Wade Callahan has spent thirty years becoming one of the biggest stars in country music. He has the records, the money, the enormous ranch in Angel Fire, New Mexico, and a life built around people who know exactly who he is. But with his spring tour finished, Wade and his longtime driver and friend, Tommy Raines, are simply heading west when their aging tour bus breaks down in a pounding rainstorm on Highway 90 outside the little Southeast Texas town of Mercy.

The timing couldn’t be worse. The bus can’t be moved safely in the storm, every motel room in town is filled because of a refinery turnaround, and the repair may take days. Local mechanic Earl Thibodeaux finds Tommy a place to stay at his shop and deposits Wade in the spare bedroom of his cousin Susan Broussard—a woman who knows perfectly well who Wade Callahan is and nevertheless expects him to get up on time, stay out of her way in the kitchen, and help peel potatoes for lunch.

Wade expects the usual commotion that follows him everywhere: autographs, photographs, questions and people making a fuss. Instead, he finds a family and a circle of friends who mostly go about their lives. He meets Susan’s husband Ray, their son Caleb, Earl and the people around him—and Melanie Jackson, the attractive next-door neighbor whose first encounter with the famous Wade Callahan is finding him sitting at Susan’s kitchen table with a potato peeler in his hand. Nobody seems terribly interested in treating him like a celebrity, and Wade isn’t quite sure what to make of it.

As one repair delay becomes another, Wade is drawn into the ordinary rhythms of Mercy: meals around a family table, neighbors dropping through the back door, fixing things around the house, conversations by the pool, and preparations for a Fourth of July gathering. The contrast becomes impossible for him to ignore. Back in Angel Fire waits a 26,000-square-foot home where he may spend the holiday alone. In Mercy, almost by accident, he’s stumbled into something his fame and fortune never managed to buy.

Ten days weren’t supposed to matter. They were only supposed to be the time it took to fix a bus. But by the time Wade Callahan finally leaves Mercy, Texas, the question is no longer whether the bus can be repaired. It’s whether Wade can go back to the life he had before it broke down.

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Book Two of the Trilogy

Fourteen years after the events of When the Moon Betrayed Us, Sally Walker is no longer the wild young woman cruising the square and running blackjack games with railroad men. She has built a successful career in Houston banking, married, raised a family, and seemingly left that part of her life behind.

Then her grandfather, Poppy, asks her to help straighten out the collection of properties, investments, and businesses he has accumulated over a lifetime. What begins as an exercise in organizing a surprisingly large family fortune soon produces questions. Some of the numbers don’t make sense. Some of the people involved don’t want Sally asking questions. And one trail leads toward Galveston and names Poppy hoped never to hear again.

Tracks of Fortune is the second book in the trilogy—a story about family, money, loyalty, reinvention, and the long reach of choices made years before. Sally has spent fourteen years building a new life, but the past she thought she’d escaped isn’t quite finished with her yet.

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Book One of the Trilogy

It’s 1976, and life is still supposed to be fun. A young pre-law student with a hot-rod Mustang drifts between college, a part-time radio job, two very different young women, and blackjack games that begin as harmless entertainment. Then there’s Frenchy—an aging Cajun cab driver with mysterious connections, an unsettling ability to know things he shouldn’t, and a warning that makes it clear the games may not be so harmless after all.

Soon the stakes are rising, railroad men are bringing serious money to the table, and a man who played in one of the games turns up murdered on the tracks. Somewhere amid the danger is Sally: beautiful, free-spirited, unpredictable, and becoming far more important to him than he realizes until it may be too late.

When the Moon Betrayed Us is the first book in a trilogy—a story of youth, love, bad decisions, missed chances, and the people who can disappear from our lives without ever quite leaving them. Sally’s story continues decades later in Tracks of Fortune.

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J.T. McClendon has spent decades behind the counter of J.T.’s Emporium of Oddities, watching people come through the door carrying things they can no longer afford to keep—or sometimes things they can no longer bear to keep. A widower in his fifties, J.T. has learned not to ask too many questions.

