Mending What Is Broken
by Robert McKean

Mending What Is Broken

 ISBN 978-1-60489-341-0, trade paper, $20.95 Sale $18.95

 

 

Synopsis:

Peter Sanguedolce is fighting to save shared custody rights of his daughter only to begin questioning much darker motives of his wife’s new husband. As he unravels this web, Peter becomes caught in a quest to fulfill his dying friend’s wish to be reconciled with his estranged daughter, a woman whom Peter once—and possibly still does—love.

 

 
About theAuthor:


Excerpt from Book:

The world is heartless.

When the final disposition came down from family court, confirming what surprised no one, that he’d forfeited his shared custody rights to his daughter, Peter Sanguedolce thought his world had come to an end. And perhaps it had. It was January. Ice dams climbed the roof. Wind moused about the drafty casement windows. The front door froze shut. In the basement the ancient Lennox boiler bellowed, summoning itself for another Western Pennsylvania winter, and, as fresh steam hit the condensation in the pipes and the radiators gurgled like drowning sailors, he heard clear as a bell his mother forty-odd winters ago asking his father worriedly, “Steve, d’you think the furnace is going to blow up?” 

It didn’t, it probably won’t.

Gloomy skies, purses of hardened snow beneath the shrubs—all of it to set the affective faculties going like the sympathetic murmur of adjoining strings when a piano key is struck. He loves music, he hates ice dams. Before breakfast, Peter empties the four plastic buckets in the attic that Mortie Siegel at Savage’s Hardware and Sporting Goods sold him, red, yellow, green, blue. A dual major in college, materials science and English Lit., Peter guesses that Mortie’s buckets are polypropylene, although Rubbermaid appears close-lipped on the matter. The blue one is as brilliant as the copper sulfate in his old chemistry set. His daughter Jeanette loves exploring these upper regions of the old house, but it’s rare for Peter to have reason to mount the narrow staircase to the attic. Light stabs through the fissures between the browned roofing boards; a bat, off-duty in daylight hours, dangles by his toes; and around him, what three generations of Sanguedolces failed to carry with them into the afterworld: boxes of Literary Guild novels; the duffle his Uncle Nico lugged home from Korea; bags of petrified shoes; a wardrobe housing suits with five-inch lapels and slippers whose turquoise satin still retains the shape of his mother’s toes. On a round-screen television rests a capsized model ship, his grandfather’s, gifted to him by a coke-puller in lieu of payments for his child’s piano lessons. It’s as if Nonno Franco’s folk art brigantine has foundered and come to grief here. The canvas sails, the size of ladies’ hankies, have torn from their spars, and the ship’s string-ropes become fouled with webs spun by the tiny white spiders who have taken to living in its hold.

Someday, Peter vows, eyeing a crucifix with a missing arm, I need to do something about all this.

The day before the court orders were passed down, the third week of December, he’d bought an eleven-foot Fraser fir from the St. Ursula altar boys. Their hands were chapped; their chilblained toes squeaked in their cheap sneakers. He tipped lavishly. The presents he’d picked out for Jeanette, to be hidden beneath the skirts of that regal tree that languished, never erected, outside on the icy veranda, she opened the day after Christmas, under the critical gaze of her stepfather, Elliott Fields, who, unshaven and dyspeptic, monitored disgraced Papa and daughter’s sad, quiet holiday. His fault, all his fault. Nobody to blame but himself. Before abandoning the attic, Peter ensures that his ice-dam leaks are striking Mortie’s colorful pails dead center, plop, plop, then, nodding to the sleeping bat, he descends in search of his chief consolation: simple carbohydrates.

He’s lonely, he has no work; ergo, he eats.

Baking whole wheat sourdough bread has become his passion. He has his cultures, his thermometer, his rattan proofing baskets and Danish whisk, his 900° F oven mitts, his wooden spoons, his organic flours. The loaves rise in the shape of parsons’ hats. So much bread does Peter manufacture, so many loaves lining the counter like the hats of a gathering of country clerics, that one person cannot possibly eat it all. After dropping off extra loaves at the rescue mission in town, he’s taken to fattening up the birds, too. There used to be more birds. That was before the removal of his neighbor’s tall arborvitae hedge—and it was, by the way, the sale and partial demolishment last fall of Jacob Weiner’s house next door that started the chain of events that led to the revocation of his custody rights—but the chattering sparrow nation hasn’t gone anywhere, nor have the cardinals that also do not migrate and the robins that no longer seem to, and, especially, the mourning dove couple who appear to have taken the cue and foregone the hassle of seasonal relocation, as well. Spotting the fat man maundering into his backyard in trench coat over pajamas, the silky, long-necked doves lift in a whistle of wings from their perches on Jacob’s cockeyed roof, and, burbling contentedly, join him for breakfast.

Butter, sometimes olive oil, Sundays, cream cheese and lox.

In a corner of the yard stands a crab apple tree. The crabs, no larger than peas, ripen in autumn to marigold-yellow, then dim like dying stars, withering, blackening. Birds, sometimes whole murders of crows, descend on the crooked tree to peck at the shriveled fruit and squabble with the squirrels who hang out on the limbs like trapeze artists. Beneath the tree, strewn across its snowy apron, are the leavings of this beggar’s feast: gnawed and decomposing fruit, twigs, stray feathers, colonic splotches of remarkable coloration. Once he’d been a successful businessman. His father’s top salesman, and, when his father died, owner himself of the Ganaego Clay Works. When someone in Ganaego pees, chances are his waters will find their passage through Sanguedolce sanitation pipes.

A sewer pipe salesman from Pennsylvania, he liked to introduce himself.

That was before the clay works went bankrupt. Peter tears his tangy peasant bread into generous chunks and contributes to the disorder under the tree. In the slanting light of a Sunday winter morning, as he kills time waiting for twelve-thirty so he can drive across the river and spend the afternoon with his daughter in a supervised setting—it’s all he lives for—his shadow looks grotesquely distorted, elongated, rendering him, weirdly and splendidly, skinny again. He worries about his daughter.

Something about his ex-wife’s household does not feel right.