ON THE EDGE OF BEAUTY (working title) is a 100,000-word, dual-timeline literary novel structured as a nested triptych: Johnny’s 1981 and 2022 road trips are braided through Part I, Carmelita’s parallel 1981 story occupies Part II, and the narratives converge in Part III, set in 2022. Framing this three-part structure is a second triptych of omniscient, Latin-titled sections centered on Maria—INITIUM FABULAE, MEDIUM FABULAE, and FINIS FABULAE—whose three sections span the novel from beginning to end.

Readers of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter will recognize its collision of the sacred and the profane — grace arriving, as it often does, through violence and dark comedy rather than around them.

At sixty, widowed and alone, Johnny is about to pick up the loaded gun on his desk when the phone rings. It’s Dave — the best friend he hasn’t spoken to in forty-one years. Dave wants to repeat the road trip they took at seventeen: North Dakota to Tijuana. Johnny says yes — the first brave thing he’s done in years.

What neither man expects is a reckoning neither trip can outrun: Carmelita, the woman whose life collided with theirs, the family she married into, and consequences neither of them knew existed.

On the day of her salvation, Maria looked down from the one-room apartment above the restaurant, waiting for her daughter to appear. Across a short span of grass grew the largest tree in Tijuana. Planted a hundred years earlier by a traveler from the south, la ceiba, the tree of life, was allowed to live even as all around it other trees fell and painted buildings of concrete blocks and red bricks rose. A door slammed. Her daughter ran across the grass to the tire swing Mateo had hung from the lowest branch on her sixth birthday. Maria leaned out the window, taking care to not bump the jar of wax crayons on the sill. She watched her daughter climb into the tire, bare feet sticking out the front, thin bare arms hugging it from behind. “Carmelita…remember to wait…” she started to say but then stopped. Carmelita began to swing. Maria blinked slowly. The rumbling growl of a delivery truck muted. Her daughter, in the swing, receded. Only then did Maria turn around. She slipped from her nightgown into a low-cut, red crimplene dress, opened the door, and let Mateo in.

Red. You’re dead, the red dot at the back of the slide says with its one-eyed stare from the top of my desk. I had never kept guns in the house before because I always recognized the capacity to use them on myself because I’m a loser, but then Hannah fixed me for a while, and I thought it might be fun, so I bought a Beretta 9mm because it was big and had a double action trigger.
I let myself touch it, just cupping the grip right on the desk, not picking it up. The cool textured surface fits into my palm like it’s made for it. It’s time.

It was one of those days you knew something bad was going to happen. No wind. Hot and muggy like maybe you were in a rain forest without any trees and only a strip mall with a liquor, grocery and hardware store, in that order, and big-ass parking lot. We all had sweat rings under our arms that showed through the white shirts we had to wear, and, who wears a white T-shirt when you can wear one with Queen on it? Every time we wheeled out a cart of groceries or carried paper bags, theoretically stuffed with the heavy things on the bottom, our eyes were pulled to towering gray mountains on the western horizon. Problem was, this was North Dakota. The first tornado touched down south of New Salem at 6:00 P.M., twenty miles west of us. In a matter of minutes day turned to night, like maybe the end of the world was coming.
It was a Friday, and SuperValu was packed. Every cashier had a line at least five people deep, but they were clearing out fast. Thirty minutes later, while I was bagging groceries at the new girl’s counter, one of the more excitable carryouts came running in and screamed, “Tornado! Fifty feet away. Hit the ground.” Turned out, there wasn’t. The second one touched down south of Bismarck. Gary was outside at the same time and said it looked like maybe a nuclear bomb went off except there was a small space between the mushroom cloud and the ground, with a twisty dirty gray finger reaching down. Gary was older, our college-aged supplier, but he still got in trouble because he stayed out so long watching it and couldn’t set us straight. The manager was pissed. It took twenty minutes for the general pandemonium to subside, what with taking customers downstairs and all. By the time our shift ended at 11:00 P.M., it was back to hot and muggy with only a tornado watch hanging over our immortal heads. That’s the night we fell in love. Me and Dave. My best friend. So I guess it was a sign. A bad one, because it didn’t work out so great because I did a bad thing.

It was one week after my sixth birthday when I discovered my mother was a whore. Twelve years after that, I killed the man who made her so. It all happened because of a flower and me breaking two rules that day, and the only reason I found the flower was because of Mateo’s swing. He had hung a big old tire from the lowest branch of the giant ceiba tree outside the building where I lived in a small room with mi madre.
“This is just for you, Carmelita,” he had said, squatting down so he could look at me through the tire with his craggy face like a Maya chieftain who’d just cut out someone’s heart. “If any other niño uses it you don’t want, you tell me.” He frowned ferociously, his brows only slightly less bushy than the mustache curving around his lips. “You hear?” His hands tightened around the tire. I started to cry, then he stuck out his tongue, making the shape of a three-leaf clover, which made me laugh. He was trying to teach me, but I hadn’t learned it yet.
The morning everything changed I was in Mateo’s tire, at the highest point of my highest swing, leaning way back, my legs outstretched. That’s when I saw them, the flowers, framed between my toes I had painted the color of strawberries. Maybe I smelled them first. I remember that for sure because I don’t know how I could have seen them in the alley all the way across the street, but I did. I saw them in my mind. It’s like the flowers said my name.