The Accident at 13th and Jefferson: Book 1 Only

By Brenda Carlton

Josh Greenwood and his Mom and Dad are walking their neighbors to the corner of 13th and Jefferson after Josh’s 14th birthday party when a careening motorcycle kicks up a rock that kills Bonnie, the mother. But what if the rock killed Tom, the father, instead? Or the accident unfolded differently and Josh was killed? This uplifting tale of middle class family life in America offers all three stories.

In Book 1, Tom struggles to cope with single parenthood and tries to woo Elaine, the neighbor at the accident who has a past with a mystery man. Josh and Max, Elaine’s son who doesn’t know that his real father is “somebody”, interfere and grow up until graduation from high school.

In Book 2, Bonnie struggles to save Josh from the influences of her petty criminal half-brother, Mitch. Max reacts very differently to learning the identity of his real father and even with the best intentions and efforts of loving mothers things do not turn out well.

In Book 3, Tom and Bonnie’s marriage flounders as they struggle to reinvent themselves as non-parents, Max becomes a real player in his father’s presidential campaign and Elaine... Well we can’t tell you the rest.

In Book 4, (surprise!) the original tragedy is averted. How much do we really know about anyone?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brenda Carlton
• Release date: Jan 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301205264

Brenda Carlton

Brenda J. Carlton is a Grammy with an itch to finally express herself. She loves gardening, painting, science and studying people. What is a jack of all trades with a lifetime of stored up sly observations to do except write? She also paints her own book covers.

Book preview

THE ACCIDENT AT 13TH AND JEFFERSON (Book 1 only)

3 NOVELS

BY: BRENDA J. CARLTON

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Copyright© 2012 Brenda J. Carlton

Smashwords edition

Cover Painting by Brenda J. Carlton 2012

Cover Photography Copyright© 2012 David Evans

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

What others are saying about THE ACCIDENT AT 13th AND JEFFERSON:

Customer reviews on Amazon: Bonnie said Fantastic Reading! This book just grabs you from the very beginning. Brenda is a very talented writer and her books are something that once you start reading, you just can't put it down! A truly wonderful book and I highly recommend it and Brenda as my new-found favorite author!!! Looking forward to more!!!

Meggie said "Thought provoking. This was a great read. I just had to know what happened next! It really made me think about how easily life can change for any one of us.

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Dedication

To every ordinary middle class American and to his or her story which IS worth telling.

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Prologue

Miles below the surface of a very young planet, much later to be called Earth, chemistry and physics were at work although there were no humans to put their own names on these processes. Silica, aluminum, oxygen, and curious metals slowly became the little rock of our story, a tiny bit of granite in a formation the size of a small continent. The seas formed and gave birth to life, which spread onto the land and produced great reptiles. The great reptiles vanished, life found new forms and meanwhile the little rock of our story moved for hundreds of thousands of millennia with the shifting, sliding and buckling of the earth’s layers. The rock emerged into the elements for the first time in towering mountains later, after they were worn down to a speck of their former glory, to be called the Poconos. Ice ages later a glacier snapped our little rock from its birthplace, drove it a couple of hundred miles south and left it under twelve feet of rubble.

By the time the Roman Empire fell, countless storms had washed it into a stream, where a human of the Lenni Lenape tribe found it. He used it to build a fire-ring in which he roasted a whitetail deer for his family. It lay by the remains of the fire, eventually beneath two feet of dirt, until the last of his great-great grandchildren had grandchildren.

An oxen-pulled plow churned the rock up in a farmer’s field toward the end of the time when Pennsylvania was considered by certain humans to be part of England. It spent almost two hundred years in the wall of a stone barn and then another seventy years in one of the rock piles that became less and less recognizable as the remains of the collapsed barn.

