Excerpt from What Is Left the Daughter by Howard Norman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the heart of winter the following year, Widow’s Walk played in Halifax and I went to see it with my parents. Just after the opening credits, Reese Mac Isaac appeared on screen. She played a hotel switchboard operator! “Hold on, please,” she said, and listened through an earpiece. “I’m sorry, your party is not answering. Try again later, please.” This scene took all of thirty seconds. Still, I was impressed, and though Widow’s Walk had no true movie stars in it and box-officewise it fell short of popularity, I imagined all sorts of associations. I wondered, Had Reese met Loretta Young? Had she met Tyrone Power? Had she met Jean Harlow? When the meager audience filed out of the theater, I said, “Pretty lucky of them to find someone with firsthand experience with switchboards like Reese has!”

Right there on the sidewalk my parents fell apart laughing. My mother said, “Darling, I hate to point out the obvious, but Reese Mac Isaac’s cameo took place in the switchboard cubby she actually works in, six a.m. to three p.m. every day but Sunday.”

“Hardly a big stretch,” my father said.

“I don’t care,” I said. “She did well with what she was given.”

A week after the funerals, as I lay on the sofa drinking whiskey to try and help me sleep, I realized that I didn’t begrudge my father that he loved Reese Mac Isaac. The same went for my mother, all received morality notwithstanding, for which I didn’t give a good goddamn, not in the least. I knew that my parents no longer loved each other. Since I was eight or nine I knew it, even earlier. Civility had become their mainstay. Civility bowed and curtsied — “Good night, dear” — as they went to separate bedrooms.

Excerpted from What is Left the Daughter: A Novel by Howard Norman. Copyright © 2010 by Howard Norman. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.