Excerpt from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She was looking for the other man, the fellow her own age or a little younger, whose name she did not know. He had got into her head, though all he'd done was take her pulse. Still, he did that caressingly, the tip of his finger a bow against the stringed instrument of her wrist.

PHEBE PICKERSGILL, HERMANN SWETTMAN, SUSANA PETERSON, DELILAH FOREST, wife of, daughter of, aged 81 years, aged 18. Bertha Truitt thought they, the dead, were just the same as her, they'd also gone onto the next life. Or else the dead were the people she'd left behind, all life spans ending this date, this year, everyone she'd once known dead except her, a convenience. She could astound herself sometimes with the sudden iron of her heart. Cast iron, ringing like an anvil. Not all the time. At all important times her heart was flesh.

She thought, When I finish building Truitt's, that's when I'll find him, and that was true, nearly to the day.

She saw him in the cemetery, walking the avenue of willows that led to the ornamental pond at the center of the park, and then her heart was neither iron nor flesh but pond, ready to receive and conceal anything tossed into it. He was a handsome, tubby, mustachioed black man, in a green suit with an orange windowpane check. The expression on the man's face—he hadn't seen her yet—was thoughtful and pleased, full of a self-kindled light. She felt a plunk in the pond of her heart and went to him.

June. The sun whetted its rays on the gravestones. The fish in the ornamental pond didn't know they, too, were ornamental. They swam up to catch the light.

"Hello," she said.

He said, in a voice quiet as a comb, "I knew you'd turn up eventually." One wing of his black mustache was longer than the other. There was nobody looking after him. "I am glad to see that you are well."

"I am." She couldn't think of the next thing to say, so she offered to give him a reading. A reading? Of your head: phrenology.

"No thank you," said Doctor Sprague.

"Why not?"

He gave her a careful look. Later she knew all the angles of this particular expression, the subtle widening of the eyes, his condescending affection, the way he bore the burden of knowing too much. He was a man of facts. Even his poetry was highly accurate. He said, "Phrenology is not science."

"But it is!" said Bertha Truitt. "There have been many words written on the subject."

"Words are not facts. A man who requires inferiors will find his own head superior, he will write encyclopedias on the subject."

"But you have a splendid head," she said.

"Your Dr. Fowler would not say so, on account of my race."

"Oh!" she said. "Truly? Then he would be mistaken."

She was giving his head a look of admiration and hope, and nervousness, so he took off his derby and aimed his head at her. His splendid head. He liked to think he was immune to compliments, but he wasn't.

This was a long time ago but they were still not young. Bertha, particularly, was not. She would be older till she died.

She read the territory of his scalp not through the close-cropped hair but beneath it. The back of his neck smelled of bay rum, his windowpane coat of tobacco. No, don't smell, she reminded herself. That tells you nothing.

People misunderstood phrenology, thought Bertha. It was exercise. The stevedore, lifting a great deal of weight, changes the shape of his torso; the philosopher who lifts heavy thoughts, the shape of his head. Look at the portraits of Benjamin Franklin in his early years and at the end of his life, see the difference. Look at Dr. Sprague's magnificent forehead, knotted with thought, evidence of all his education, the poetry he wrote, the patients he saved. She went to the knobs at the back of his head, to the prominences, as was her habit.

His area of Amativeness was well developed, as was his area of intelligence. His Alimentiveness was worrying. His Self-esteem was very bad indeed. His Hope—but now she could discern nothing abstract. Was that a scar? What had happened to the man?

Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.