Excerpt from The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I have one more cigarette brush my teeth look in at Honey splayed out in her Pack 'n Play in the dark closet and stroke her head and cover her with the blanket and climb into bed. Then I think of all this big expanse of bed and Honey cooped up in the closet alone and get back out and gently lift her out and carry her over and put her next to me which I've always wanted to do but have not done because of all the things you read about sleep habits and people who sleep with their children until they are five. I've never had her in bed with me through the night, just mornings during the early weeks months when she hardly moved at all. Now I put my arm under her rear and sort of encircle her with my mouth against her fuzz. But she senses the change and squirms and wakes up and looks at me and smiles and starts fidgeting and says "da da daaaaaah" with curiosity and I feel her little hands on my face and I say "shhhhh sleeping" but when I open my eyes I can see the whites of her eyes in the darkness gazing at me like an inquisitive turtle and she kicks her feet and squirms toward the edge of the bed and I can't get her to lie down and I know I've made a mistake and carry her back to the Pack 'n Play and she cries.

My grandmother who slept in this bed with my grandfather lost her father before she was even born. He was twenty-one years old and was carried off by flu when my great-grandmother was six months pregnant. I thought about this all the time when I was pregnant and Engin was home with us and when he was late coming home from the store or the studio he sometimes rented time in I would hold my stomach and know he was dead and he would find me crying over the kitchen sink. Now sometimes I have to remind myself that Engin is not actually dead, just in Turkey. I want to think good thoughts about Engin so I think about those magic weeks after Honey was born when Engin and I hung around the house with tiny her lying on her blanket. In the mornings we would tuck her between us like a hot dog, and we would loll around until 11:00 and Engin would fix breakfast. Then we would have a pro forma argument about the in my view mistaken Turkish belief in a forty-day sequestering period for babies and new mothers that I pointed out he only knew and pretended to care about because his mother told him he should, and finally we would bundle her up and take her for a long, slow walk around the City, and we would stop for ice cream or beers and hold hands and gaze at each other and at the perfect creature that we made.

The last thought I have is that Engin is not in fact in Turkey at this moment, he is in Belgrade helping his friend Tolga shoot a commercial, and he'll be back at his mother's tomorrow night. I lie there feeling guilty that I have forgotten this, and also relieved that he likely hasn't been sitting around his mom's house waiting for Honey's face to light up his screen, until I finally fall asleep.

Excerpted from The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling. Copyright © 2018 by Lydia Kiesling. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.