Excerpt from His Favorites by Kate Walbert, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Had killed, I could tell Master. The pluperfect. Not to be used too often because it will take you out of the story in your flashback, out of the simple past into something too far from it—the distant past, the remembered past, some metaphysical expression of the past I can no longer remember although his point remains—too removed from the scene, he said. A coward's tense. A dodge from describing what actually happened.

So here is what actually happened, what happens still: the scene on its parallel track to now, to me: linear and constant, never passing into past, never speeding into future. The sound of Carly screaming my name, the cart sprung from the release of our weight, Stephanie's trajectory such that she didn't make the dogleg, she hit the rough, she had a bad lie, the worst lie, and always the only light the fireflies brought on by the heat, the only sound Carly's screaming, Stephanie dead at the base of the white pine, at least that, my mother said, instantaneous, Stephanie's legs folded in a way that would have hurt, her eyes still open, looking up like maybe she could see where it was she believed she might be going next, like maybe there is such a thing as God and an afterlife, the cart on its side and Carly screaming.

* * *

Farmingdale held fast to its traditions: the Christmas sing-along; the Memorial Day parade with all the old veterans in their woolly, pickled uniforms, medals at breast, driving the fleet of Model T Fords owned by our local Mitchell's Ford, tossing candy to the children lining Main Street who waved little American flags courtesy of the Friends of the Farmingdale Free Library. The kids dove for the candy like beasts, scrambling for Tootsie Pops and Tootsie Rolls and shoving whatever they could in their pockets. Everyone strained to see the Farmingdale High School marching band bring up the rear, the flag twirlers the biggest crowd pleasers, the way the girls launched those flags in the air and caught them in their gloved hands.

Around the Fourth of July, Farmingdale Christ Church held a barbecue and peach festival, church biddies in aprons that read I'm a Peach! scooping barbecue to all the former Methodists now Episcopalians gathered on the front lawn, sitting on blankets pouring cheap wine into Dixie cups, every year the same joke made to Father Phillips on his rounds—the bottles were water, Father, promise, until suddenly, wine!

The geraniums in the concrete planters along Main bloomed as if it were June in late August, although by October their stems were too rangy for the Autumn Festival, the last of their red petals crushed to a dusty brown ash on the sidewalks. The Town Council funded pumpkins and gourds and hay bales in a unanimous vote, the October Tableaus on Main, as they were then called, matching the banners strung from the lampposts announcing the Autumn Festival: Farmingdale High gymnasium, hayrides and a corn maze and an afternoon crowning of the Autumn Queen, a pretty senior whose photograph appeared in the local paper wearing a one-of-a-kind crown created by the kindergarten class of Farmingdale Elementary, a garland of brittle leaves around her neck.

That year Farmingdale High canceled the Autumn Festival and anyway, the rain. For weeks afterward, it rained, the rain flooding the golf course, overflowing the artificial ponds and farther east, on the Atlantic shore, eroding the banks held by the newly planted beach grass to wash with each tide back into the sea. After so many days of gray weather and mist and fog, the sun all but disappeared behind clouds so thick people forgot to turn off their headlights or porch lights, as if everyone anticipated someone else lost, a road uncharted.

That year my mother, a beautiful woman given to her own foul play, divorced my father and took up with a much younger man, someone she met at a farmers' market on a trip to Portland. She will move to the West Coast and eventually marry him, adopting and training shelter dogs as service animals, forswearing liquor, pot, and meat in short order.

Excerpted from His Favorites by Kate Walbert. Copyright © 2018 by Kate Walbert. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.