Excerpt from Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Still, I enjoyed her company more than Skip's and Lon's combined. Babs slept not just in my bed but under the covers, where we struggled over the one soft pillow. When she died, I was ready to retire from a lifetime of animal management. I was sixty-three years old and single, and I vowed to myself: no more Labs, no more husbands, no more ex-husbands either.

The kennel in the bed of Carl's truck only confirmed the wisdom of my decision. The whole thing lay flipped on its side, jumping and heaving from the campaign being waged against the door. Nuthatches flickered through the yellowing trees, made frantic by the sound of claws against metal. Squirrels fled for other yards.

"Carl," I said. "I'm about to have an open house. I can't take your dog."

He looked over at the woodpile, where the remains of the chain-link runs sagged along the ground. "You could put her in the basement. In the clamshell grotto," he said. Then laughed. He had a wonderful laugh, the kind that tickled through you, slowly, inch by inch, brain cell by brain cell until you were mentally unfit to resist him.

"No, Carl," I said—not even talking about the animal.

"She can drink out of the fountain."

"No," I said. "N. O."

"I'm not a dog," he said, his voice quiet.

Wind riffled through the aspens, exposing the silverish undersides of the leaves. A plane buzzed by overhead. Carl jammed his hands in his pockets. "Besides," he said, "you can't sell Howl Palace."

I looked at him, daring him to tell me that he and I needed to live here together. The way I had always wanted. He had a suitcase in the back of his cab.

Carl looked back at me—as if about to say all this. Then he said, "It's your home, Dutch. You love it." He smiled, the way he always smiled. Time drained away for a few moments and we were back in the trophy room at Danny Boy's, thirty-five and tipsy, his finger laced through the loop of my jeans. The Eagles skipped on the turntable and my second husband, Wallace, ceased to exist. Tiny, dry snowflakes clung to the edges of the window like miniature paper stars. Carl kissed me and a dark, glittery hole opened up and I fell through, all the way to the bottom.

"I hate you, Carl," I said, but as so often happens around him, it came out sounding backward, fraught with tenderness.

The kennel creaked all of a sudden. We both looked over and, blam, the door snapped off. Seventy pounds of black, thundering muscle shot out of the truck and into the alders.

"Oh boy," he said. "Not good."

"Hand me the zapper."

"She doesn't have a shock collar."

I tried a two-fingered whistle. Nothing. Not a snapped twig.

"I hate to say it," he said. "But there's this appointment—"

"Carl, I've got an open house."

He toed something, a weed. "It's a flight," he said. "To Texas. I'm fishing down in Galveston for a few weeks."

All the dewy romance inside me turned to gravel as I watched him move toward his vehicle. When he bent down to pick up the door to the kennel, his shirt twisted. The shirt was a fly-fishing model, with a mesh panel for hot Texas days, through which I caught a glimpse of the pager-looking box strapped to his side. It was beige. A green battery light blinked on top.

Everybody our age knew what that box was. Carl was not here in my driveway to romance me all over again. Or even piss me off. Carl needed someone to dog-sit while he went off to get fancy last-ditch chemo down in the Lower 48. Houston, probably.

I took a minute to organize my face. "Get your animal," I said. "Get her back in the goddamn kennel and take her with you."

"Or what?" he said. "You'll hang her on a wolf peg?"

The cheapness of his comment released us both. I turned and went inside to not watch his truck peel down the driveway. Carl and I had always disagreed about the wolf room, which was the only thing that he, Lon, Skip, Wallace, and my third husband, RT, might have ever had in common. None of them liked it, and I respected that. But it didn't mean I had to rip it out. I was proud of it. It was beautiful. It was mine.

Excerpted from Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman. Copyright © 2022 by Leigh Newman. 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.