Release Announcement
Getting Better is out today
Getting Better is out today, on Kindle and in paperback. She brought her mother home to die. Her mother is getting better. That is the front of the book and I have never found a better way to say it. A few things so you know what you are holding. It is set in the Ohio valley, in a small town that looks after people for a living: hospice nurses, dental hygienists, night-shift aides, the people paid to care and what the caring takes out of them. It is told by Bernie, in her own voice, and Bernie is a person who counts. Days on a calendar. Pounds on a bed scale. Teeth. There is a sister a hundred and ninety miles away who sends money instead of time. There is an eighty-four-year-old woman who worked twenty years of nights beside Bernie's mother, who has been asked this question before, and who will not answer it. And there is the thing that happened in 1994, the last time their mother got better, which explains nothing at all. No jump, no chill, no house at night. The fear is arithmetic. If you have ever been the one who stayed, you already know the arithmetic. I only wrote it down. Thank you for reading it.