She gave her head a little shake that set her honey-brown hair swinging along her shoulders.
“I’m Rambler.”
“Ain’t that the band’s name?”
“That’s why I’m here. They stole my name.” He took off his hat and stopped dancing, waiting for her reaction.
“Bet they didn’t. Bet you’re some kinda rambler yourself. You a pickup man?”
“Nah. Near took the ribbon in ranch bronc riding.” He swung her back into his arms. “Bet you’re rodeo queen this year.”
Charlene blushed down to her boots. She’d wanted her own horse since she was old enough to come to the rodeo reunion each August and ogle the girls who tied goats and barrel-raced. To be rodeo queen was something she had dreamed about since she could remember dreaming.
“You’ll be my little rodeo queen for the next dance, won’t you, Miss ...?” he asked.
“Charlene. Charlene Simpson, from Texline.”
“Pleased to meet you, and your eyes the color of the sea, Miss Charlene from Texline. I’m Ray. Raymond John Hopper. From here and there and everywhere. It’s why they call me—”
“Rambler.” She cut him off. Smiling.
The band struck up its signature song. She watched him. Watched him reach for the back pocket of his work jeans, watched how a ceiling light painted a gleaming white slice along the edge of a silver flask when he tipped his head back to guzzle. She shook her head when he offered it her way, watched him pocket it again and wink at her, watched his lips as he sang along with the band. “Then there was you …”
He pulled her in closer than she’d ever been to a man, and a warm surge rushed its way from her nipples down the length of her body. She felt deliciously vulnerable, with her long, bare legs emerging from her short skirt. He was ready to kiss her, and she was ready to let him.
“Then there was you,” he whispered, and it wasn’t long till he’d swept her out of her boots and into the back seat of his truck. That’s all it took, just a sweet country song, a two-step, and a wink because she’d been waiting for the sweetness all her life.
Jann Alexander’s novel, Vacancy, was inspired by true events. Although fiction, it reads like a true story. It centres around two women, a widow who gets a second chance at happiness, and a young single mother coping with a world of challenges but determined to build a better life for her daughter, coming baby, and the boy her abusive ex-partner left behind. Initially concerned that a young student’s mother is unfit to parent her, recently widowed teacher, Helen, struggles to find ways to support the child. But then a terrible tragedy forces the two women to unite.
Alexander has given the story a strong and delightful Texas flavour, creating characters one might find in any small town in rural Texas. She presents a society that will be familiar to many who have lived in small rural towns: a community quick to judge, biased enough to destroy innocent lives, yet one in which the warmth and kindness of a few can save someone in need of help. The story moves back and forth a little in time and is narrated by different characters in varying chapters. We are presented with the different perspectives of Helen, Charlene, the young Mick, and others, understanding the challenges each face and each one’s different perspective on their own lives and the battles those they care for face.
Adding a clever touch, the author has reinforced the theme of women needing to confront the vacancy in their hearts by setting the novel around an aging motel that always had vacancies. As Helen and Charlene battle to find strength, acceptance and a second chance at love, the scarred veteran son of the motel owner engages in a struggle to restore the motel to its former glory. This parallel adds depth to a story that is filled with emotion and is certain to tug at any reader’s heartstrings. It’s a story that is as beautiful as it is tragic. I couldn’t help wanting to hug Charlene and assure her better days were coming; to urge her to trust Helen, and to give Jack a chance. Jann Alexander brought the characters and the scene to life so beautifully that I felt I was part of it.
From an inviting cover and synopsis, to the editing and page layouts, the Jann Alexander's professionalism as an author is on display. Vacancy is a polished work by an author with real talent: a beautiful story readers who enjoy fiction that tugs at the heartstrings will love.