Excerpt from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Viney can’t for the life of her imagine what’s gotten into him. The mayor is usually so easygoing, a model of the compromising spirit. It’s one of the many reasons they’ve stayed together for so long.

Many positive things could be said of Viney’s late husband, Waldo, but a flexible nature was not one of them. They had sex in the same position their entire married life, and Waldo required some form of red meat at every meal. He’d choke down a slice of turkey at Thanksgiving, but that was the extent of it. Chicken? “Dirty birds,” he’d say, although that didn’t keep him from eating eggs fried in butter eight days a week. Fish? Forget it, even when his friends brought home fresh perch from the Big Blue. It was meat, meat, meat with Waldo, which is why— Viney knows this for a fact—he dropped dead of a massive heart attack when he was only thirty-two years old, leaving her a young widow with four kids. He had a beautiful body. She’s still mad at him.

The window needs cleaning. They haven’t had a good rain for days— although Viney’s oldest daughter said it sprinkled up in Omaha yesterday. The topsoil is parched, the wind has been relentless. There’s dust on everything. Viney takes up yesterday’s newspaper and her spray bottle of water and Coke and gets to it.

The picture window is a relatively new addition. Waldo installed it back in 1962, not long before he collapsed in the parking lot of the Surf’n’Turf, where they’d gone to celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Waldo was handy, that was one of his attributes. He made a lot of improvements to the house when he was alive. Up and down ladders, hammering, hoisting, sawing, drilling. All those comforting male noises.

Alvina Closs has been a widow longer than she was married. She’s been an adulteress longer than she’s been a wife. She would have dried up for sure, grown shut down there—and in her mind and heart, too— if it hadn’t been for Llewellyn Dewey Jones, and Hope.

Welly comes back downstairs and goes out through the kitchen door, not exactly slamming it but giving the action just enough oomph to set the door harp clanging overenergetically. What’s wrong with him? Viney hears him out in the backyard, thumping his shoes together, clearing off the dirt between the spikes. She pictures great bricks of dense sod being flung about the yard, and then falling into a serene, elliptical orbit with Welly at the center: a small angry god in argyle socks, giving birth to a new solar system in which the terrain of every planet is an immense, impeccably groomed PGA golf course.

Viney resumes window-cleaning. She does a few nasolabial stretches and waits for Welly to reappear. Surely he won’t leave without patching things up.

Viney’s house is one of the oldest in town, if not the finest or fanciest: a whitewashed two-story saltbox built back in 1910 by her greatgrandfather as a wedding present for her grandparents. Her mother, aunts, and uncles were born here, as was Viney, as were Viney’s four children. She keeps her house, and Welly keeps his, even though they’ve been sleeping together since the nation’s bicentennial. In part, it’s for appearances’ sake—but it’s also because the house provides Alvina Closs with a sense of personal and historical continuity. Frankly, she’s never cared a good goddamn what people think of her and Llewellyn and their unusual arrangement, and she’s always deeply regretted the fact that Welly and the children didn’t move in here after Hope went up.

But that’s a sore subject and another story entirely. Welly is in the attached garage now—another of Waldo’s contributions— opening the garage door with the remote. Maybe he won’t come back inside to say good-bye after all.

Excerpted from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos. Copyright © 2009 by Stephanie Kallos. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.