Then one day in the third century of the existence of a nation named the United States of America, a man called Dwayne loaded cast off furniture into the back of his pickup truck. His wife would finally stop nagging, he hoped, if he delivered it to Goodwill. It was one of the hot gusty summer days that usually meant a thunderstorm was on the way. He tied a plastic drop cloth from his last paint job over the load and set off. He heard an odd puffing sound and looked into his rear view mirror. The wind was catching under the drop cloth and making it billow up as high as the roof of his cab. Looks like some kind of goddamn demented mushroom, with them colors and all, he said, aloud. He pulled over and lit a cigarette and studied the situation.

He knew he ought to retie the ropes better, but his buddies were already waiting at the bar. Sloppy job, this was. He noticed a mound of stones on the other side of the road and trotted across. He gathered an armful, took them back to the truck, and dropped them into the valley between a dresser mirror and a rocking chair to weigh down the drop cloth. He looked at the bed of the truck, and then at the rocks across the road. He spotted the rock of our story, which sparkled more than the others in the late afternoon sun. It was about as long as a small chicken egg, but the collapse of the barn had split it lengthwise leaving a pickax-shape useful for Dwayne’s purpose. Dwayne used it as a knife to poke some air holes here and there in the drop cloth and then tossed it toward a hill in his load where it slid down the drop cloth into the valley with the others.

Dwayne’s quick fix held the drop cloth down until he got into town and to Thirteenth Avenue and Jefferson Street. Someone living in the house on the corner must be having a party, he thought. There were blue balloons tied to the mailbox and the uprights by the front door. A forty-mile-an-hour wind gust met him as he turned the corner. The demented mushroom appeared again in his back window. The rocks clattered behind him in the street. Damn it. Goodwill was only six blocks away, so he decided not to stop.

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BOOK 1

IF YOU TRY SOMETIMES, YOU JUST MIGHT FIND…

Chapter 1.1

Behind the house with the blue balloons, Tom Greenwood was starting to grill the steaks for his son’s fourteenth birthday party. The party consisted of seven boys having chicken fights in the above ground pool, chasing each other around the yard, calling each other names, and eating anything and everything his wife Bonnie and her friend Elaine could find to dump in a basket and bring out to the table. Tom had promised Bonnie that he would do all the cooking for this party since she had to tend bar later that night and also because it put him closer to the center of the kids’ attention. But Tom didn’t plan for the mountain of food the boys would devour before he got the real meal finished. The ladies always seemed to make him feel foolish about such things, smiling kindly at him as they took care of whatever he messed up.

Josh came out of the pool, shaking the water out of his light brown hair and sprinkling his father in the process. Will you take me to the video game store tonight after the party, Pop? he asked. Josh relished these occasional days when his father partook of family life.

You can wait a day, can’t you, before you spend your money? said Tom, flipping a steak.

School starts soon, Dad. Time’s a wastin’. I could play all day tomorrow, Josh said, twisting his face into that pleading little boy expression that always worked on Dad, but never on Mom.

No, and that’s my final answer, said Tom. Josh was surprised but he didn’t complain. He was having too good a day to argue.

Tom’s menu included baked beans from the deli and a huge green salad that looked like a lot of work but was really two large containers of toppings from the salad bar at the supermarket dumped on top of bagged lettuce. He did prepare homemade potato salad from scratch early this morning because Josh had specifically asked for it, or more precisely, because Bonnie snapped at him last night when he came home with supermarket potato salad. He didn’t use the family recipe that Josh requested. In Tom’s opinion adding expensive deli olives and roasted red peppers to the potato salad was a big improvement which also demonstrated that he couldn’t be completely bossed around. Bonnie, he said in her general direction. Bring out the salads, will you? They can eat them before the steaks are done. He was getting more and more embarrassed by the ladies’ frantic efforts to feed the kids.

Good idea, Bonnie said. Elaine nodded in relief. They brought the salads out and the kids tore into the food.

Josh’s best friend Max, temporarily sated, came over and said, Mr. Greenwood, would it be all right if we got the volleyball net out of your garage?

