Things Kept, Things Left Behind

A rural Kentucky where pride and familial honor are sacrosanct, old flames don't extinguish quietly and secrets are hard to keep centers Tomlinson's debut story collection. In the finely wrought "Flights," a writer sits at his father's bedside transcribing the dying man's remembrances, but a cunning shift in perspective shows the real power they hold for the son. The companion stories "Things Kept" and "Things Left Behind" examine what can be salvaged in marriage and what can't. In the first, LeAnn McCray, one of eight children, is summoned home from Ohio by her sister Cass. Cass's plan to square their ailing mother's looming debts by selling off their dead father's valuable desk runs smack into their mother's unselfish love for him. In "Things Left Behind," LeAnn's lover, Dex, sees in her, and in his 187 days of sobriety, a future beyond the next week and his humdrum married life; LeAnn's controlling husband, Lonnie, feels his life and wife "slowly spinning away from him" and soon faces a choice of whether to let her go. Tomlinson frames the characters' rich vernaculars simply, and carefully sets the pasts they're desperate to reconcile and repair within bleak, unvarnished presents. (Oct.)