Excerpt from Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Rick

My mom made Lolly Reid's wedding cake. She got the recipe from a Brazilian restaurant in the city where she went one night after going in with her friends to see a show. It was a coconut cake made with fresh oranges. She prepared for days. It didn't have any pillars or platforms or fancy decorations; just a big sheet cake with a scattering of those tiny, silver edible balls and a few purple orchids she had special-ordered from Edith Tobin's shop. She was proud of that cake. She bakes and decorates cakes for all the birthdays in our family, and she made the wedding cake for my sister's wedding, and mine; so when June Reid hired us to cater her daughter Lolly's wedding, I thought, Why not?

Unfortunately, she never got paid. I didn't either. Not a cent. And if June Reid had tried to pay me, I would have torn up the check. I couldn't accept money from that woman after what she'd been through. My wife, Sandy, saw it differently, still does, but that's her business and this is mine. We own Feast of Reason together, and technically she has a right to complain, but I wasn't—and am still not—about to pester June Reid for a few dollars. Twenty-two thousand dollars to be exact, but who's counting? I should have worked up a contract like Sandy was always on me to do—at least we would have had half the money up front—but I never got around to drafting one and running it by a lawyer to make sure it covered all the bases. Lolly Reid's wedding was only the second big event we'd been hired to cater, and we were still getting the farm market and café on its feet, making sure everything there was up to code. If you want to lose sleep at night and eliminate all your free time or freedom, by all means open a small business, especially one that serves food. No one tells you about health inspectors or wheelchair access when you're first thinking of opening a place that serves the perfect lentil soup, fresh-baked bread, and almond-milk cappuccino. And it's a good thing they don't, because otherwise there would be no restaurants or cafés or coffee shops anywhere. I'm not sure why we thought the catering bit was a good idea, but it gives people you like a way to make some cash. Also, it's flattering to be asked to make the food for someone's important day—wedding or graduation or birthday. And when it's someone like June Reid, who could've had anyone from the city come up and do a first-class job, well, for us, it was a big deal. When she and Lolly came in and asked me if we'd be interested in making the food for the wedding, there was no way we were going to say no. June Reid would have been a hard woman to say no to anyway; she had that Glinda the Good Witch vibe to her, a sort of nothing-bad-has-ever-happened-to-me-and-nothing-bad-will-happen-to-you-if-you're-around-me feel. She was pretty in the way that some of the older women on my wife's soap operas are pretty. She took care of herself. She smelled good, too, like I don't know what but nice. I guess she probably still does, but we haven't seen her around here in a while. She took off months ago, and who can blame her? She pulled herself together for the funerals, kept her distance from everyone in town, and then was gone

June Reid had been coming to Wells on the weekends with her husband and daughter for years and then, later, on her own, when she moved here full-time. No one ever made a fuss or thought twice about her, but when she shacked up with Luke Morey the whole town paid attention. This was more than a couple of years ago, and at the time she must have been at least fifty, about twice Luke's age. Sandy and her friends never got tired of talking about it. They just couldn't accept that he would hitch his horse to her wagon, or however the phrase goes, especially since Luke had more than plenty of wagons to choose from. We grew up together, went to the same elementary and high school, played on a lot of the same sports teams, too, until high school, when he dedicated every free second he could to swimming. And Jesus could he swim. Perry Lynch used to joke that it's because his people were from Cuba or Puerto Rico and came to this country by swimming to Florida, but like with most things, Perry got it wrong. Luke's mom, Lydia, was white, but his dad, whoever he was, must have been straight-up black and not Hispanic or Latino or whatever you call it. In any case, Luke swam like a fish and broke school and state records and even got recruited by a few big universities—including Stanford—for scholarships. Stanford! He had the touch and had his pick of girls, schools, and futures. But then it all fell apart. All at once—bam—he was just like the rest of us, worse even. He got snagged for moving coke from Connecticut to Kingston and his whole life collapsed. He ended up serving eleven months in a prison in Adirondack, New York. It was unbelievable, and the shittiest part was that whole thing was rigged. Everybody knew Luke had nothing to do with drugs in high school. He was always too focused on swimming and keeping in shape. He drank like the rest of us on weekends. He even passed out once on the town green coming back from a party when we were sophomores. Strange to think how much of a big deal that was back then. Everyone knew about it and someone must have called Gus, the town cop, because he was the one to come down, wake him up, and walk him home.

Excerpted from Did You Ever Have A Family by Brian Clegg. Copyright © 2015 by Brian Clegg. Excerpted by permission of Gallery Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.