Excerpt from Go as a River by Shelley Read, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Some boy asking directions is all," I lied, though not fifteen minutes earlier this had been true. "Just passing through." "Brown son of a bitch ... ." 

"You stink, Seth," I cut him off. "Worse than that hog pen you'd better be tending when Daddy gets in." 

"Screw Daddy," he slurred with drunken courage, taking a deep draw on his cigarette, then tossing it to the road. 

"Just do as you're told for once and save us all a lot of fuss," I said, stamping out the Lucky Strike, then glancing over my shoulder to glimpse Wil still standing on Dunlap's porch, reading me like a mystery tale. 

"Those pigs will fly from that crap-filled stall before I take orders from you, girl. Don't you reckon you can ... ." 

"Shut up, Seth," I sighed. "Just shut the hell up." I couldn't listen to another word. I hated him right then, even more than I ever had before. My loathing already had something to do with Wil. It had long had something to do with Daddy and Uncle Og and the mother and cousin and aunt I was starting to forget. But mostly my abhorrence for Seth was raw and ragged as a thistle, having grown a little sharper each day of our lives. 

I started pushing him from behind with all my force. He took a blow, stumbled forward, then took another blow, cursing and whining and swigging beer the whole way but never fighting me. Maybe he was too drunk to care, or maybe he knew as well as I did that he had to be in the hog pen by the time the sun dipped behind the ridge. 

We turned down North Laura. At its dead end, a thin trampled trail to our farm snaked through the weeds, past the tip of crazy Ruby-Alice Akers's pine-covered patch of land and across a wide, grassy field. It was the quickest route between the farm and town, and Seth and I had walked it a thousand times together. When we were children, our mother made it Seth's job to watch out for me when we walked that trail, coming or going, even though he was younger and far less responsible, simply because he was a boy. As we aged, I watched out for him, not because anyone told me to but because I had to, for my sake as much as his, for Daddy's sake too. But try as I might, I couldn't save Seth from his own mischief, and I was damn sick of trying. 

I hurried him along the path, me pushing, him stumbling and cursing. Then he dropped the beer bottle from his hand. Before my mind could register that the bottle was in the path, I stepped square on it and toppled forward, pushing Seth to the ground and falling hard in the dirt on my right hip and elbow. Small things: a drunken boy's loose grip, a dropped bottle, a sprained ankle, a torn dress sleeve. But it is often the small fateful twist that alters our lives most profoundly—the beckoning cry of a coal train whistle, a question from a stranger at an intersection, a brown bottle lying in the dirt. Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given. 

I lay in the dirt for a disorienting moment. Seth laughed weakly then silenced. Pain radiated through my lower leg. As I gingerly raised my chest from the dirt, Wil's arms suddenly slid beneath me with the sureness of a bridegroom scooping up his bride. And though there was no threshold—just the field of wilted goldenrods and tall brittle grasses—I remember that moment as our entry. I did not startle at his touch, did not protest his gentle embrace as he lifted with ease and cradled me against his coal-smudged chest, did not foolishly try to walk on the already bulging ankle. 

"You followed me," I said flatly. 

"Yep," was all he replied, looking down at Seth, who lay on his side at the edge of the path, passed out. "What do we do about him?" Wil asked. 

Excerpted from Go as a River by Shelley Read. Copyright © 2023 by Shelley Read. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.