Precious: A Novel

By Kenneth Labich

This novel, set in an affluent town on Connecticuts suburban Gold Coast, begins with an abrupt encounter on a rocky beach and ends in shock and tragedy. We first meet Charlie Barnes, a former Hollywood public relations man who drank and drugged away his career and his marriage. He now runs a local newspaper, The Fairport Patriot. We then encounter Laura Farrell, a woman who suffered her own romantic pain on the West Coast and now works as a vegetarian chef and cares for her preteen daughter. These two damaged souls meet and try to capture some measure of love.
Their story unfolds against the backdrop of Fairport, the leafy enclave both call home, and the town itself becomes a barrier in their struggle to connect. Charlie, new to the suburbs, learns that the towns core values are social exclusion, ascending real-estate values, and an almost pathological regard for children and pets. Laura, a member of one of Fairports Colonial first families, finds it is a place that harbors hostile spirits and unexpected dangers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 29, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465319081

Kenneth Labich

Kenneth Labich has worked as a staff writer and editor for various magazines, including Newsweek and Fortune. He is the author of four previous novels—Angry Pigs, Fishing Mishaps (2008), Precious (2009), Moisture Management (2011), and Moving the Meat (2014).

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Hole in the Middle

Charlie Barnes was oblivious, lost in stray thoughts, as he jogged in a slow lope along the rocky Connecticut beach. He never heard the dog, a smallish mutt spotted brown and white, that was about to ruin his day. It came at him from behind, a bundle of fury, and sank its incisors into his bare left calf. Charlie whirled and fell to one knee as the dog stood there, panting and looking guilty. Charlie could see, about fifty yards up the beach, a thin, long-haired woman in a yellow rain slicker running toward him and the dog. Charlie pulled his white cotton handkerchief from the pocket of his blue rayon shorts and pressed it against his wound; the blood soon stained it in a red splotch.

The woman snapped a leather leash into the dog’s collar when she got to them. Bad dog, she said. Bad. She looked up at Charlie and waved a strand of dark blond hair out of her eyes. I’m so sorry, she said. Molly’s been sort of crazy lately.

Charlie dabbed at the puncture marks on his calf. The owner’s not doing too damn well either, he said. You ever think you might want to get some sort of control over your animal?

The woman looked to be about thirty years old, and she had high cheekbones, a narrow face, and a long straight nose. She looked down at the sand for a moment, and then tears began to escape from her pale blue eyes.

Charlie stood up, and the dog approached him and began licking the blood from his hand. Oh, hell, Charlie said to the woman. Please stop that. He looked down at the dog. You too, he said.

The woman sniffed and wiped a hand across her eyes. She yanked on the leash, jerking the dog away from him. C’mon, she said. We’ll get you fixed up. My sister runs a place where they breed dogs and there’s a vet there. Just follow me. Then she turned and began striding toward the wooden stairway that led to the parking lot. Their cars were parked a few spaces from each other – his a black Volkswagen Passat, hers a dusty blue Toyota Prius with its rear end festooned with bumper stickers. One announced a child’s inclusion on the Eastfield Middle School academic honor roll, another bore the call letters of the local left-wing radio station. There were faded GORE-LIEBERMAN and tattered KERRY-EDWARDS stickers. Another framed her policy toward the Iraq war: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. BRING THEM HOME. She expressed her view of the current White House occupant with a blue-and-white sticker that read SOME VILLAGE IN TEXAS HAS LOST ITS IDIOT.

They stood at the back of her car for just a moment, then she walked up to him and held out her hand. I’m Laura Farrell, she said. Charlie took her hand, cool and bony. I’m really sorry about this, she said. Just follow me. This will work out.

Charlie immediately thought that these were words that had led him to trouble in the past, but he got into his car and followed her as she roared out of the parking lot, spraying gravel. She drove fast, a good ten miles over the limit, as she traveled the length of the tree-lined street that led toward the middle of town. She went west on the main street, past the restaurants, bars and banks, clothing and jewelry and curio shops. She turned right at the small village green with its white wooden gazebo. In the three months of his residence in this suburban outpost, a town called Fairport, Charlie had attended four brass concerts held on the green. John Philip Sousa was apparently a local favorite and Charlie, not a fan, had decided to forego the next summer season.

