"Set in small-town Paris, Arkansas, Liberating Paris is the story of six best friends who have just passed their fortieth birthdays and now must come to terms with the past in order to move forward with their lives." "Woodrow McIlmore, the town's golden boy and local gynecologist, is married to his beautiful high school sweetheart, Milan, and seems by all appearances to be leading the perfect life with his two children and extended family and friends. But when Wood's daughter announces that she is smitten with a college classmate and intends to marry him, her parents are stunned. Their daughter's beloved is none other than the son of Wood's lost love, Duff - romantic chemistry has repeated itself in the next generation!" "The impending wedding will lead the free-spirited Duff, now an IHOP waitress, to return to the town and the man she left behind, for the first time in twenty years. As Wood's and Duff's reckless behavior progresses, they are forced to question whether their rediscovered passion is worth shattering their children's future and Milan's faith in her husband, and abandoning the friendships and values that they have clung to since childhood. As one of the group says to Wood, "See, it's not just you having an affair. Now we're all having an affair."" "During this one tumultuous year, there is a revelation of sexual identity, an unexpected death, a birth, and a wedding, bringing about as many changes as the national discount superstore that is destroying the very heart of the town. The six friends will be forced to decide what in their lives is worth keeping and what needs to be thrown away, and how they can save for their children not only Main Street, but the things that were learned there."--BOOK JACKET.

Liberating Paris
A Novel

Chapter One

Imagine a town that hardly anyone has ever heard of. Yet everyonehas seen one like it. It is just before daylight and the MainStreet is coming into view. There are cracks in the sidewalk withstubborn little patches of grass sticking through them. Most of thestores are boarded up, but one that isn't has a lot of naked mannequinslying around in the window. A fall breeze comes up and blows someleaves lightly against the cracked glass pane, blows the stoplight whereno one is waiting, until it swings drunkenly from its cable.

Just past all this, if you look hard, you will see the fire station andthe football stadium and then the interstate where something largeand pitifully ugly has been put up. Something to take the place of thetown. There is a fifty-yard banner stretched across the front of it thatsays: "Home of the new Fed-Mart Superstore."

A few miles beyond that is a much smaller sign, really about thesize of a world atlas. It's nailed to a wooden gate, and you can tell byits shabby condition that it's been there a long time. The sign readsfast deer farm, but there aren't any deer around. Just a middle-agedman on a horse. He is wearing some red-checkered pajama bottomsand drinking whiskey from an upturned bottle and riding as fast as hecan toward the sun. If you lived around here, you would know thathis name is Woodrow Phineas McIlmore the Third. But most peoplecall him Wood, except his mother, who calls him Woodrow. Eventhough Wood and Sook—that's his horse's name—take this same ride every morning, they are in no hurry to arrive anywhere. They alreadyknow the bright light on the horizon moves farther into the distancethe nearer you get. Well, really, Wood and DapplegreysUltraviolet, the granddaddy of Sook, figured this out when Wood wasstill a boy—it was the ride itself that was worthy—the swift exhilarationof speed and spirit, the complete aloneness of two equestrian astronautshurling themselves through the green space of a thousandvelvet acres—cool customers in their youth, now just two old friendstrying to prove one more time that they can still ride the ride.

The boy and his horse had once set out for the sun and quicklylearned what others had tried to put into words—that becoming isprobably better than being, that there is only one thing in between andthat is the ride. The ride is everything—not the arrival at some distant orimagined spot of light from which you would probably just see anotherspot of light and then another until you didn't know where you were ormaybe you would even fall from the sky like Icarus for flying too nearthe sun or end up floating facedown in your swimming pool likeGatsby, who had worshipped too closely to the green light at the end ofDaisy's dock. No, there was no question about it: Forget about the light.Just keep your head down and stay on the ride.

Wood felt lucky to know such a thing. And if his morning workoutwith Sook didn't make it clear, the walls of his study were lined withthe favored novels of three generations of McIlmores. Books thatwere full of myopic, vainglorious fools who had not only failed to appreciatethe ride, they had gotten off, like some fevered hoboes lookingfor Big Rock Candy Mountain, and wandered stupidly into irony,mayhem, and even the jaws of a killer whale.

That wasn't Wood. He knew what a fine meal had been laid uponhis table. He retrieved the whiskey bottle from the hip pocket of his pajamabottoms and unscrewed the cap—"Whoa, slow her down now,girl, that's the way," he coaxed Sook as she adjusted her pace to hisneed. He brought the flask to his lips, turning it up full tilt and drainingthe remainder of the whiskey inside. It went down smooth, warminghim, like the maple syrup Mae Ethel used to make for his pancakes. Try as he might, he had never been able to reproduce for his own childrenthe thick, sweet texture that flowed like a small mudslide acrossand then down the lightest, fluffiest pancakes ever poured on a griddle(nor could the cooks at the local Waffle House, despite his meticulousembellishments). Fluffy was not a word Wood used often but that'swhat they were, damnit; they were fluffy and he missed them! Hemissed Mae Ethel, too. For some reason he thought of her whenever hedrank whiskey. Maybe that was her secret ingredient for the syrup ormaybe it was just that the liquor and the woman warmed him, especiallyon fall mornings like this when he rode without a shirt. Ah, MaeEthel, his jolly, all-knowing angel who was colored when he first knewher but later became black. The person who used to scoop him up likewarm laundry and press him against her huge, pillowy bosom, laughingher high-pitched approval at his simplest declaration.

His parents were equally doting, but it was Mae Ethel who physicallyloved him up each day, squeezing his flesh, swinging him, holdinghim. Mae Ethel, filling every inch of the doorway with herhands-on-hips massive presence, a symphony of happy, human noisemoving joyfully through the McIlmore house. Mae Ethel, who hadno expectations and therefore no judgments of him other than "doright" and "be happy," and who had been born before self-esteem wasdiscovered but had somehow managed to electrify her charge with thesimple admonition, "Study hard now, Peaches." It wasn't a warning,really. It was more like a good tip. But by the time she said it, she hadalready filled him up with so much highly combustible good stuff, allshe had to do was light the match and the boy was on fire . . .

Excerpted from Liberating Paris: A Novel by Linda Bloodworth Thomason
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