Today's guest author, Nicole Bokat has published four novels: Redeeming Eve (nominated for both the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction) What Matters Most, The Happiness Thief, and her new book, Will End in Fire...a heart-racing domestic thriller about an alienated young woman who must find an arsonist before her own life goes up in smoke.
Bokat is also the author of a book on novelist Margaret Drabble and has written essays for several publications, including The New York Times, Parents, and The Forward. She lives in New Jersey, with her husband and dog, Ruby, and has two adult sons.
Reach out to Nicole via: https://www.nicolebokat.com/aboutnicole/
Nicole, welcome to the book club!
The first time we put our house on the market was in March of 2020. Or, rather, it was scheduled to go on the market: the flyers had been printed, the house "staged" to resemble a glossy West Elm catalogue, the floors polished to a gleam, reflecting whatever light the sun afforded through our oversized windows. It felt like mounting a Broadway show--one that we canceled two days before the audience was due to fill the theater.
My son, a journalist, warned us, this virus from China had already arrived on the West Coast. Which meant it would be everywhere in the country within weeks; it had even infiltrated our area near New York City. No one knew exactly how it was transmitted. Did we want people pouring in from the city to touch our kitchen counter, to open our refrigerator, to breathe their germy breath in our home? Our realtor was dumbfounded. She'd be careful. She'd wear gloves. What good would that do, our son asked us. The virus could be airborne. Later, the realtor remarked how we were her only clients with such foresight. N.Y.C. closed down within a week.
The pandemic had arrived.
Four years later, we sold our house in one weekend. What I hadn't anticipated was the grief that I'd feel this time around. That place, the one I'd lived in for 24 year years and raised my boys in, had become my refuge through the hardest time in my life, through a recent serious illness and the onslaught of other physical woes, of lost friendships and even worse ordeals too painful and private to mention. But the grief hit me after the whirlwind of packing, re-staging, striking the set pieces of my existence--books and mementos and pictures of my children's childhood--from what was, after all, just a physical structure. No one had died, I reprimanded myself. My sons were thriving adults, with great jobs, partners and city-busy lives of their own.
My husband was "disoriented" but not devastated. We'd made a good sum from the sale. We'd leased an apartment in our town and planned to take our time looking for condos that weren't shamefully overpriced (a tough feat, but that's another tale). Only I was crushed. The day we left, the house bare, I lay on the living room floor and wept. It never occurred to me that one could say, as we Jews do about the dead, "Let her memory be a blessing."
Yet, I said it, just the same.
-- Nicole Bokat
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
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