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Over the years of writing and editing COMMUNITY DAY, I sent out more than 50 draft copies and asked for comments. Maybe the only area of consensus was that Pith is the best character.

Pith is the narrator’s best friend. He’s caring and generous. He’s simple and straightforward but wise. He’s down-to-earth and folksy.

But he’s also an alcoholic.

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In the first quarter of the novel, I play Pith’s drinking for laughs. He always has a red plastic party cup. He falls asleep on his lawn. He’s constantly crashing his golf cart into neighbors’ gardens.

He’s meant to be the perfect foil to the straitlaced narrator.

But I always imagined that Pith was deeper than just a good-time guy. I wanted to develop the sadness of his backstory to make his playfulness take on a different cast. I decided to pair his development with the unwinding of the narrator. My idea was to have the second quarter of the novel show that the narrator is more troubled than we thought and that Pith is more layered.

This is the focus of Chapter 13.

In the teeth of the pandemic, Pith invites the narrator to a night out at the Dew Drop Inn, a shady tavern in a swamp. Pith says they’ll “just take the edge off.” But Pith also wants to talk about the narrator’s erratic behavior, particularly his recent political writing and protests. As he tells the narrator once they’re seated:

“Yessir, yessir, I wanted to talk to you about all that. I’m thinking some of this business you’re gettin’ yourself into don’t make a whole lotta sense. We gotta keep it together. You know what I mean?”

Here, I wanted the reader to understand that Pith is more than jokes and that he cares about the narrator. And in the following paragraphs, Pith shows unusual kindness to a bartender.

Pith pulled out some stray cash and paid our tab. He then folded up an extra $20 bill, handed it to the waitress, and said quietly, “For the bartender, like usual.” Her smile was embarrassed but grateful.

And then:

Pith replied, “Well, you tell him my mama said hello, alright then? She does ask after him. Still talks about all that talent and potential. The good Lord must’ve given him my share!” The waitress blushed and chuckled.

When the narrator asks what that was all about, Pith brushes it off. When the narrator persists, Pith references a quote from The Great Gatsby about Tom Buchanan, the character who peaked early in life. Pith says:

“But the tragedy,” he said to the bottom of the glass, “is when acute excellence is limited at 18 and everything afterward savors of anticlimax.”

Yes, Pith is talking about the bartender. But Pith is also talking about himself—specifically his regrets about a life spent drinking (hence his speaking to the bottom of a glass).

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The narrator clues the reader into the importance of Pith’s drinking in this chapter by stating simply as they found seats at the Dew Drop:

We ordered. Pith must’ve been thirsty.

Then the narrator asks Pith about Nelly—the kind, nervous character who seems to dislike Pith.

When I jokingly asked Pith about the backstory of ever-anxious Nelly and why she seems to have it out for him (including snubbing him back at the park), he raised his eyebrows, frowned, and then tilted his head down with eyes closed as though he were about to say grace. Or confess his sins.
“Oh,” I said, getting it.
“Yesssssirrrr,” he drew out over several beats.
“Were you two serious?”
“First time I knew what love was, and that’s just being real. Honest-to-God connection. Sincere affection, I’d say.” I didn’t know Pith could be a softie.

Pith reveals that they were a near-perfect match. He could settle her nerves. She made him feel special. But Nelly broke it off.

“Nelly had plans, my man. Big plans. She was going to start with that first dealership and then grow it. She used to get starry-eyed about running a ‘transportation empire,’ she called it.” He smiled sincerely and used air quotes. “She had big hopes and ambitions. Great expectations.”

So what was the problem?

“And I had…” Pith stopped and looked at the empty glasses in front of him. I wasn’t sure what to say. I tried, “Sometimes the timing of these things just doesn’t work out.” Pith smiled at me kindly, finished off his current drink, and replied, “Yeah, but sometimes the clock and calendar ain’t to blame.”

Pith knows that his drinking was to blame.

I like the idea of developing characters by explaining their pasts after the reader has gotten to know them a bit. It’s an easy way to suggest why the characters are doing things now and imply what they might do in the future. It’s also a way to make sure characters don’t become one-dimensional. Characters should be as complicated as real humans.

I have four ideas along these lines for the prequel. The main female character, ebullient and steady, would be revealed to have suffered something terrible in graduate school. Another tears-of-the-clown thing.

The main male character, stoic to the hilt, would be revealed to have been a volcanic teen. A laughingstock priest would be revealed to be courageous and pure of heart.

But the fourth character—the primary villain—well, I kind of want to not explain his past. I want him to seem evil through and through. Bad from the cradle. But I would still need to figure out how that character develops. He can’t be a one-dimensional scoundrel.

Hmmm. TBD.