The Forever Year Read online

  Praise for The Forever Year:

  “The Forever Year is pure pleasure from beginning to end, beautifully written and emotionally rich.”

  – Susan Elizabeth Phillips, New York Times bestselling author

  “The Forever Year is a wry, tender, beautifully written novel…. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down.”

  – Lisa Kleypas, New York Times bestselling author

  “Better than Nicholas Sparks’s best. There’s more wit, more wisdom, and yes, there are tears.”

  – John R. Maxim, New York Times bestselling author

  “The Forever Year is a warm, engaging story with a valuable contemporary lesson inside – it is well structured and funny and keeps you turning the pages till the very end to find out what happens. It may even make you rethink your own attitude toward love! I really enjoyed it.”

  – Suzanne Vega, multiplatinum recording artist

  “The Forever Year is a delightful family relationship drama with a wonderful romantic subplot.”

  – Allreaders

  “The Forever Year is a true keeper of a book.”

  – A Romance Review

  “It feels real, will keep you glued to the pages, and will touch your heart.”

  – Bookloons

  The

  Forever

  Year

  A novel by

  Lou

  Aronica

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  Studio Digital CT, LLC

  PO Box 4331

  Stamford, CT 06907

  Copyright © 2003, 2012 by The Fiction Studio

  Jacket design by Barbara Aronica Buck

  Author photo © 2010 by Kim Anderson

  Story Plant paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-100-4

  Fiction Studio Books e-book ISBN-13: 978-1-943486-30-4

  Visit our website at www.TheStoryPlant.com

  Visit the author’s website at www.LouAronica.com

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by US Copyright Law.

  For information, address Studio Digital CT.

  Originally published under the name Ronald Anthony

  Original Forge Books hardcover publication: May 2003

  First Fiction Studio Paperback Printing: January 2013

  First Story Plant Paperback Printing: September 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my father, who taught me different lessons.

  And for Kelly, who taught me precisely these.

  Acknowledgments

  I originally published this book in 2003 under the pseudonym Ronald Anthony. I’d like to thank the people who helped The Forever Year see publication then, along with those who have helped in the production of this new edition.

  It was because of my wife Kelly and my children Molly, David, Abigail (and Tigist, who wasn’t around in 2003) that I chose to write this novel in the first place, and it was their continued presence and support that kept me going even on the days when the words didn’t want to come.

  My original agent Marilyn Allen deserves my unending gratitude for helping get me started and for being such a staunch advocate for my work. I also want to thank her husband, Bill Liberus, for being an early reader and cheering me on with his encouragement.

  My current agent, Danny Baror has been a tremendous champion in the foreign market and a staunch supporter of my work in the years since.

  I’d like to thank Peter Miller for his help in pushing this novel in Hollywood and for regularly reminding me how much he loved it.

  Linda Quinton at Tor/Forge got on board with this novel when it was little more than a thinly sketched story and for that I am eternally grateful. My original editor, Stephanie Lane, did a truly impressive job of getting inside this novel and showing me where I didn’t say what I wanted to say. I know how difficult that is and I’m very glad she was there for me.

  Debbie Mercer first suggested that I write this novel and for that I’m grateful. However, I’m even more grateful for her consistent willingness to read whatever I write and for her willingness to risk an embarrassing reaction on the Long Island Railroad.

  Keith Ferrell has been much more of an inspiration to me over the years than he will ever know. If this novel is good, it’s largely because his dedication to his own craft and his willingness to “talk writing” drove me to work harder.

  Thanks too to the Harry Bennett Branch of the Stamford Public Library for providing the occasional place to write where I was free from my numerous self-imposed distractions.

  Thanks to Dan Howard for copyediting the revised edition.

  And thanks to Barbara Aronica Buck for the gorgeous work she always does on my covers.

  Chapter One

  In his eighty-third year and the fourth season since his wife of more than half a century had passed, Mickey Sienna opened his eyes early, as he did every day. He listened as commuters hustled to pick up the newspapers at the ends of their driveways, believing they were already falling behind in that day’s corporate competition. He heard school buses creaking to a stop to pick up some other generation’s children. If this were a Tuesday or Thursday, the garbage men would be coming to visit; if it were a Monday, the recycling men would come instead. Soon, that overexcited little girl next door would be squealing as she played outside, regardless of the day and regardless of the weather.

  Each sound would send his thoughts in a new direction. Those bracing early years at the brokerage and the life that accompanied them. Darlene’s first day of kindergarten. The piles of boxes left at the curb after the Christmas bounty. Denise’s delight at a piggyback ride.

  Lying there, as he sometimes did for hours, Mickey would listen and remember. He was incapable of falling back asleep even though he was weary and knew he was going to feel that way the entire day. But while dozing wasn’t an available option, rising wasn’t a particularly appealing one. There was the pain in both of his knees, the decreasing dexterity in his fingers, and the simple fact that without Dorothy his life didn’t seem to have much of an agenda.

