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    Proof of God
    Proof of God
    Proof of God
    Ebook51 pages52 minutes

    Proof of God

    By Holly Goddard Jones

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    About this ebook

    In Girl Trouble, acclaimed writer Holly Goddard Jones examines small-town Southerners aching to be good, even as they live in doubt about what goodness is.

    A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant--with his child. A lonely woman reflects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.

    In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.

    Written with extraordinary empathy and maturity, and with the breadth and complexity of a novel, Jones's stories shed light on the darkness of the human condition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 1, 2009
    ISBN9780061966477
    Proof of God
    Author

    Holly Goddard Jones

    Holly Goddard Jones's stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best American Mystery Stories, and various literary journals. She is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

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      Book preview

      Proof of God - Holly Goddard Jones

      Proof of God

      a story from Girl Trouble

      Holly Goddard Jones

      logo.jpg

      For Brandon and my father:

      two good men

      Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

      —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

      • Contents •

      Cover

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Proof of God

      About the Author

      Acknowledgments

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      • Proof of God •

      When Simon turned sixteen, his father gave him his old car: a red ’88 Corvette, just four years off the showroom floor. Corvettes, his father insisted, were the only American vehicle worth a goddamn anymore, and made in Bowling Green, Kentucky, at that. Good for the local economy. Also, as a businessman and a local leader—a pillar, he’d say sometimes, if he was shitfaced—looking like a success was important. I’m a walking advertisement, he’d tell Simon’s mother, who’d pretend she hadn’t heard the same bellowed proclamation a dozen times already. Folks see me living high and know I must sell the good stuff.

      Good stuff it wasn’t. Jefferson Wells owned a small chain of furniture stores with locations in Kentucky and several surrounding states, and what he dealt in could only be called furniture by the most generous of observers: chipboard entertainment centers with plastic veneers meant to mimic the look of wood grain; kitchen chairs with metal legs that would start to bow upon too many sittings. The name of the chain—Wells Brothers Furniture Company—was also crap. Simon’s father didn’t have a brother. He just thought the name sounded old-fashioned, established, and so he put it on all of his stores in heavy Old West lettering. He told Simon that he might change the name to Wells and Son if Simon minded his p’s and q’s and got through a business degree at Western, and back then Simon had considered that more of a threat than an offer. He wanted to help the old man sell junk like he wanted a hole in the head.

      A few weeks after Simon’s sixteenth birthday, some guys from his high school trashed the Corvette. He’d been driving it to school every day, feeling good: folks at Bowling Green High School paid attention when he walked down the hall now; heads turned. One day, a couple of seniors, football players, asked him if he wanted to go down the road to G. D. Ritzy’s with them after final bell, and Simon agreed, too dazed to do much more than nod and croak out a yes. This is how things change for a person, he’d thought, walking out BGHS’s big double doors with two of the most popular guys at school on either side of him, like bodyguards. He wished his father could see him. They rode in the Corvette with the windows down and the radio blaring Aerosmith; he wouldn’t remember the song later, not for sure, but it was one of the ones with Alicia Silverstone in the video, who was, Kevin Britt proclaimed in the car that day, hotter than sin.

      They ate burgers and string fries, drank giant chocolate milk shakes in a dining room decorated with photos of ’50s and ’60s rock stars. Simon paid. The two older boys talked about Friday’s game and about Sheila Foster’s enormous tits. Just wanna get my face between them, Ray Hunter said, putting his hands out in front of him in a honking motion, shaking his face vigorously side to side, so that his considerable jowls trembled. They all laughed. When the food

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