The woman headed north on one of the two main roads leading from the beach on Long Island Sound to Northfield Hill, a moneyed enclave that soared above the suburban sprawl below. She blasted through two intersections on yellow lights, and Charlie struggled to keep on her trail. His calf was still bleeding a bit, and it had begun to ache. They drove another two miles up into the hills to the north, where the suburban mini-mansions devolve into horse farms and thirty-acre estates, until they reached a dirt road that led west. The woman, Laura Farrell, turned into a cinder driveway about one-quarter mile up the road, and Charlie followed her as she wound her way up a steep hill past broad green lawns shaded by stands of old red oak trees, their leaves just starting to show red-and-yellow tinges of fall color. At the top, she pulled to a stop in front of a collection of one-story redwood buildings. With his window rolled down to let in the moist September air, Charlie could hear the howls and yapping of what sounded like three hundred dogs eager for attention.

After they had parked, he followed the woman inside the door of the largest of the redwood buildings. They walked into what seemed to be a waiting room; three women, each with a dog in tow, were seated along the far wall. A short Filipino woman wearing a white coat stood behind a low counter, and Laura Farrell approached her and said a few words. Within thirty seconds, a tall, fleshy woman wearing a red wool dress appeared. Laura introduced Charlie to the woman as her sister, Monica Kershaw. She had Laura’s fair complexion and pale blue eyes, though her features were broader, more coarse. After Laura had explained the events on the beach, Monica sighed. That’s the sort of behavior you can expect from mongrels, she said, staring down at the offending mutt. She glanced up and met Charlie’s eyes, making clear that her remark applied to people as well.

Monica led them down a long corridor until they reached a small, brightly-lit treatment room with a surgical table in the center and a wall of glass cabinets to the rear. A veterinarian, a thin man with sparse black hair and a prominent adam’s apple, showed up a moment later. He threw open a drawer on a green metal filing cabinet and rifled through some index cards, then pronounced that all shots were up to date on Laura’s mutt. You should find that very good news, he said, showing yellow teeth. Then he dressed Charlie’s wound and gave him a shot of antibiotics. You can go to a doctor and have him look at this, but basically you’re fine, the vet said as he exited the room.

Monica was standing next to the Filipina receptionist in the waiting room as Charlie and Laura made their way to the front door. She gave them both a brief, frosty smile. Laura apologized again in the parking lot, and Charlie lingered just a moment before he went to his car, trying to think of something to say to her. As he drove away, he angled his neck to catch a last look at her in his rear-view mirror.

The suburbs were an unknown territory for Charlie. He had spent his childhood in an Iowa river town, and he displayed a convert’s enthusiasm for big-city life when he went off to Columbia in New York for his undergraduate degree in American literature. He ended up in Los Angeles and spent twenty years working in the entertainment business, and he had become a devoted city dweller. He was at one with the crowds and bustle, and on his rare trips back to Iowa he longed for the smell of wet concrete and the sound of police and fire sirens at night.

Charlie had never agreed with his city friends who contended that some great evil lurked at the center of suburban life, some soul-destroying Stepford disease that stripped residents of human spirit and independence. Charlie had always presumed there was nothing in the middle of the suburban experience, a hole. In his few months in Fairport, he had learned that too was wrong. The town, Charlie had discovered, was in fact built on a rock-solid base of social exclusion, ascending real-estate values, and an almost pathological regard for pets and children. The people of Fairport, he had found, were like any other group of mostly white, mostly affluent 21st century Americans, though far less tolerant of irregular behavior than the city folks he had associated with throughout his life. At age forty-four and with considerable personal wreckage behind him, Charlie felt that he had used up most of his irregular behavior and, to his surprise, he liked living in the town.

Charlie had come to Fairport after making a mess of his life in California. The trouble began when the 15-person TV production company he had co-founded went under. He and his partner, a hyperactive Irishman who later sued him twice, had continued to peddle scripted shows – mostly one-hour action dramas and police procedurals – when the networks and most of the cable channels were ordering up more and more inexpensive reality shows. When his company folded, he took the first job offered and became a script scout and publicist for the third-largest U.S. cable network. That job led a year later to the top publicist job at the fourth-largest U.S. film studio. It was in many ways a sweet job – a salary well north of $400,000 and a fat holiday bonus, flexible expense account, limos to the airport, four-star hotels. But the job also involved much groveling at the feet of a range of people – kissing the asses of critics and TV hosts, newspaper and magazine reporters, actors and producers and directors, theater owners and distributors, his own four tiers of bosses. Charlie coped with great lashings of self-medication – all sorts of pills that blurred things, lines and lines of Mexican cocaine that made everything seem brighter, long afternoons in dark hotel bars that made him forget what he did for a living

There were two DUIs and Charlie’s wife, by then a scarred veteran of their marital wars, began issuing ultimatums. She threw him out when, after a minor accident in a strip-mall parking lot with his two kids in the car, he flunked yet another Breathalyzer and was led off in handcuffs.

