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Back The Great Pretenders
Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise for The Great Pretenders
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. PART I
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. PART II
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. PART III
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-one
  29. Chapter Twenty-two
  30. Chapter Twenty-three
  31. Chapter Twenty-four
  32. Chapter Twenty-five
  33. Chapter Twenty-six
  34. PART IV
  35. Chapter Twenty-seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-one
  40. Chapter Thirty-two
  41. Chapter Thirty-three
  42. Chapter Thirty-four
  43. Chapter Thirty-five
  44. PART V
  45. Chapter Thirty-six
  46. Chapter Thirty-seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  51. Readers Guide
  52. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  53. Acknowledgments
  54. About the Author
  55. What’s next onyour reading list?

Terrence offered me his hand, and I took it. I felt his warmth penetrate not simply the flesh of my hand, but the very fiber of my being. I looked up into his dark eyes. A smile tugged at his lips, and his gold tooth gleamed. We did not kiss. We were at a funeral, after all. Everywhere around us I heard a collective intake of breath, of shock. Everyone, black and white, stared at us as though they had been turned to stone. Someone, Booker, I think, shouted, Don’t! Don’t do it! Don’t do it! I saw Leon go pale. I saw Denise’s red mouth gape with outrage. I saw Irene roll her eyes, smile at me, and shake her head, knowing this was the most romantic act of my life, but it was not reckless. Far from it. Terrence and I walked on by together, crossing both space and time toward a future that would challenge and reward us for the rest of our days.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In my family we take our movies seriously. Like Julia in The Great Pretenders, I took my eldest son to the movies when he did not weigh enough to hold down the seat. Bear sat through Gandhi—at age three. My youngest, Brendan, had seen The Bridge on the River Kwai three times before he was ten. They could sing all the songs from the Fred and Ginger movies, and they knew who wrote which tunes.

Every weekend we had marathon movie night because with the first royalties from my novel These Latter Days, I bought a VCR. I remember walking the aisles of the video store after we had plugged it in. I was overwhelmed. Hundreds—maybe a thousand movies! Blockbusters, obscure foreign films, classics, silents, comedy, noir, some I had seen recently, some I had seen as a kid, some I had never even heard of. All of them were suddenly mine to behold for $2.99. My sons, who were just little boys then, were a few aisles away, and I could hear them quarreling over which movies we would take home. I let each of them choose one. For myself, I was so paralyzed by the possibilities I could only walk out with Gaslight (1944) with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, a movie I had long heard about but had never seen.

But very soon our family trips to the video store required a bag to carry all the movies we rented. Our marathon movie nights were an education as well as entertainment, not just for myself but for my kids and their friends.