Excerpt from Harrow by Joy Williams, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She laughed, "I hate my name so much."

"But you've given your baby such an interesting name," her friend Slim teased.

"That's not her legal name of course," my father said. "It's just for now. Her name is Christen."

"Oh him and his damn boats," my mother said. "Everything has to be connected to boats. I've insisted on the letter K at least."

"Let's get a little dinghy," a man on my mother's left said. He was new, she didn't know who he was.

"What a pretty charm bracelet," the banker's wife said. Her husband was a loan officer, recently promoted.

"You must be happy," someone said, congratulating him. "We am," he said. He firmly believed he wasn't drunk yet but that if he went to the bathroom, which he ached to do, he would be. He knew himself.

"Thank you," Martha said, touching a charm. "This is a new one. It's the zodiacal sign of the Gemini."

"But you didn't have twins, Martha, did you?"

"No, no," she laughed. She hated her laugh. "But that's her sign. She was born in May. On a Thursday."

"Astrology can be fun, I guess," the banker's wife said.

"Fiesta!!" a young man shouted. He was wearing red pants, a tie as a belt and a white shirt on which he'd already spilled bean dip. "Throw down your burdens of time and reason!"

My mother's young man went into the kitchen and put a pot of water on to boil for a package of pasta he'd found in the cupboard. He was always hungry but didn't like people seeing him eat. He found eating tactless.

My mother liked candles, they were all over the house. Some were expensive, but there were others she'd bought in supermarkets as a joke, the wax poured into tall glasses with decals wrapped around them.

St. Martin de Porres with the broom and the cat and the dog and people lying behind him in beds, not looking good. Or the Guardian Angel one, with a winged woman following two barefoot children over a wooden bridge slung over a chasm and clearly unsafe and what were they doing out there by themselves anyway? The prayers on the back of the glass were in Spanish and English and even the most casual examination showed them to be evasive and nonsensical in the extreme. Most of them had cheap wicks and didn't even light or if they did the flame soon drowned in its own wax.

My mother was teasing him, even mocking him, he knew that—his troubled, angry faith, its outrageous sentimentalities and brutal corrections. If it were up to him, he'd told her once, he'd be a Jew, a Zealot in the time of the Roman Empire. They were audacious and went far beyond the norms of consensual behavior. They ripped things apart. They went after Rome and just chewed it to pieces. But then they screwed up, burning the food supplies of their own people during a long siege of Jerusalem in order to force God's hand to act against their enemies. They figured God would have no choice but to intervene to preserve them, His adherents. But God did nothing and everybody in Jerusalem starved to death.

But to be a Jew your mother had to be a Jewess and his mother was no Jewess. She was a sun-wrinkled dope-fogged ex-hippie whose highest ambition in life was to have someone give her an old Mercedes diesel that she could run on waste fry oil from the restaurant where she worked. Ma, he'd say, it's a seasonal restaurant, it closes the first week of November. How you going to get around after that? You're not thinking, Ma.

He wandered through our house, lighting candles and turning off lights. He came into the nursery and looked at the two framed photographs of my mother that hung on the wall. She was in a bikini, showing off her big belly and wearing the charm bracelet she always wore, glinting with the codes of her known life. The photographs were in black and white, one frontal and the other taken from the side which made her, and what she was carrying, look like suspects in an atypical police lineup.

He looked down into the crib at the baby, me, and I gazed back at him. My name escaped him. He was nothing to me, of course—this figure, this presence, this filament of darkness—but his was the world I would inherit. He said no word to acknowledge or comfort me but sat down in the chair my mother rocked me in in the early mornings before the day began.

Excerpted from Harrow by Joy Williams. Copyright © 2021 by Joy Williams. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.