With the style of a novelist, which he is, and in a compelling narrative voice, Fleming traces the paths of his two sets of grandparents, the eventual meeting and coming together of his parents, and then the painful years of his childhood
"When I was sixteen or so I wrote a tale about an Egyptian slave. I called him Brute. He was influenced by Conan the Barbarian, God help me, but I wrote this thing out and read it to my mother and sister. They weren't impressed."
"While my parents weren't big readers, they were good at story-telling. My great great grandmother was a "Lady" in Scotland and lived in a castle, but threw it all away to marry the gardner, so the story goes. I was intrigued by stories like that as well as fairy tales and Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden."
Carlos Bob lives and sleeps in the backmost room of the modular addition of a trailer in the Whispering Pines Trailer Court. He’s a confused boy, not only because of his name, some ethnic mismatch his mama dreamed up with her girls before she fell …
She's homeless. Probably crazy. She presses further into the only available seat four rows behind the driver; the other occupant presses closer to the window, stares out as if it was actually open and wafting clean air in.