Loose Ends

A distraught Davis Banks arrives home for his mother’s funeral. Davis teaches poetry at a small college. He loves words — but not himself. His father had died some years before, and now Davis discovers a lot of little things in his mother’s house that don’t seem right. Where are the keys to her car? In fact, he realizes he doesn’t even know how or where she died. That night he visits his mother’s gravesite, dug next to his father’s. Near the bottom he discovers a man’s arm sticking out of the dirt where his father’s coffin is supposed to be. And when he finds out that his mother apparently died in a motel room with another man, he’s confronted with a myriad of loose ends thrashing about in a quicksand of details. With a poet’s feel for language, Neal Bower tells a story whose twists intrigue the reader as much as they do Davis.