Novel Excerpt: Happy Am I?
From “I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer”, Robert Lashley’s critically acclaimed debut novel.
It was good for the shop that you got Mrs. Eulalah and Aunt Estelle back together. You should run for office or try to be a diplomat for that shit. Swear to God, you were talking to them and engineering everything as if you were on C-SPAN. I don’t know if it’s gonna stick, but the end result is the shop loves you more than they did yesterday (and that they loved you a lot yesterday). Those two have too much history to be completely cut off. They talk a lot of shit to each other, but I can tell you, from knowing them both, that they are miserable when they have distance. Also, thank you for allowing me to quit the group by telling Dr. Everett that I had sufficient growth. You really did me a solid on that one.
Life at the shop is pretty fucking wonderful, but sometimes the blues gets me. It happened one night after work when Nona told me a little bit about the group she used to be in, but not in a direct way.
“Take out the electric piano from the woodshed,” she told me.
“We ain’t got no electric piano.”
“We do as of yesterday.” She threw me two dollars, “bring it in, then get us coffee cream smoothies from the stand out front.”
