Cover

Title Page

Copyright

SEND ME
A Dial Press Book / February 2006

Published by The Dial Press
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Portions of this book appeared in somewhat different form in the following publications: “Getting Heavy with Fate” in The Yale Review, “Ground Control” in The Iowa Review, “So Much for Artemis” in One Story, “Welcome to Utica” in Cairn, “That Daring Young Man” in Bloom.

The Dial Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ryan, Patrick, 1965–
Send me/Patrick Ryan
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33580-1
1. Children of divorced parents—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Parent and child—Fiction. 4. Divorced mothers—Fiction. 5. Florida—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.Y336 S46 2006 2005051987
813/.54 22

v3.1

Dedication

To Fred Blair

Send Me

1996

Somewhere between Rome and Dixie, he fell asleep behind the wheel. This had happened to his father once, long before Frankie was born: he’d drifted off just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, and when he’d opened his eyes, his car was somersaulting out of a ditch and across a field, the view through the broken windshield a rapid slide show of sky, grass, sky, grass, sky, grass. One of the doors came off. The backseat was torn loose and expelled. The bumpers, the hubcaps, the headlight rings, the trunk lid, and the jack shot out like shrapnel from a grenade. When the car finally came to rest on its wheels over fifty yards from the highway, it was so mangled that the state trooper who arrived on the scene was unable to make a visual identification of the vehicle’s year, make, or model. These details were learned from the young man sitting behind the wheel, dazed and disoriented, but with nothing more than a bruised elbow and a superficial cut on his forehead. “It’s a miracle of God,” the trooper had said, but Frankie’s mother, deserted by two husbands by the time she told him the story, had footnoted the remark: “More like dumb luck.”

Frankie’s luck—dumb or otherwise—held him steady as he dozed. When his head snapped upright and his mind pulled out of what had seemed like a long stretch of darkness, he found an early afternoon intensely radiant with greens and blues. He was on a road in the Conecuh National Forest of Alabama, both hands on the wheel, and he was centered perfectly in his lane.