Excerpt from The Sunken Cathedral by Kate Walbert, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"My ancestors were Welsh," Pete said. "You could write about that. The Welsh are interesting."

"I thought Holland," Elizabeth says.

Pete shrugs. "Somebody sailed from Rotterdam before the Revolution, but then there was also something about Wales. Nobody really knows."

"If you were a girl you could be a member of the DAR," Elizabeth says to Ben. "That's kinda cool."

Ben looks from one to the other then takes a tremendous bite of his taco, tomatoes and cheese and lettuce shreds raining down on his plate, and to the side of the plate onto the good tablecloth.

"Promise me you won't take your first date out for tacos," Elizabeth says.

"I promise I won't take my first date out for tacos," Ben says, his mouth full. When did he get so large, so ungainly, so hairy? He is all arms and legs, as if he can't even fit into his chair. They sit on the chairs she and Pete bought in Mexico, right after their wedding. The chairs have rattan seats the cat has destroyed and are grease-stained and worn but when she looks at them she thinks of Pete speaking broken Spanish, attempting to bribe someone at the post office in Oaxaca to mail them freight.

"We could write how we had tacos on our first date," Elizabeth says to Pete, feeling suddenly expansive, young; she might be twenty-eight; she might be walking on that beach in Mexico, the one where they stayed before leaving for Oaxaca, where the chickens and seagulls followed them for crumbs. They were eating galletas; they were leaving a trail in case they got lost. "We could write that when I took the first bite he wondered if he could have a second date, much less spend the rest of his life with me."

"I did wonder that," Pete says.

"First date?" Elizabeth says.

"What did we do?" Pete says.

"Chinese," Elizabeth says.

"Right," Pete says. "I was thinking egg roll."

"Chinatown," Elizabeth says.

"Right, right. You had the spicy braised fish," he says, though she didn't—at the time she refused to eat anything with scales.

"And then we went to hear music," she says.

"Muddy Waters," Pete says.

"Willie Dixon," Elizabeth says. "And ate those little balls with the toothpicks for dessert. They were too sweet. They're always too sweet."

"I moved into your mother's apartment. It was above Sherm's—" Pete says to Ben.

"Sherman's was an upscale diner and all day Sunday you smelled all the delicious—" says Elizabeth.

"Sausage."

"Your father didn't have a dime. We never ate out again," Elizabeth says.

"One time your mother found this stray dog and asked the waiters if they had any leftover sausage—"

"Oh God!"

"For the dog," Pete says. He smiles, remembering.

Ben has his eyes covered, head on the table, or the pretty tablecloth. "Should I be writing this down?" he says.


Two fathers sprint past Stephanie G., their jacket tails flying as if they can't wait to get the hell to their jobs. Certain days the fathers turn out in impressive numbers, walking their young children to school, looking handsome and freshly showered, many in well-cut suits and a few in jeans and bomber jackets, good shoes, and one or two in grungy clothes. The fathers must exercise at different times, maybe earlier in the morning before they have showered, or possibly at night or possibly not at all, though in general the fathers look more physically fit than the mothers and, truth be told, Elizabeth thinks, younger. How could you account for this? How can you possibly reconcile the great inequities of gender—coupled with the perversions of age and the general randomness of everything? Who could you call to complain? Or is it whom?

"Elizabeth?" Stephanie G. is saying. "Are you with me?"

"Oh, sorry," Elizabeth says, too quickly. "Yes, of course. Absolutely. What?"

Excerpted from The Sunken Cathedral Copyright © 2015 by Kate Walbert. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.