Charlie moved into a one-bedroom condo on Venice Beach and stepped up his use of various intoxicants. One of his bosses called him in and suggested a leave of absence, perhaps a company-paid stay at one of LA’s many high-end rehabilitation centers. Charlie turned down rehab and promised to pull himself together, but then at Sundance that winter he more or less fell apart after staying up for three-and-half-days. He remembered little of it, but people told him he had raged through the streets of the little Utah town wearing a leather cowboy hat and a full-length beaver coat. He was arrested twice and somehow made bail, and there were tales of public fornication in the backrooms of bars and marathon contests involving tequila shots and hallucinogenic mushrooms. By the end of it, rehab was inevitable; he signed his final divorce papers a week into the program. Two days after he was expelled back into the world, the studio fired him. Nobody, not even old friends, would grant him an interview, not even a lunch; he was soiled goods. Charlie realized that he was on the precipice of a personal cliff, a dangerous moment in his life, and he understood how vulnerable he was, how fraught. He wondered what would have happened to him if his Uncle Walt hadn’t died.

Uncle Walt was his mother’s brother, a tall, friendly, gay man with a grand black mustache who fled to New York from Iowa as a teenager and worked his way through NYU with a job in the menswear department at Bloomingdale’s. He ended up in the advertising business, acquiring a flock of copywriting awards and a seven-figure pot of money after his medium-size agency was consumed by a London-based behemoth.

Walt became HIV-positive, and his partner of twelve years standing, an actor, got full-blown AIDS. They took all of their pills, and Walt’s partner lasted almost two years before pneumonia got him. Walt wanted out of New York then, and he decided to buy a small newspaper in the Connecticut suburbs and live out his days as a country editor. He spotted an ad in one of the trade magazines for The Fairport Patriot, a 12,000-circulation weekly that included a small office building with a second-floor residential apartment. He cashed in the balance of his agency stock, waited while his lawyer haggled over price for a week, and then bought the paper and made the move to Fairport, taking up residence in the two-bedroom apartment above the office and settling into his new role.

Walt died two years and three months later – pneumonia again – and Charlie, the only living blood relative, inherited the paper, the building, and a little over $800,000 after taxes. The news came just in time, just as Charlie felt himself being sucked down into some final LA sink hole of drugs and despair. He seized on the chance to shake up his life and, after another two-month stint of rehab, he disposed of his Venice Beach apartment and most other worldly goods and said goodbye to his kids, promising with little conviction to call often. His daughter, a gawky 12-year-old, seemed a bit sorry to see him go; his son, 16 and often stoned, seemed indifferent. Charlie flew East, declaring himself editor and publisher of the Patriot and moving into Walt’s apartment, taking up his dead uncle’s life.

Charlie walked into the paper’s office the first time on a cool Monday morning in June, and he could almost feel twenty pairs of eyes locked on him as he entered the front door. He shook a dozen hands, and a tiny bird-like woman who said her name was Ruthie ushered him past a cluster of cubicles to a small glass-walled office. He sat at the scarred oak desk and swiveled around to take in the view of an asphalt parking lot and a one-story red-brick building with a wooden sign out front that said Blue Rock Clam Bar. We boxed up your uncle’s belongings – pictures and that sort of thing, the woman said in a high-pitched voice as she backed out of the office. Just let me know if you need anything – anything.

Coffee? said Charlie. And the books – whatever shows where we stand.

Ruthie returned in minutes with a Styrofoam cup of foul brew and a stack of ledgers. They went over them for the next hour, and Charlie learned some good and bad news. For the good, the paper’s circulation had held steady between 11,000 and 12,500 for several years without much effort on anyone’s part. Even better, the operation was making money, showing a net profit of $108,000 during the previous fiscal year. On the down side, that profit figure had slid more than 50 percent from the year before. All the costs were up – salaries, real-estate taxes, computers and office supplies, printing and mailing costs – but the real problem was that advertising revenue was trending down. Both the number of ad pages and the revenue they produced had shrunk over each of the previous three years. Also disturbing was that employee turnover, particularly on the editorial staff, was high. Most reporters were in and out of the place within six months.

After Ruthie had left, Charlie put his feet up on his uncle’s desk and began reading back issues of the paper – scanning pictures and stories of representative town meetings and board of education hearings, bake sales and bank openings, boy-scout awards and petty crime reports, high-school sport scores and YMCA pool schedules. Charlie thought that the people he saw on those pages seemed remarkably optimistic, and that seemed a good thing to him.

Over the next week, Charlie devoted himself to meeting his staff. The first thing he discovered was that Ruthie ran the place. She answered the phones, ordered office supplies and handled payroll, kept the books, drew up advertising and edit schedules, knew everyone’s birthday, and worked as hard as she could every day. Charlie promoted her to general manager, hired an assistant for her, and