All characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
What others are saying about THE ACCIDENT AT 13th AND JEFFERSON:
Customer reviews on Amazon: Bonnie said “Fantastic Reading! This book just grabs you from the very beginning. Brenda is a very talented writer and her books are something that once you start reading, you just can't put it down! A truly wonderful book and I highly recommend it and Brenda as my new-found favorite author!!! Looking forward to more!!!”
Meggie said “Thought provoking. This was a great read. I just had to know what happened next! It really made me think about how easily life can change for any one of us.
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Dedication
To every “ordinary” middle class American and to his or her story which IS worth telling.
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Prologue
Miles below the surface of a very young planet, much later to be called Earth, chemistry and physics were at work although there were no humans to put their own names on these processes. Silica, aluminum, oxygen, and curious metals slowly became the little rock of our story, a tiny bit of granite in a formation the size of a small continent. The seas formed and gave birth to life, which spread onto the land and produced great reptiles. The great reptiles vanished, life found new forms and meanwhile the little rock of our story moved for hundreds of thousands of millennia with the shifting, sliding and buckling of the earth’s layers. The rock emerged into the elements for the first time in towering mountains later, after they were worn down to a speck of their former glory, to be called the Poconos. Ice ages later a glacier snapped our little rock from its birthplace, drove it a couple of hundred miles south and left it under twelve feet of rubble.
By the time the Roman Empire fell, countless storms had washed it into a stream, where a human of the Lenni Lenape tribe found it. He used it to build a fire-ring in which he roasted a whitetail deer for his family. It lay by the remains of the fire, eventually beneath two feet of dirt, until the last of his great-great grandchildren had grandchildren.
An oxen-pulled plow churned the rock up in a farmer’s field toward the end of the time when Pennsylvania was considered by certain humans to be part of England. It spent almost two hundred years in the wall of a stone barn and then another seventy years in one of the rock piles that became less and less recognizable as the remains of the collapsed barn.
Then one day in the third century of the existence of a nation named the United States of America, a man called Dwayne loaded cast off furniture into the back of his pickup truck. His wife would finally stop nagging, he hoped, if he delivered it to Goodwill. It was one of the hot gusty summer days that usually meant a thunderstorm was on the way. He tied a plastic drop cloth from his last paint job over the load and set off. He heard an odd puffing sound and looked into his rear view mirror. The wind was catching under the drop cloth and making it billow up as high as the roof of his cab. “Looks like some kind of goddamn demented mushroom, with them colors and all,” he said, aloud. He pulled over and lit a cigarette and studied the situation.
He knew he ought to retie the ropes better, but his buddies were already waiting at the bar. Sloppy job, this was. He noticed a mound of stones on the other side of the road and trotted across. He gathered an armful, took them back to the truck, and dropped them into the valley between a dresser mirror and a rocking chair to weigh down the drop cloth. He looked at the bed of the truck, and then at the rocks across the road. He spotted the rock of our story, which sparkled more than the others in the late afternoon sun. It was about as long as a small chicken egg, but the collapse of the barn had split it lengthwise leaving a pickax-shape useful for Dwayne’s purpose. Dwayne used it as a knife to poke some air holes here and there in the drop cloth and then tossed it toward a hill in his load where it slid down the drop cloth into the valley with the others.
Dwayne’s quick fix held the drop cloth down until he got into town and to Thirteenth Avenue and Jefferson Street. Someone living in the house on the corner must be having a party, he thought. There were blue balloons tied to the mailbox and the uprights by the front door. A forty-mile-an-hour wind gust met him as he turned the corner. The demented mushroom appeared again in his back window. The rocks clattered behind him in the street. Damn it. Goodwill was only six blocks away, so he decided not to stop.