The Perfect Love Song (22 page)

1. What do you think of the title
The Perfect Love Song
? Do you think such a song can exist? Why do you think the author only gives us the first few lines of the song? Try your hand at writing one and see what you think of the results!

2. In this story, the song that was so “perfect” had a negative effect on Jimmy’s life. Have you ever had something “perfect” come into your life, only to understand the negative influence it has on you or your loved ones?

3. Chapter one begins with the traditional Irish storyteller’s opening, “May stillness be upon your thoughts and silence upon your tongue! For I tell you a tale that was told at the beginning . . . the one story worth telling . . . ” The Irish have a rich cultural history of storytelling and of myths passed down from generation to generation much the way Maeve tells Kara her love story. Are all stories interconnected in some way? Do you think many modern stories are actually based on far more ancient tales and myths? And if so, what are some examples?

4. Callahan Henry’s fiction is a celebration of Southern low country culture and customs. You can often feel a novel’s setting through
the actual words used in telling the tale, the beauty in the language as it captures the spirit or energy of the characters, or the smell of the sea and salty air. What is unique about the setting of this book, and how did it enhance the story? How much do you feel that the narrative voice is both affected and informed by place? And how does the use of sea imagery like the small shell Charlotte brings with her to the church in Ireland play into the narrative?

5. At one point in the novel, the narrator says “There are so many things that work themselves into chance.” How do chance and destiny affect the characters in the novel as they make decisions and live and love? Do you agree that real life is the result of predetermined forces? Or can we affect our fate?

6. The author writes about complex characters finding their place in the world, of the love and heartache in friendship, and of family and home. How do characters change or evolve throughout the course of the story? What events trigger such changes? Where do you see these characters in six months?

7. Jimmy and Jack had very difficult childhoods, and we learn that they were in fact abused by their alcoholic father. How does the past imprint their present-day lives and hinder their futures? Are they ever able to escape the effects of the past, and, if so, by what means?

8. When Jimmy tells Jack he will miss the wedding ceremony, Jack remarks “That’s just great. Jimmy, always in time for the party.” How does the concept of responsibility toward family play into the novel? Weddings are often a time of joy but also of incredible stress for families. What do you think it is about weddings in
particular that can bring families closer together, or tear them apart?

9. The Claddagh ring appears throughout the novel. What is it about the ring that symbolizes the themes of love returning, reconciliation, and rebirth? How does this play into Jimmy’s conversation with his father? How does Jimmy’s need for his father’s approval and his reunion with his father influence Jimmy to return to Charlotte’s side?

10. The story outcome is greatly influenced by Maeve Mahoney, her stories, and her advice. Do you believe that those who have passed on influence our lives and choices? If so, how?

11. Music is an important theme throughout the novel. Music becomes a father to Jimmy and Jack when their father is not in their lives, and in turn, their band also becomes their family. How does involving yourself in art or music help to fill the void of a close personal relationship that is now lost? Do you think that music and art can be viable replacements for lost love? Or are music and art outlets for grief and loss?

12. The holiday season features prominently in
The Perfect Love Song
, and it is Christmas that brings everyone back together in the end. At one point, when Kara and Charlotte visit the nursing home, the narrator says, “Giving means having more.” How do you give back during the holiday season? Are there ways that we can inspire others to remember to visit the elderly in our communities and to truly understand that giving is a gift in and of itself ?

There are years in our lives that change us, mold us forever in some way. I was eight years old that Christmas, too young to really understand all the undercurrents swirling around me.

It is only now, fourteen years later, as I graduate from Michigan State University and prepare for a job in the health care industry, that I am able to look back with the clarity to see that Christmas for the miracle it truly was.

Back then, during that summer of 1994, with the trees leafed out and the sun warming my shoulders through a T-shirt that hung down to my knees, I didn’t realize disaster lay just a few months ahead. I only knew I wanted to buy the beautiful clock in the window of Tremont’s Antiques as a gift for my grandmother, Lottie Sparks.

I didn’t know that in trying to buy the clock, I would meet the people who would change my world, and my life would never be the same.

S
ylvia Winters was going home. She had only been back to the small Michigan town of Dreyerville once in the past eight years. Her mother’s funeral had demanded a return, but she had left the following day. Only a few close friends had attended the brief, graveside service held at the Greenhaven Cemetery. Marsha Winters had started drinking the day her husband disappeared. Abandoned with a month-old baby in a ramshackle house at the edge of town, she took up the bottle and didn’t put it down for twenty years. Neither she nor Syl ever saw Syl’s father again.

Times had been hard back then, but the years Syl had spent in the charming rural community surrounded by
forested, rolling hills held memories she cherished. She was a good student, and she was popular. In high school, a glowing future spread out before her: a scholarship to college and a career in nursing, a husband and children, the sort of life Syl had always dreamed of and never had.

