The Straightened Road (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798994640500)

They return because there's a deadline.

Their mother calls with the kind of problem that can't be ignored: the septic has failed, an inspector is coming Tuesday, and she can't do it by herself. Brian drives in first from North Carolina with his wife Julie and their two teenagers, Jake and Emily. Scott follows from Chicago on little sleep. Matt flies in from out west with his son Owen and the look of someone who's already bracing for blame. Their father Rick is there, too-present, practical, and increasingly lost in small ways that no one names out loud.

The cabin at Horseshoe Bend is the same in all the ways that matter: the screen door slap, the ceiling fan click, the dock tapping underfoot. But the lake is louder now-powerboats carving the main channel, the distant roar of the Shootout drifting up from the dam. The children move with modern freedom-phones, wave runners, speed-and the adults can't keep them in sight the way they once did. Work gathers in the yard behind the cabin. Lists appear on envelopes. The week becomes a rehearsal for inheritance: who decides, who yields, who watches, who leaves first.

And the past keeps breaking the surface.

In braided chapters, the boys' summers at the lake return through the pressure of the present: a Sunday routine that includes Mass at Our Lady of the Lake, a fireworks crowd that turns dangerous on the ride home, a storm that forces an emergency tie-up at a stranger's dock, a dark gap under the boards where a water moccasin waits, a set of cliffs around the point where the channel pulls boats too close together. The children do not interpret what happens. They register it. The adults do not explain it. They carry it.

When the next generation tests the same edges-when a phone captures something the adults would rather erase-the brothers have to decide what they will control, what they will confess, and what they will let remain unfinished.

The Straightened Road is a deeply human Mid-American novel about brotherhood, faith as practice, and the private cost of being the one who "handles things." It refuses easy revelation or tidy resolution. Instead, it asks what a family becomes when love is expressed indirectly and the truth is left unfinished-and what it means to bring your own children back to the place where you first learned to stay quiet.

Though the characters and story are fictional, the book is based in part on real incidents in the Ozarks.