Excerpt from Carolina Moonset by Matt Goldman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I kept my eyes on the road and asked what they were building.

"I don't know," said my father. I would soon learn this was his go-to response. He was resigned to his moth-eaten memory. I wondered how that worked—how he could remember that he couldn't remember.

My mother said, "They're tearing down the resort and building a gated community of luxury homes."

"On Hammond Island?" said my father with disgust in his voice. "Who would want to live on Hammond Island? You can only get there by boat."

"No. Remember, Marshall? They built a bridge last year." She looked at me and said, "We all voted against it, but the powers that be won the day."

"The powers that be," said my father. "Those Hammonds are nasty sons a bitches. Every one of 'em. Stole that island from the blacks. When the Union Army came through, they gave black people their own land. Gave 'em a chance. And it worked, too. The people prospered. Until the goddamn Klan took over and redistributed the land." My father had venom in his voice. "Redistributed the land with guns and knives and ropes and trees. I wouldn't live on Hammond Island if you paid me a million dollars. Hope a hurricane wipes it off the face of the earth."

"Marshall, you don't mean that," said my mother.

"The hell I don't."

My mother looked at me and shook her head, as if to say he doesn't know what he's talking about. I checked the rearview mirror to see my father scowling at the construction cranes.

When my sisters and I were young and still lived at home, we played a game called Divert Dad. The object of the game was this: if our father got onto a topic any one of us didn't care for—say, government public health policy, pharmaceutical companies, or worst of all, one of our social lives or academic missteps—we would introduce a new topic he couldn't resist commenting on. One thing about our father: if he could make his point using ten words, he'd use a hundred. By the time he finished saying what he had to say on our interjected topic, he'd have forgotten what we distracted him from.

There was only one rule to the game. The rule was that neither my father nor my mother could know the game was being played or that it even existed. Divert Dad was a game for three players and no spectators. My oldest sister, Bess, invented it when I was about eight, and we have played it, on and off, ever since.

The game grew more intricate over the years. We could earn bonus points for working in obscure vocabulary words, or by trying to get him to say a predetermined word like mozzarella, tomfoolery, or bunion. But the one rule has remained—the game is between us three and for our amusement only. If that rule were ever violated, the game would be forever ruined. Therefore, a competent player must have (1) a good poker face, (2) a vast knowledge of distracting subjects, and (3) an understanding that Divert Dad is a team sport. Sure, you can rack up impressive personal stats, but we never competed against each other. For example, if our father was lecturing me over my C in physics, I couldn't be the one to divert him onto another topic. That would have been too obvious. One of my teammates had to do it.

But today, with my sisters home in Chicago, I was the only player. My father glared at Hammond Island. It upset my mother. Therefore, it fell upon me to Divert Dad.

"Dad, looks like the White Sox pitching staff is in trouble. Two starters out with injuries."

In the rearview mirror, I saw him look away from the construction cranes, but instead of launching into a diatribe on the White Sox front office, he looked blank and then sad. He sighed and said, "I don't know anything about it."

Divert Dad was going to be a lot harder now. I said, "Well, the days of 2005 are long gone. Hey, remember José Contreras's start in game one of the World Series? When Guillén pulled him in the seventh?"

Excerpted from Carolina Moonset by Matt Goldman. Copyright © 2022 by Matt Goldman. Excerpted by permission of Forge Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.