The Distance Home

1

The End: A Refrain

It s you or me next, René said to get a laugh.

Her brother had already passed away, as had her father. Now René and her sister were once again driving the length of the state. Black cattle dotted the yellow hillsides. Out their open windows, long-abandoned homesteads flew by roofs pitched eerily to one side, windmills cracked in half, groaning. With this one more passing, it was down to just the two of them.

Mostly René had been steely, while Jayne had been unable to stop crying. René was older, but it didn t matter how old they were. Their mother had finally stopped messing the bed and tearing her clothes off in the middle of the night, ending up naked and haywire on the mattress or sprawled, drooling, on the carpet next to it, her translucent body shimmering with sweat. She d lain unconscious for the final week, cold and luminous as porcelain, as the girls came in to handle her by hip bones and shoulder blades, to turn her this way and that.

They would bury her ashes next to their father s and brother s.

They d been busy cleaned and sold her house, divided everything without jealousy or rancor. In so many ways it was all done, and in so many ways it was just beginning.

You girls will miss her, someone had said at the service. No one in the world can love you like your mother does.

René had nodded and smiled coolly, dismissing the sentiment as tired and trite, while Jayne reached for a tissue.

Thank you for coming, René had said. She d found herself repeating the same line all morning, as if by rote, wondering if it was the right thing to say or if perhaps there was something fundamentally cold and incorrect about her that was causing her to sound standoffish and transparently unfeeling.

2

Eve

Yvonne, called Eve, grew up around the corner and down the long dirt road from Al, two houses from the muddy banks of the Bad River, just where it joined with the Missouri, so there was always the problem of flood

Paula Saunders grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. She is a graduate of the Syracuse University creative writing program, and was awarded a postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship at the State University of New York at Albany, under then-Schweitzer chair Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.

The Distance Home is a deeply involving portrait of the American postwar family: its promises and disruptions surrounded by a rich, shimmering, sensuous South Dakota landscape. Jennifer Egan

[Paula] Saunders skillfully illuminates how time heals certain wounds while deepening others, and her depiction of aging is viscerally affecting. . . . The Distance Home becomes a mediation of the violence of American ambition and a powerful call for self-examination. The New York Times Book Review

Saunders debut is an exquisite, searing portrait of family and of people coping with whatever life throws at them while trying to keep close to one another. . . . The Distance Home will leave readers eager for more from this extraordinarily talented author. Booklist (starred review)

The author s compassion for her characters shines through in this honest story. Library Journal

Penetrating and insightful . . . This debut wonderfully depicts the entire lifespan of a singular family. Publishers Weekly

Paula Saunders has given us a riveting family saga for the ages. The Distance Home is fresh, with a seductive Midwestern innocence, though the book s outwardly ideal clan holds dark secrets that kept me turning pages into the wee hours. This is one of the best books I ve read in years destined to become a classic. Mary Karr

In The Distance Home, a family s story its past, its present, and (most surprising) its future traces the intricate, often subterranean lines that connect damage to redemption, creation to dissolution, and the everyday to the eternal, just to name several of its moving and startling aspects. It s a true, and rare, accomplishment. Michael Cunningham

The Distance Home is a bracing and beautiful novel about a fierce struggle for love and understanding in a South Dakota family, and about aspiration (both thwarted and encouraged) in an unforgiving place. Read it it will break