He gives people a fair price, listens when they need somebody to listen, and understands something most people don’t: very few people pawn things that mean nothing to them.

But J.T.’s shop isn’t quite an ordinary pawn shop. After the doors are locked and Main Street grows quiet, the things on its shelves remember. An old violin remembers being played. A pocket watch still believes in promises. A wedding dress carries the memory of a dance that never happened. A guitar remembers one perfect night. An old revolver would prefer to forget what it knows, while a cheap plastic robot is still trying to make sense of human beings.

They don’t speak to J.T. in words, exactly—but gradually he begins to suspect that the objects people leave behind may be holding onto considerably more than dust.

At the center of it all is J.T. himself, still living with the absence of his wife Rebecca, and Darlene Mercer, the woman from the diner across the street who keeps finding reasons to bring him pie and make sure he hasn’t decided crackers constitute supper. Around them pass ordinary people carrying small emergencies, disappointments, secrets and pieces of their lives.

Sometimes an object is sold. Sometimes it’s reclaimed. And sometimes getting an old possession back where it belongs seems to change the shop itself.

The Pawn Shop sits somewhere between small-town fiction, gentle mystery and the supernatural without quite belonging to any of them. It’s a story about memory, grief, second chances and the strange importance we attach to ordinary things—built around one simple question:

What if the things we leave behind remember us long after we’ve forgotten them?

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It begins with a telephone call to a Galveston radio station. A young woman named Alice calls the afternoon disc jockey to request a song. She’s just waking up because she works nights as a dancer, and after a few minutes of talking, he chooses Bob Seger’s Mainstreet for her. She calls again. Then again. Before long, he’s waiting for the sound of her voice—and wondering about the woman who belongs to it.

When they finally meet, Alice isn’t anything like the woman he imagined. She’s quiet, intelligent, and determined, finishing nursing school while dancing three nights a week to pay the bills. What begins with coffee and pie grows into an unusual friendship, and eventually something much deeper. Alice becomes part of his everyday life—and one of the first people to encourage him to put his stories and observations on paper instead of letting them disappear into the air after a radio broadcast.

But careers move forward, people move away, and life doesn’t always preserve relationships as we expect. The years carry them toward different cities, different marriages and different families, yet the friendship survives. So does an old piece of film: Alice dancing in the moonlight in front of his apartment window, captured during a time when neither of them could possibly know how much their brief years together would matter decades later.

She Danced in the Window is a story about love without possession, friendship that survives distance and time, and those seemingly insignificant moments that quietly alter the rest of our lives. Sometimes a person doesn’t stay—but what they leave behind does.

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Some stories are invented. Others come from memories that have hung around for decades waiting to be written down. Short Stories, Poems and Observations wanders freely between the two, through baseball diamonds, radio stations, old photographs, family, Texas and Louisiana, love, loss, growing older, and the occasional absurdity of everyday life.

The collection moves from facing Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller and childhood evenings helping repair old radios, to stories about a father, a broadcasting career, baseball, cheeseburgers, old friends and moments that seemed ordinary when they happened but became more important with the passing years.

There are poems and reflections alongside stories, and enough humor mixed in to keep the whole thing from becoming overly respectable.

It begins, however, with something quieter. In “All the Lies I Told My Wife,” eighty-year-old Mike sets the table on what would have been his fiftieth Christmas Eve anniversary with Clara. She is gone, but he pours the wine anyway and begins confessing all the lies he told her during their marriage—the terrible lasagna he praised, the fishing trips he pretended to enjoy, the money he shaved off the reported price of guitars and hot rods, and the times he told her everything would be all right when he was actually scared to death.

One by one, the funny little lies give way to something else: the truth about a long marriage and all the things people sometimes don’t say until there is nobody sitting in the other chair. And there was one thing Mike never lied to Clara about. He loved her. Every day, every moment. And he still does.

Short Stories, Poems and Observations is less a collection about any one subject than a collection about looking back—sometimes laughing, sometimes shaking your head, and sometimes discovering that an ordinary memory wasn’t ordinary at all.

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