Our Unpublished Fiction Series exists to highlight outstanding, well-performing fiction manuscripts on The Black List.
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Enjoy the excerpt below, and read the full manuscript for CARELESS DRIVER on blcklst.com.
“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”
BOOK ONE:
She had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.
Chapter One
When I was just a slip of a girl, my Daddy said something to me that I have thought about nearly every day since. “It’s a rotten world, and the only currency a man has in it is his honor.” He looked at me, my white flounces ruffling slightly in the breeze where I stood on our front porch and amended, “or a lady. A lady’s honor is worth just as much as a man’s, and anyone who’ll tell you otherwise is a blamed fool. Always let honesty — even brutal honesty — be your guide.” I took this very much to heart, in consequence of which I have spent most of my life profoundly disappointed that so few of my acquaintances have turned out to cherish similar ideals.
It was Daddy who taught me golf. He was one of those widowers who spend half their time treating their motherless daughters like fragile China doll princesses, and the other half like the sons they’d have been less ill at ease raising. My girlhood, therefore, was punctuated with adages such as “pretty is as pretty does” and “if you’re looking for sympathy, you’ll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis” in equal measure. I learned to ride astride, but my habit was robin’s egg blue, so festooned with braided trim that I resembled nothing so much as a frosted tea cake. I had piano lessons, but oh how Daddy laughed when I turned from the hymns old Miss Spencer taught to the pick out music hall ditties that our housekeeper Delilah sang. When we had company, I could pour the tea and stir the lemonade for the ladies as handily as I could cut and light the men’s cigars. I was fond of sport, and encouraged to play all those appropriate to a girl from a genteel family; Daddy applauded gratifyingly whenever I recounted how I had viciously trounced my schoolmates in croquet and tennis. In the evenings, we read aloud to one another: adventure stories and Greek mythology and the like. We doted on each other, for we were all we had in the world.
We lived on Fourth Street — two doors down from Calvary, Daddy liked to say, meaning, of course, the Episcopal Church — in one of those fine, old red brick edifices that were the fashion in the ‘80s. My grandfather’d had it built in ‘82: a monument to his ego, my Aunt Sigorney used to call it, sniffing with derision. As though her own townhouse on Fifth Avenue in New York was any less grand! But I loved that house: loved standing on the thick bluegrass lawn when the sun was setting, sending green light through the spreading leaves of the coffee trees, giving the evenings a mellow coolness that belied the day’s fading humidity. I used to stand there on the front walk, watching the sky change as slowly, window by window, the lights came on inside, and then, when the first pale stars began to wink into the purple sky, rush up the front steps and into the brilliantly lit foyer. That was coming home. Home was the gracious sweep of the stair, and the yellow glow of the chandelier, and the deep voice calling from the study, “is that you, darling?” Home was Daddy.
My bedroom was on the second floor overlooking the backyard. There was a picture window with a window seat, and I would spend hours there in the dappled light reading books that had belonged to my mama in her own girlhood. There was a picture of her on her wedding day that I kept on my desk. I loved the sweet, serious face I had never seen in life, looking wistfully out at the camera, her diaphanous veil cascading from the orange blossoms atop her Gibson bouffant. Daddy used to say my hair was just like hers: a rich, dark gold with glints of auburn, though of course you couldn’t tell that from the photo. When I was very small, I used to talk to her whenever I was sad or lonesome, though such occasions were admittedly rare. I never knew her to miss her, and Daddy truly was my whole world.
I was seven years old the first time he took me out on the greens, in the spring of 1909. He had been an avid golfer in his youth, but my mama, he insisted, and her wide gray eyes, had distracted him from pastimes that took up so many hours. I came upon him hauling up a thin, dusty canvas bag from the basement one afternoon, an odd assortment of wood and metal protruding from the top, thwopping and clunking together as he breathlessly heaved the bag to the top step. To my amazement, the thing stood upright.
“What have you got there, Daddy?”
He turned, somewhat red in the face as he brushed a cobweb from his hair, rather surprised to see me, and said, “deplorable, the state of that basement.” Then bellowed, “Delilah? What on earth is it we pay your lot for?” shaking his head good naturedly. Delilah, inured to Daddy’s temper, which was prone to swelling and flagging like a sail deprived of a sudden burst of wind, ignored him from the kitchen.
Equally nonplussed by this outburst, too commonplace and fleeting to be any kind of deterrent, I pointed to the bag again. “What are those?”
Read the full manuscript for CARELESS DRIVER, only on blcklst.com.
Gina Marie Guadagnino's debut novel, The Parting Glass, was published by Atria Books (Simon & Schuster) in Spring 2019. Her previously published work includes three short stories: "Whisper in the Shadows," which appears in The Morris-Jumel Mansion Anthology of Fantasy and Paranormal Fiction; "In the Sky She Floats," which appears in Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction) for the Discerning Drinker (and Reader); and "From the Inbox of Madness," which appears in Welcome of Miskatonic University. When not writing fiction, Gina is an independent scholar in the field of Irish history. A New Yorker by birth, she now resides in Maine with her family, her library, and her cats, Kenning and Litotes.
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