Excerpt from We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"WHY IS THERE A GUN in this drawer?"

It was the first thing I had said since Jim started talking. I realized it must have sounded incongruous. It was the only thing I could make my mouth say.

"What?"

"The gun. Our gun. It's in this drawer."

I was still naked. My back was still to him.

"I don't know. The gun?"

He sounded shaken. He was wondering if I had heard him. He didn't know what I was talking about.

WE STAY IN A SHELTER when we first get back to Vegas, where I sleep on a cot near a man who burps rotgut whiskey and we line up for breakfast with a lady who screams that Betty Grable is trying to kill her. After a couple of nights, we move to a furnished motel where Sharlene can pay the rent weekly. That motel is not too far from the motel we lived in before Sharlene met Steve, though it is not the same one we lived in when Rodney was born, and it is not the same one we lived in when Sharlene first came to Vegas—when Sharlene came to Vegas with me, just a baby, and the boyfriend who owned the 1951 Henry J. The Henry J broke down in Colorado, and Sharlene and I and the boyfriend had to hitchhike the rest of the way to Vegas. That's what Sharlene told me anyway, that's what I know about how I got to Vegas—that, and that the Henry J was a red car without any way to get into the trunk.

But they were mostly the same, those furnished motels. They all had rats, which didn't even scurry when I stamped my small foot, and mattresses stained with urine and vomit and blood. In all of them, the neon lights of dilapidated downtown casinos blinked through the kinked slats of broken window blinds.

"THIS GUN USED TO BE in the closet. Did you put it in this drawer?"

I didn't know why I was asking these questions. I didn't care why the gun was in the drawer. I just had to say something, and nothing else that occurred to me to say was possible.

"I put it there. I forgot. I mean, I forgot until just now."

I waited. Still naked. Was he still looking?

"It was a long time ago. At least a year. I had it out. I was looking at it. And you came in the room. I just wanted to put it away before you saw it. I meant to go back and get it, but I forgot about it. Until just now."

I thought about this. The gun had been in the drawer for a year. Jim was looking at it. He didn't want me to see him looking at it.

"Is it loaded?"

I heard Jim move, quickly. I almost laughed. I didn't know why I had asked if it was loaded, but I had no intention of shooting it. And suddenly, it was not funny. Did my husband just imagine that I would aim the gun at him? That I was asking him if it was loaded so that I could hurt him?

What had happened to us?

WE DIDN'T STAY IN THAT furnished motel very long. Sharlene got the shakes. She said she couldn't be alone, not with Rodney and me anyway. So we went to live with a friend from the bar where Sharlene used to work. We lived there for four months, and while we were there, Sharlene smoked and talked and cried, night after night, with her friend. And then she stopped crying and she started laughing. And when Sharlene and her friend had collapsed on the floor, laughing about Steve and the bills and the wind from the windows, for the third time, I knew we would be leaving the friend's house, and we would be going somewhere else. Eventually there would be another man, and another apartment, and if I were lucky, another school. I would go back to school.

"IT'S NOT LOADED. AVIS, PLEASE. Turn around. Just look at me."

I didn't care that I was naked anymore, and I didn't care that Jim had apologized, and I wasn't even thinking about what he had said about Darcy. I had reached some sort of disembodied state, and what I was thinking about was whether the gun might be loaded after all, and why Jim had been looking at it a year ago, and if there was still any way to get my life back.

Excerpted from We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride. Copyright © 2014 by Laura McBride. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.