{"product_id":"fireworks-isbn-9781400096978","title":"Fireworks","description":"Hollis Clayton is in trouble. His wife has decamped for the summer, leaving him to pursue his increasingly overwhelming compulsions: drinking; spying on neighbors; worrying about the fate of an abducted local girl; avoiding his editor, who is on the verge of rejecting his new collection of stories; and confronting as obliquely as possible the recent death of his young son. Meanwhile, he is spending more time with Jack Daniels and a stubbornly persistent stray dog than with anyone else, including his girlfriend Marissa, who has either abandoned him or been abandoned by him, he’s not sure which. A tender and comic portrait of suburban despair, \u003ci\u003eFireworks \u003c\/i\u003edetails the events of one strange summer in which a man’s troubled soul hangs in the balance. In her perceptive exploration of Hollis’s disintegrating life, Elizabeth Winthrop gives us an unforgettably powerful portrait of an anguished man, one who is both endearingly flawed and vividly real.\"Bittersweet. . . . Winthrop proves to be a bitingly intelligent writer.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\"Reads like a heartfelt collision of Saul Bellow's \u003ci\u003eHenderson the Rain King\u003c\/i\u003e and the Oscar-winning \u003ci\u003eAmerican Beauty\u003c\/i\u003e. . . . Pitch-perfect first-person narration.\" —\u003ci\u003ePages\u003c\/i\u003e“Wry . . . Winthrop portrays with poignant humor the characters and events in Hollis' anxiety-filled existence.\" —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\"Brimming with gentle wisdom.\" —\u003ci\u003eRedbook\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eElizabeth Hartley Winthrop\u003c\/b\u003e was born and raised in New York City. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2001. In 2004 she received her MFA in fiction from the University of California at Irvine, and she was the recipient of the Schaeffer Writing Fellowship for the 2004-5 academic year. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.1  FIREWORKSWhen my grandfather died, I told everyone he’d been killed by aborigines  while he was berry-picking in Africa. I told them that I had been there,  too. I told this to my friends, and to their parents. I told this to the  lifeguard at our neighborhood pool. I told this to the gas station  attendants and motel clerks my father and I met on our drive down to  Florida for the funeral. I wrote about it in a letter to my mother, who  had left us that spring to live in a commune upstate. I was picturing dry,  open fields, the occasional crooked tree under which a lion might have  lounged or beside which a giraffe might have stood with his neck stretched  to reach the topmost leaves. I was picturing jeepfuls of tribal rivals  speeding around with shotguns, like what I’d seen in \u003ci\u003eThe Gods Must Be  Crazy\u003c\/i\u003e, my poor grandfather in the line of fire, myself lying flat in  hiding behind a log.This was during my safari phase. My wife found a picture of me from around  this time up in the attic just the other day. She brought it downstairs to  show it to me. I was sitting on the porch with a Jack Daniel’s, enjoying  the sunset. “You were adorable,” she said. In the picture, I’m wearing  khaki trousers that unzip into shorts around the thigh. I’ve got a khaki  vest on, and a safari hat. There’s a stuffed monkey pinned to the back of  my pants, and a plastic snake hung around my neck. I’m carrying a small  pair of binoculars, and there’s chocolate on my face. I got a little chill  when my wife showed me the picture, even though it was June. “Mmm,” I  said. “I’m not so cute.”My name is Hollis. I’m a writer, and I live with my wife in a midsize,  coastal New England town. My wife is a teacher. We have no children. We  did, but our son, Simon, was killed nearly two years ago by a bunch of  kids in a speeding car.I’ve been cheating on my wife. My girlfriend, Marissa, is twenty-four,  almost fifteen years younger than I am. I met her ten months ago at a bus  stop when I was on my way to a meeting with my editor. It was raining,  neither of us had an umbrella, and the buses were running late, so instead  of waiting we shared a cab, which we quickly redirected from our  respective destinations to her apartment. We’ve spent hours there together  every afternoon since then. Some might consider me lucky. But oftentimes,  as I’m drifting in and out of sleep in the late afternoon light, I feel  lonely. I feel like I’m being rolled around in a huge wave of loneliness.  When Marissa asks me what’s wrong, I don’t say anything about it, because  who am I to be lonely? I have Marissa, I have my wife, and I know they  both love me. I am never alone.I went through phases as a kid. I was a fireman for a while. My uncle  really was a fireman, so I had the real stuff from him: helmet, gloves,  charred bricks from burned-down buildings. I was Robin Hood. I wore the  tights only on Halloween, but I carried a bow and arrows around for  months. For a while I was a break-dancer. I wore a bandanna and a single  black leather glove with the fingers cut off.“A safari phase,” my wife said when she showed me the picture. “I don’t  think I knew about that one.”“It was brief.” I shifted in my chair so I could better see the sunset. I  sipped my Jack Daniel’s.My wife stood behind me and ran her fingers through my hair.Marissa is standing in my wife’s kitchen. That’s how I think of it when I  see Marissa bending to open the cabinets that my wife bends to open, or  leaning against the countertops my wife leans against. I watch her in my  wife’s apron, using my wife’s utensils to make us dinner before the  fireworks start downtown. She looks up and sees me staring.“What?” she says.I shake my head. My wife has gone to spend the Fourth of July with her old  college roommate, and so the house is mine alone. This is only the second  time Marissa has been here. She seems unbothered by it.“Is this you?” she asks. My wife has hung the photograph of me in my  safari gear on the refrigerator. I nod.