Sure, Max. Help yourself, Tom said. Max was Elaine’s son, the same age as Josh. Max and Elaine were their catty-corner across the street neighbors in an old residential neighborhood where the streets ran in nice logical straight lines unlike the self-conscious new developments where Tom installed wallboard. Max was the only one of Josh’s friends that called him Mr. Greenwood, even though he had known him far longer than any of the others. Some of the kids called him Tom, which he didn’t mind. But most of them talked to him as if he didn’t have a name, which he did mind.

Max and Josh had one important thing in common besides having gone to school together since they were four. They loved to play baseball. Tom played football when he was in school and he used to think that nothing else really counted as a sport, but now with Josh and Max in the game he was a big fan.

The boys got the net set up and a volleyball game started just as Tom finished the steaks. So the steaks cooled until the first game was finished, but at least that gave the adults some time to relax, so Tom didn’t complain.

They sat in plastic chairs by the pool, and Bonnie passed around some grown-up punch. Elaine said, Is Josh disappointed about being in the middle school for another year, now that they’ve taken 9th grade out of the high school?

When did they decide that? said Tom. Maybe he didn’t pay enough attention to such things, but Bonnie could have told him.

About a month ago, said Bonnie. Josh thinks it will be cool to be in the oldest grade in the school twice. I think he was fairly intimidated about going to the high school anyway, although he wouldn’t admit it. She addressed her answer more to Tom than to Elaine. She consistently gave Tom’s clues about Josh in ways that never implied he should already know these things.

Tom said, That does sound like fun. Bonnie gave him an approving smile.

Max is disappointed. He wanted to get into some of the science labs at the high school, said Elaine. She took a sip of her punch and looked disappointed as well.

Is he in all honor classes again? said Bonnie.

Yes. We’re hoping for some college scholarships by the time he finishes. He’s a hard worker, said Elaine.

He’s just a kid. He needs to have some fun, said Tom.

He does have fun. said Elaine.

Did I tell you that Janet gave her notice? said Elaine, to change the subject. Janet was a young woman at Webster’s Gardens, the nursery that Elaine owned, who had been missing a lot of work lately. I don’t know how I’m going to get everything done until I can replace her, Elaine said.

Didn’t you say that she was thrilled to get this job? What happened? said Bonnie.

She found out she’s pregnant. I think her parents are going to raise the baby, and they insisted she quit, said Elaine. Moving shrubbery and small trees around all day is tough work. Elaine was sympathetic, but she was also short on help.

Maybe she should’ve thought about getting married before she had a baby, said Tom. Just an idea. You know… Tom switched into a singsong theatre voice. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Susie in the baby carriage.

He laughed his big booming laugh, and waited for his audience to respond.

Bonnie gave him a dirty look. She didn’t find Tom’s performances as funny in recent years.

Elaine said, Hey, watch it. I was never married either.

Tom recomposed his face, disappointed because he didn’t get a laugh, and said, Really? I always thought you must be a widow. His attention wandered to the volleyball game. Josh got a good dig and Max tried for a spike but missed completely.

Bonnie said, Honestly Tom. How long have we known Elaine?

So shoot me, said Tom, dutifully returning his attention to the ladies, although he had to miss the next point in the volleyball game. I didn’t know. I’m sorry if I offended you Elaine.

It’s OK, said Elaine.

Max has never talked about a father, said Tom.

No. Max has never met him, said Elaine.

Tom didn’t understand why but he didn’t ask because Bonnie’s mother, Juliet, appeared with Marvin and Mitch just in time to eat. Bonnie ran to show her family to the chairs she already had set up for them. Tom got busy with a batch of chicken wings at the grill and waved in their general direction.

Tom tried hard to find something to like in everyone but he had to admit that Bonnie’s family was not a lot of fun. Juliet was OK. She was just an older lady who hadn’t had an easy life. Tom flirted with her a little now and then and that was all it took to get along with her. Trying to talk to her latest husband Marvin was a problem. An occasional grunt and a scowl were about all Tom could ever get out of him.

The young guy, Mitch, was Bonnie’s half-brother. He was Juliet’s son by some guy or another between Bonnie’s father and Marvin, and he was bad news. Sometimes guys can tell things about other guys that you can’t explain to the women. Mitch always put Tom