They live in the Massachusetts seaside town where Katie and her domineering older sister Caroline, now a successful entrepreneur based in San Francisco, grew up. Nine months ago, Katie’s dying great uncle, Walter, moved in and spends his time smoking medicinal weed and writing weird short stories about middle-age misfits. The most likable of Schiavone’s characters, Walter is a retired physician whose antic behavior provides a few light moments in this mostly grim tale as he tries to referee the increasingly frequent clashes between mother and son.
At the beginning of the novel, Katie and C.J. receive a Harley-Davidson from Craig, Katie’s ex-husband and C.J.’s newly deceased, but long-absent father. The bequest he’s sent exacerbates the tension between mother and son and precipitates the forward action of the novel that sometimes moves unsteadily backward and forward in time. In flashbacks we learn that her mother was an alcoholic, and just as Katie is doing now, woke up from blackouts to find burns on her knees where she’d stubbed out her cigarettes. We see Katie, just out of college, move to a Vermont ski resort town and drift into a life of bartending, late nights, and the short-lived marriage to the hulking ski instructor who fathered her son.
After C.J. hurls his hockey stick into the crowd when he misses a shot in his big playoff game and after Katie has to do a perp walk - in view of C.J.’s classmates - when a cop stops her for driving under the influence, mother and son trade accusations and settle into an uneasy truce. In response to C.J.’s plea to keep the “hog’’ she’s threatening to sell, Katie exacts two promises - that he’ll take a motorcycle safety class and that he’ll see a shrink. Katie tries but can’t resist the pull of Grand Marnier and resumes an empty relationship with an old boyfriend. Just after his 16th birthday, C.J. does what any red-blooded kid with a new driver’s license would.