But life was never predictable, she had learned, and oftentimes cruel. At nineteen, during her first year at Dreyerville Community College, Syl had fallen in love. She and Joe Dixon, the school’s star quarterback, were engaged to be married the summer of the following year. Syl couldn’t imagine ever being happier.

Then her world came crashing down around her, and all of her dreams along with it. A routine doctor’s appointment had brought news so grim that the week before the ceremony, Syl called off the wedding. She packed her belongings that same afternoon and left for Chicago.

If it hadn’t been for her mother’s sister, Bessie, Syl wasn’t sure she would have made it. Aunt Bess and Syl’s dearest friend, Mary McGinnis Webster, had been responsible for getting her through the most difficult time of her life.

But things were different now.

Syl studied the double yellow line in the middle of the two-lane highway leading into Dreyerville. The air conditioner hummed inside the car, while outside, the temperature
was hot and a little humid this late in the summer. Dense growths of leafy green trees lined both sides of the road, and a narrow stream wove its way through the grasses, bubbling and frothing in places, lazy and meandering in others.

As she drove her newly washed white Honda Civic toward the turn onto Main Street, a feeling of homecoming expanded in her chest. She recognized Barnett’s Feed and Seed, just down the road from Murdock’s Auto Repair at the edge of town.

Making a left onto Main, she spotted the old domed courthouse built in 1910 and the ornate clock tower in the middle of the grassy town square. A little farther down the street, Culver’s Dry Cleaning held the middle spot in the long, two-story brick building that filled the block on the left, and there was Tremont’s Antiques, right next to Brenner’s Bakery.

Sylvia smiled. The apartment she had just rented sat above the garage at Doris Culver’s house. Doris worked at Brenner’s Bakery, had for years. The middle-aged woman was practically a fixture behind the counter of the shop.

Syl’s friend Mary had found her the apartment. A job as a nurse in a local doctor’s office had recently appeared in the employment section of the Dreyerville
Morning News
, and Mary had convinced her to send in an application. After flying out for an interview, Sylvia had gotten the job.

She was coming home at last. She wasn’t sure what sort of life she could make for herself in the town she once had fled, but something told her coming back was the only way she could conquer the demons that had haunted her for the past eight years.

Doris Culver didn’t believe in happily ever after. She hadn’t since she was nineteen, madly in love, and found her boyfriend, Ronnie Munns, in the backseat of his parent’s ’55 Chevy with Martha Gladstone, the local librarian. Love, Doris believed after that, was for fools and dreamers, and she never allowed herself to succumb to its lure again.

At fifty-six, Doris Culver felt old, but then she had for most of her life. Her husband, Floyd, the retired owner of Culver’s Dry Cleaning, was a nondescript, balding man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and built birdhouses to fill up his empty days. Floyd was six years older than Doris, whom he had met when she came into his store with an armload of laundry. After cleaning her clothes for nearly five years, Floyd asked Doris out on a date. This July fifth, they had celebrated twenty-two years of marriage.

Doris felt as if it were fifty.

She rarely saw her husband except at dinner, which he ate mostly in silence. Afterward, he returned to his wood-shop in the garage at the back of the house, where he stayed until he trudged up to bed at exactly nine P.M.

Though the sale of Floyd’s business three years ago had provided them with a comfortable living, Doris had kept her job at the bakery, where she had been employed for years. She loved her job, especially decorating the cakes and cookies the shop made for holidays and other special occasions. With little else to fill her time, she went to work early and usually stayed past closing. Afterward, she returned to her two-bedroom, white stucco house on Maple Street, cooked Floyd’s dinner, cleared the dishes, and spent the rest of the evening painting ceramics.

It was a consuming hobby. Every table, every bookshelf, even the window sills, held miniature clowns, birds, horses, dogs, cats, vases, and pitchers all done in the bright colors Doris used in an effort to cheer up her lonely world. Instead, somehow the crowded rows of objects, often in need of dusting, only made the house more oppressive.

Doris was glad for the hours she spent at the bakery, where the fragrant aroma of chocolate-chip cookies and fresh-baked bread was enough to buoy her spirits. The shop on Main next to Tremont’s Antiques was a narrow brick
building with big picture windows painted with the name Brenner’s Bakery in wide, sculpted gold letters. Frank Brenner had died sixteen years ago, but the bakery, now owned by his son, remained a landmark in Dreyerville.

It was Saturday morning. Doris stood behind the counter wiping crumbs off the top when the bell chimed above the door, indicating the arrival of a customer. She tucked a strand of gray hair dyed blond under her pink and white cap and smiled at her next-door neighbor and her grandson, Lottie and Teddy Sparks, as they walked into the shop.

“Good morning,” Doris beamed. “How are you and Teddy today?”

Lottie set her shopping bag down on a little iron chair. “Darned arthritis has been acting up some, but aside from that, both of us are fine.” She looked down with affection at her grandson. “We’re kind of hungry, though.” Lottie was wrinkled and slightly stoop-shouldered and her hair was as white as paper. Still, there was always a sparkle in her eyes and the hint of rose in her cheeks.