Good Girl
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About this ebook
In Girl Trouble, acclaimed writer Holly Goddard Jones examines small-town Southerners aching to be good, even as they live in doubt about what goodness is.
A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant--with his child. A lonely woman reflects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.
In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.
Written with extraordinary empathy and maturity, and with the breadth and complexity of a novel, Jones's stories shed light on the darkness of the human condition.
Holly Goddard Jones
Holly Goddard Jones is the author of the short story collection Girl Trouble. Her work has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, Tin House magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2013 recipient of The Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Hillsdale Prize for Excellence in Fiction and a 2007 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and lives in Greensboro with her husband, Brandon, and two rowdy dogs. Visit HollyGoddardJones.com.
Read more from Holly Goddard Jones
The Next Time You See Me: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Girl Trouble: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Allegory of a Cave Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An Upright Man Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Theory of Realty Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLife Expectancy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsProof of God Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Parts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRetrospective Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Book preview
Good Girl - Holly Goddard Jones
Good Girl
a story from Girl Trouble
Holly Goddard Jones
logo.jpgFor Brandon and my father:
two good men
Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.
—William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• Contents •
Good Girl
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
• Good Girl •
A year before Jacob’s son, Tommy, was arrested for raping a fifteen-year-old girl, the police chief came to his shop about the dog. Tommy’s dog—a pit bull bitch. Tommy had brought her home the week he graduated from high school, a pup in an old Nike shoe box, eyes just opened. And Jacob had said, You’re not bringing that dog here,
but he soon gave in, letting his son keep her on a blanket in the toolshed; weeks later he said, You’re not bringing that dog in the house,
but he gave in on that, too, and the dog started sleeping on the living room couch, the same spot where his wife, Nora, had liked sitting when she was alive.
The one thing he’d held firm on, he thought at the time, was the treatment of the animal. Tommy wanted her mean, wanted to beat her and chain her to weights and mix gunpowder into her dog food. Now Jacob wasn’t one of those animal rights nut-jobs, and he’d never really liked dogs, or any kind of pet, for that matter—always had to scrub his hands clean after petting one, and even then he’d go to bed sure that fleas and ticks were crawling all over him, setting up camp in the graying curly hairs of his underarms or groin. But he was softer in his middle age than he’d once been—less casual about life since Nora’s passing—and he wouldn’t stand back while the poor animal was tortured, made crazy by one of his son’s misguided whims. So he’d stood his ground. He started feeding her when he noticed Tommy was forgetting to, scratching her belly when Tommy was gone and she seemed slow and disconsolate, and at some point—maybe the day he got home from work and she met him at the front porch, bouncing on her hind legs, eyes buggy and worshipful—he realized he loved her, he was grateful to have her. Though he never said so to Tommy, he felt a bittersweet certainty that Nora would have loved her, too—good as she’d always been with rough beasts, himself at one time no exception. It was easy, on nights when Tommy slept away and the house felt as open and empty as a tobacco warehouse in January, to imagine the dog as his last connection to Nora, to anything good like Nora. It was a desperate way to feel.
The police chief in Roma, Kentucky, was Perry Whitebridge. He’d been a year behind Jacob in high school, a soft-spoken kid with duct tape holding his boots together, which wasn’t so uncommon in