  After Dorothy’s death, the children implored him to move out of the New Jersey colonial they had lived in for the past forty years. Too much space. Too many stairs. You don’t move around as well as you used to. They told him that no person living by himself needed a house this size. But what they were really telling him was that he was too old to remain independent and surely too old to learn how to do the things that Dorothy had always done for him. As much as he loved his children, this grated on him. His knees might feel like the cartilage had been replaced with steel wool, and his arm would sometimes go numb for a few minutes without warning, but his mind was as sharp as ever. And if he didn’t feel like getting out of bed on most days, and if the simple act of descending the stairs and walking to the den made him tired, that was his business and his alone. This was his house. He was keeping it. End of discussion.

  As much as he loved to eat, Mickey had never learned to cook. There had always been someone else available to do the job. First there was his mother, a stout woman of Neapolitan descent who embraced the kitchen with nearly as much passion as she embraced her firstborn son. Then, when he was living on his own, there were the endless offerings of the restaurants of New York. And one of the things that had settled his heart after he met Dorothy was how utterly comfortable she seemed making the dishes of their respective heritages. With access to this continuous st
ream of good meals, Mickey had never found any reason to learn even the rudiments of the craft. It never dawned on him that there might be a time when he would need this skill. Certainly, he never considered the possibility that his wife, eight years his junior, would go before him.

  And so it was that ten months after Dorothy died, Mickey made his way tentatively to the kitchen and took two eggs out of the refrigerator. Making hot meals was a point of pride for him. Anyone could fill a bowl with cereal and add milk. A hot meal required a certain level of mastery, mastery that someone like Mickey Sienna could surely attain even at his advanced age. Someday soon, he would invite all of his children over for dinner and give them the surprise of their lives.

  He pulled out a frying pan, placed it on a burner, and filled the bottom with oil. He lit the burner, but having never figured out which knob controlled which, he ignited the wrong one. Without turning that burner off, he lit the proper burner and cracked two eggs into the pan. It always took the eggs longer to cook than he thought it was going to take, so while he waited to flip them over, he went down the hall to see what was on TV.

  Mickey didn’t really like television, especially morning television with its preponderance of vapid talk shows, uninformative self-help programming, and noisy “education” for toddlers. Still, he was never in the mood to read when he first got up, and he preferred to trade stocks in the afternoon. And there was a certain amount of comfort to having some kind of noise in the house. Mickey chose a show nearly at random and settled on the couch. It was an old family drama from the seventies. The poor sound quality and the simplemindedness of the storytelling, combined with the weariness that seemed to be his constant companion these days, made him lethargic. While once he was awake in his bed he could never get back to sleep, the same was not in any way true about the couch. Not long after the first advertising break, Mickey was out.

  It was possibly the first time in history that a television commercial saved a man’s life.

  In the time between Mickey’s dropping off and the next promotion that awakened him – its sound a crisp and blaring contrast to the muted melodrama – the eggs had burned and the overabundance of oil in the pan had spattered onto the naked lit burner across from it. Eventually, the entire pan ignited and spread to the Formica countertop where the oil had leapt out. Black billows made their way down the hall to where Mickey was sleeping. The smoke, which might have killed him if enough time had passed, didn’t startle him from sleep. But a loudmouthed announcer telling him that he could have “a washboard stomach in only ten minutes a day” did.

  Mickey coughed and choked as he picked himself off the couch. He slowly treaded into the kitchen, hindered not only by his degraded joints but also by the heightened sense of fear that comes from awakening to danger. He tried throwing water on the flames, but that just generated more smoke. He tried to smother the pan with a kitchen towel, but the towel caught fire.

  A portion of Mickey’s mind more willing than his conscious mind to accept his physical limitations told him that if he was going to get out of the house safely, he needed to start moving now. As quickly as his screaming knees would carry him, Mickey struggled through the smoke and out the front door. Once outside, he stood breathing deeply on the lawn. What was he supposed to do now? He thought about everything he had left in the house and considered going back to rescue the most precious items. But he knew that was unrealistic.

  He had to do something. He couldn’t just let the house burn down. Mickey was only thinking clearly enough to realize that he wasn’t thinking clearly. He tried to calm himself down to allow some sense to seep in.

  “Hi, Mr. Sienna,” came a little girl’s voice. Mickey turned toward the sound. It was Maureen, the three-year-old who loved to play outside.

  “Hey, Mickey,” said her mother, Lisa, waving and walking toward him. “Out early this morning, huh?”

  Mickey started to move in their direction. The distress and disorientation must have been apparent on his face, because he had barely taken a few steps when Lisa quickened her own pace to come up to him.

  “Is everything okay?” she said.

  “The kitchen – the house – is on fire.”

  Lisa’s mouth formed into an O and she glanced back quickly at her daughter. She walked up to Mickey and took him by the arm.

