Small Damages: a small scene

Sometimes the days get too busy, the demands too shrieking, the hours too full, and I forget:  Small Damages is due out in July.

Today I was waiting (very early) for a client to call and he did not.  I hurried and worried about it, sat at my desk with my mind fisty and tight, and then my thoughts went to another place, to the books that ease me back to a peaceful place, to this story.

I remembered this scene from Small Damages:

The first night after my father died, the wind started howling and wouldn’t stop. It banged the trash cans out into the street and U-turned the limbs of the trees and scorched the canopy straight off the side porch, and this was before my mother had found her talent for exerting her power over things. So that she stood at one end of the house, and I stood at the other until it was my father I heard in the wind, speaking to me and me only. He howled and howled until he’d blown a tunnel through my heart, a black, blank wilderness that rattles.

It was September of my senior year, and I had loved my father best.