The Loose Brick

Behind an old Carnegie library on Sixth Street, there is a brick that has never fit properly. Press the top corner and it slides out into your hands like a drawer. Two eleven-year-old girls discovered it on separate bad afternoons, in the alley where neither of them wanted to go home. They filled it with marbles and rabbit's feet and half a candy bar. Mostly they filled it with notes — hundreds of them, folded into fat little squares — because some kids need you to ask what's wrong, and some kids need you to not, and Amber and Sara always knew which one the other was. Then, at fifteen, Sara's family moved. No warning. No forwarding address. On a Tuesday the notes stopped being answered, and then there were eighteen years. The Loose Brick is the story of what happens in that long middle — of a locksmith who spends her life getting people back inside, and a woman who keeps a shop full of plants that everyone else gave up on. Neither one is waiting to be rescued. Both are doing the slow, unglamorous work of becoming whole: the Tuesday appointments, the learning to sleep through a night, the unlearning of the flinch. And it is the story of a sticking door, a dead wisteria that refuses to be torn out, and a snowy Sunday in December when forty-one carefully chosen people watch two women prove that family is not something that happens to you — it's something you build, on purpose, out of whoever shows up. Warm, funny, and quietly magical, this is a novel about survival that isn't grim, and a romance that isn't a rescue. It's for anyone who has ever grown crooked around a fence to reach the sun, and found somebody leaning the same direction. Some things only bloom when both of you are home.