“On my way to Florida, for my grandfather’s funeral,” I say. “Do you  believe I wore that to the actual funeral?”Marissa smiles and shakes her head. She takes the photograph from the  refrigerator door and holds it between the tips of her fingers, just like  my wife did.When my grandfather died, he died suddenly, of a massive stroke. My father  decided to drive down to Florida for the funeral, and since he had no one  to leave me with, he brought me with him, even though I’d never even met  my grandparents.What I remember most about the drive are the bugs. The farther south we  drove, the thicker the clouds of them became, these humming throngs of  insects that hovered over the highway and smacked against the windshield  as our car plowed through them. And I remember once waking up at a gas  station to a sound I couldn’t immediately identify. I was in the front  seat of the car, alone. Out the side window I could see gas pumps, air  pumps, diesel tanks, oil cans. I’d unzipped my safari pants into shorts,  and my skin was stuck to the leather of the seat. Ridges of upholstery had  set patterns into the backs of my thighs.The windshield was near opaque with the blood and smear of bugs, and I  soon realized that the scratching sound was the sound of a knife against  the windshield’s glass. As the glass cleared, I could watch my father as  he scratched at the glass. His forearms were ridged with muscle, and  hairy, and in his hand the knife he used to clear the windshield looked  small. I shifted my weight from one side to the other, peeling my skin  from where it seemed to have melted into the seat.“Stroke,” I say when Marissa asks me how my grandfather died. “I didn’t  know him.” I shrug. “His wake was the first time I’d ever seen him,” I say.It was the first time I’d met my grandmother, too. When my father and I  pulled in to her driveway, it was dusk. We went through the kitchen door  and found her sitting at the kitchen table with a rocks glass filled with  vodka and milk on ice. There was a slant of evening light coming through  the small window above the sink and falling on her hands. I remember  staring at the way the light made the webs of skin between her knuckles  glow translucent, and I remember the way it glinted in her rings. She wore  four rings on one finger, a column of ruby, diamond, emerald, sapphire.She looked up as we walked through the door. “Mom,” my father said.She lifted her glass to her lips and took a sip. “Who are you?” she said.I watch Marissa, on tiptoe reaching for a bottle of wine from the rack  above the fridge. She is small. Her fingers just reach the nose of a  bottle when she really stretches, and she’s trying to coax it out one  reach at a time so that maybe she can get a good grip on it. I go up  behind her and take the bottle down, and she turns so that we are facing  each other, very close, her face against my chest. I pause, not because I  don’t like the feel of Marissa against me, but because this posture was  not what I intended. I helped her with the wine so that the bottle  wouldn’t fall and break, not so that we could be close. Her breath is hot  against my chest and she runs her hands down my sides.It is moments like these that make me feel lonely.She looks up at me. “What?” she says.I shake my head and bend to kiss her hair. “Nothing,” I say.“Where would I find a wine opener?” she says.“Drawer to the left of the sink,” I say. She plants a kiss on my chest and  steps out from between me and the refrigerator, leaving me face-to-face  with myself, safari style.We were in Florida for ten days. The heat was unlike anything I’d  experienced before. My cousins hung off the dock at the lake below my  grandparents’ house, but I’d seen snakes in that water, so I opted not to  join them. I told anyone who asked that I simply was not hot. It would  have been a betrayal of my safari persona to admit that snakes could scare  me.I also stayed away from the house, where my aunts helped my grandmother  rummage through my grandfather’s old things, and where uncles muttered  around the kitchen table about what should become of the house, of the  property, of my grandmother. My cousin Toby, who was four or five years  older than I was and who lived with his mother, my father’s only sister,  across the street from my grandparents, told me that they wanted to lock  my grandmother   up, her three sons. He said they thought she was crazy and a drunk. “She’s  not,” he said, slapping a mosquito from his leg with a towel. “I think I  would know better than them. I live here, unlike you dumb Yankees.” He  flung his towel around his neck and ran down to the lake, and I watched  him as he cannonballed himself into the water, snakes and all.I spent a good amount of time in the old storage shed, spinning the wheel  of an overturned bicycle and listening to the hum of the spokes when it  got going fast.I spent a good amount of time at work on the tree behind   the shed, peeling away the bark and carving words and pictures in the  smooth wood beneath.Then there was my grandmother’s car. It was an old car with fins, and it  was shiny blue. The seats were green leather and so wide that I could  stretch myself out fully on them. My grandmother was in the habit of  taking a drive early each morning, maybe because it was the only time she  was sober enough to do so, and I guess so she wouldn’t lose them she  always left the keys in the car. I’d turn them in the ignition partway and  listen to the radio for hours at a time. Sometimes, I would lie down and  stare at the material drooping from the ceiling as I listened, or up  through the window at the sky and trees, all upside down from my angle.  Other times, I sat in the backseat and pretended I had a chauffeur. Best,  though, was taking the wheel myself and driving through the African brush,  dodging killer rhinos and tigers. Best was speeding across the desert  plains, kicking up plumes of dust that would hover, then settle and cover  my tracks so that the aborigines hunting me down wouldn’t know which way  I’d gone. Best was hunting for lion and zebra with my loyal dog eagerly  peering over my shoulder and sniffing the air as we drove.My loyal dog was Max, my grandmother’s bloodhound. Max was a big, silly  dog. His skin had settled in loose rings around his neck, and his jowls  drooped an inch below his mouth. His lips slung spit when he turned his  head. His ears were like velvet. I liked Max okay. Whenever I drank from  my bottle of water, I poured some into my hands for him to drink, too,  despite his refusal to play the role of safari hunting dog. He didn’t  sniff the air or peer over my shoulder when I piled him into the car; he  lay drooling in the backseat, his paws hanging over the seat’s edge and  his eyebrows twitching with dreams. Sometimes I forgot he was even there.A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300596961509,"sku":"NP9781400096978","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400096978.jpg?v=1767726963","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/fireworks-isbn-9781400096978","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}