Excerpt from Where The Heart Is by Billy Letts, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But what she didn't know was that Willy Jack was going to Bakersfield to chop off one of his fingers. He hadn't told her the whole story.

He hadn't told her that a month after J. Paul started to work, he got his thumb cut off in a coupling clamp, an injury for which he received a cash settlement of sixty-five thousand dollars and an additional eight hundred dollars a month for the rest of his life. J. Paul used the money to buy a quick-lube shop and moved into a townhouse at the edge of a miniature golf course.

Hearing that had created in Willy Jack an intense interest in his own fingers. He noticed them, really noticed them for the first time in his life. He began to study each one. He figured out that thumbs and index fingers did most of the work, middle fingers were for communication, ring fingers were for rings, and little fingers were pretty much unnecessary. For Willy Jack, a southpaw, the little finger of his right hand was absolutely useless. And it was the one he would sacrifice, the one he intended to trade for greyhounds and race horses. It was the one that would take him to Santa Anita and Hollywood Park where he'd drink sloe gin fizzes and wear silk shirts and send his bets to the windows on silver trays.

But Novalee didn't know all that. She only knew he was going to Bakersfield to go to work for the railroad. He figured that was all she needed to know. And if Willy Jack was an expert on anything, it was what Novalee needed to know.

"Want to feel the baby?" she asked him.

He acted as if he hadn't heard her.

"Here." She held her hand out for his, but he left it dangling over the top of the steering wheel.

"Give me your hand." She lifted his hand from the wheel and guided it to her belly, then laid it flat against her, against the mound of her navel.

"Feel that?"

"No."

"Can't you feel that tiny little bomp ... bomp ... bomp?"

"I don't feel nothin'."

Willy Jack tried to pull his hand back, but she held it and moved it lower, pressing his fingers into the curve just above her pelvis.

"Feel right there." Her voice was soft, no more than a whisper. "That's where the heart is." She held his hand there a moment, then he jerked it away.

"Couldn't prove it by me," he said as he reached for a cigarette.

Novalee felt like she might cry then, but she didn't exactly know why. It was the way she felt sometimes at night when she heard a train whistle in the distance ... a feeling she couldn't explain, not even to herself.

She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, trying to find a way to make time pass faster. She mentally began to decorate the nursery. She put the oak crib beneath the window and a rocker in the corner beside the changing table. She folded the small quilt with cows jumping over the moon and put it beside the stuffed animals ...

As she drifted into sleep, she saw herself thin again, wearing her skinny denim dress and holding a baby, her baby, its face covered with a soft white blanket. Filled with joy and expectation, she gently peeled the blanket back, but discovered another blanket beneath it. She folded that back only to find another ... and another.

Then, she heard a train whistle, faint, but growing louder. She looked up to see a locomotive speeding toward her and the baby. She stood frozen between the rails as the train bore down on them.

She tried to jump clear, to run, but her body was heavy, weighted, and the ground beneath, spongy and sticky, sucked at her feet. She fell then, and from her knees and with all her energy, she lifted the baby over the rail and pushed it away from the tracks, away from danger.

Then, the blast of the whistle split the air. She tried to drag herself across the rail, but she moved like a giant slug, inching her way across the hot curve of metal. A hiss of steam and rush of scalding air brushed her legs when, in one desperate lunge, she was across. She was free.

From Where the Heart Is, by Billie Letts. © 1997 by Billie Letts, used by permission of the publisher Little Brown