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

June Reid didn't stick around long enough to clear up any of these stories. I used to get worked up about it and sometimes I guess I still can, but I've learned that people will believe what they believe no matter what you say or do. What I know about Luke is that he was a friend of mine. He was a good man who had come through some hard times who got to be happy for a little while. And now he's gone.

I didn't want Sandy and Liam to see me blubbering that day, so after I dropped the cake off at the firehouse, I drove to my mother's place. She still lives in the same house I grew up in, the same place where Sandy and I lived when we were trying to get on our feet. Funny how in a small town like ours things play out, circle back, end up. Who would have thought that one day Earl Morey, with his son Dirk, and all their brothers and cousins, would be eating Brazilian wedding cake made by my mother and meant for the daughter of Luke Morey's older, city-rich girlfriend? No one, that's who. But the crazy, haphazard upside down of it all somehow made sense.

I sat in my childhood driveway and watched my mother turn on the porch light, something she always does before opening the front door, since I was a kid and even in broad daylight. I watched her shut the door behind her and pull her thin housecoat tight around her bony shoulders and button the top two buttons. I thought of her squeezing all those damned oranges and cracking all those coconuts for the last two days, sprinkling the little silver balls that the Moreys were now crunching in their tobacco-stained teeth down at the firehouse. And then I started to laugh. I couldn't help it. Nothing was funny, not one thing, but it was all so absurd and fucked-up. Tears and snot were everywhere, and here was my mother, making her way from the stoop to the driveway, shuffling in her slippers, old. She'd left her glasses in the house and I could see her squinting to see me more clearly. Rick? You okay? she asked as she stepped to my side of the car and tapped the window. This was my mother: both hands on the roof of the car, leaning into the window, half-blind, worried. Funny how disasters can make you see what you could lose. I don't think I'd ever seen my mother as clearly as I did that day: sixty-six, widowed at fifty, a secretary at the elementary school for over thirty-five years; a single mom who raised two kids, who took care of her granddaughter while my divorced sister went to nursing school in Hartford; a breast-cancer survivor who let her grown son move back in with his nineteen-year-old wife and one-year-old boy.

You okay in there? she asked, tapping the window again. Rick? I unlocked the door and got out of the car. It was now evening. Tell me, she said, her hands on my shoulders, her feet balancing on tippy-toes. I leaned in and put my arms around her little body. It was a good cake, Mom was all I could think to say. They would have loved it.

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.