  “Come into my house,” she said. “Did you call the fire department?”

  “No, nothing. I couldn’t think of what to do. I just left.”

  “Let’s go call them right now.”

  They took a few steps. Even in his agitated condition, Mickey could only move so quickly. Lisa let go of his arm.

  “You know what, let me run ahead and make the call.” She turned to her daughter. “Maureen, could you come with Mr. Sienna into the house?”

  “I want to play some more,” the little girl said in a voice that made clear her sense of inconvenience.

  “We’ll play outside again in a little while. Can you show Mr. Sienna your new rocking horse now, please?”

  A few minutes later, Mickey was sitting at Lisa’s kitchen table. His heart was still pounding, but he was at least somewhat mollified by the knowledge that firemen were on their way. He had more than forty years of his life invested in that house. Much more than that if you considered the memories that he brought there with him. He couldn’t begin to imagine how he would feel if the house were destroyed.

  Lisa seemed to understand what he was going through. She patted him on the hand. She had been a good neighbor since moving in a few years ago. She baked cookies for him and his wife every now and then, and she came each day to Dorothy’s wake.

  “The fire department will be here soon,” she said.

  Mickey gripped her hand and offered her a faint smile.

  “I should call my son. Can I borrow your phone?”

  Matthew would be in his office by now. It took him a moment to remember the number. Damned speed dial.

  “Dad, I was gonna call you in a few minutes,” Matthew said when he came to the phone. “What’s up?”

  “I’m having a little problem here,” Mickey said as casually as possible.

  “What’s wrong?” Matthew’s voice was growing tense. Mickey could imagine his agitated face. Matthew was an excellent husband and father, and he had a big, responsible job, but he tended to get riled up way too easily.

  “There’s a little fire in the kitchen.”

  “A fire in the kitchen? Dad, where are you? You have to get out of the house right away.”

  “I am out of the house. I’m at Lisa’s.”

  “Good, that’s the right thing.” Mickey could hear Matthew’s voice ease back a bit. His son was going to give himself a heart attack some day if he wasn’t careful. “Are you okay? Are you feeling short of breath? How much smoke did you inhale?”

  “I’m fine,” Mickey said, feeling an increasing need to underplay his own anxiety. “I’m more worried about the house and our things. I should have thought to at least take the photo albums with me.”

  As he heard the exhalation, Mickey could imagine the exasperated look that Matthew was no doubt wearing, having moved from concern to consternation. Mickey wondered when exactly the point came that your children felt they could start treating you like an infant.

  “The photo albums are hardly the thing to be worrying about at the moment, Dad. There’s no such thing as a little fire. I’m just glad you got out of there alive.”

  “Don’t be dramatic.”

  “That’s an interesting thing to say after you tell me that the house is burning down.”

  Mickey gazed up at Lisa, his eyes suggesting he was under siege. She smiled back at him. He wondered if she treated her parents the same way.

  “The house isn’t burning down,” he said. He looked out the side door. Was that smoke coming out of his windows? “I probably just won’t be able to use the kitchen for a while.”

  “Then why did you call me?” Matthew was fully beyond his initial di
stress about the situation. The lecture about the house being too big for him was likely to start in the next minute.

  “I was calling to see what you thought I should do next. This is the kind of thing your mother would have taken care of.”

  “Dad, I’m in Chicago,” Matthew said, his voice rising again. “I can’t exactly jump in the car and get there in a half an hour.”

  “Denise never seems to be in her office.”

  “Don’t get me started on Denise. When was the last time you saw her, by the way? Does she send one of ‘her people’ to check on you every now and then?”

  Mickey shook his head. He should have called Darlene.

  “Denise is very good to me, and you know that.” He never appreciated it when his children sniped at each other and he thought he had sent that message clearly enough over the years. “She just has that big job that keeps her very busy.”

  “This is not the time to get into this,” Matthew said abruptly. “Look, you have to deal with the insurance company and all of that stuff. Why don’t you call Jesse?”

  Jesse had never entered Mickey’s mind. “Why would I call Jesse?”

  “Well, for one thing, he lives ten minutes away from you.”

  “Jesse doesn’t know about these things. He’s just a kid.”

  “Dad, he’s thirty-two. He even has his own house.”

  Mickey looked out the side door again. The fire truck was pulling up to his curb.

  “The fire department is here. Let’s not worry about this now. I’ll see if I can get Denise later.”

  “Call me when you know what’s going on.”

  “I’ll call you tonight.”

  “Call me as soon as you know.”

  “Fine. I need to go see the firemen.”

  Mickey broke the connection and handed the phone back to Lisa.

  “The fire trucks are here,” he said.

  “Maureen’s already at the window. She heard the sirens.”

  Mickey made his way toward the front door.

  “My son thinks I’m incapable of doing anything on my own.”