A Canny, Moving Slice of Small-Town Life

Laurie Hendrie, her publisher tells us, has worked as “a waitress, a firefighter, a chain-saw crew leader, a stonecutter, a disc jockey, a forest law enforcement officer, a ditch digger, a bartender, a painter, a 911 radio dispatcher and a bomb shelter saleswoman.” And if all this were not enough to prejudice the prospective reader in her favor, Hendrie also has the common sense and good grace to remark, as quoted in press materials, “I have yet to find much there worth writing about.” What the writer knows is that colorful-sounding experiences are not always as colorful as they sound, and even those that are do not automatically translate into arresting fiction.

Whether Hendrie’s interesting resume testifies to versatility or restlessness, one thing is clear: She has a pretty good idea how to write fiction. Her first book, “Stygo,” a collection of linked stories, showed her to be a deft practitioner of what might be called the gritty, laconically humorous Western style. Hendrie writes about people who have a tough, hard time of it but who are toughened rather than hardened by the process.

Rose Devonic, the heroine of “Remember Me,” Hendrie’s first novel, exemplifies the breed. Now in her 20s, she’s lived for most of her life in Queduro, a tiny town in the remote mountains of New Mexico. Once a mining town, Queduro now makes its living chiefly off the summer tourist trade. Most of its longtime inhabitants, of mingled Irish, Mexican and Amerindian ancestry, spend the snowy, isolated winters working on elaborate embroideries that are snapped up each summer by tourists. Intricately wrought, many of them based on patterns handed down from generation to generation, Queduran embroideries have become something of a collectors’ item.

Despite having grown up in Queduro, Rose is a perpetual outsider. She was the only one of her family to survive a bizarre auto accident; but even before that, the Devonics never fitted in. When Rose’s mother, deserted by her husband, was joined by her freewheeling brother from out of state, tongues began wagging. Rose’s Uncle Bob was a man with big ideas. Instead of embroidering, Bob wanted to sculpt high-quality, larger-than-life-size wooden Indians. Rather than embracing Bob’s plan as a clever way of enhancing the town’s status as a craft center, Quedurans saw Bob as a dangerous lunatic.

Now Rose, the sole surviving member of her clan, has been struggling to master the embroidery trade and spending winters in the cold cabin of the Ten Tribes motel managed by 68-year-old “Birdie” Pinkston, her crotchety, alcoholic, but fundamentally good-hearted mentor. But although Birdie is a fairly decent old fellow, his uppity, rich, teetotaling, septuagenarian sister Alice, who’s just come back to town after decades away, hates Rose. Birdie and Alice’s sister Florie was killed in the same car accident that took all of Rose’s family. Irrationally, Alice blames Rose for being the accident’s sole survivor.

If poor Rose is the quintessential outsider, hanging on to her temporary home and tentative livelihood by only a thread, Frank Doby, the town sheriff, is--or certainly seems like--the ultimate insider: not only accepted, but respected, trusted and well-liked by almost everybody in town. Indeed, one of the people who is fondest of him is Rose herself. As a young girl from a broken home, she spent much of her time hanging around the Doby house, where Frank and his kindly parents made her feel right at home. Time and circumstances have driven Frank and Rose apart. Frank has married another woman; Rose, who more recently ran off with a fast-talking Texan, is back in town with her tail between her legs, too proud and too lacking in genuine self-esteem to presume on their old friendship. Nonetheless, a bond endures between the two.

Will Frank and Rose reunite? While the reader (along with Frank and Rose) is wondering about this question, an equally interesting--and even more unusual--story line unfolds in the foreground, as the spiteful Alice attempts to drive Rose out of town and out of Birdie’s life. Events take an unexpected turn: Birdie has a stroke, and his bossy sister’s attempts to cope are dangerously undermined by her encroaching senility. Against her own better judgment, Rose comes to their rescue. Fortuitously, by this time Alice no longer knows exactly who or what Rose is. By turns bizarre, funny, sad and poignant, Hendrie’s account of this strange little household is entirely convincing.

Parts of the story drag, especially toward the end. But Hendrie’s ability to convey the texture and complexity of the interwoven, often tangled lives of people in a small town makes this an absorbing novel. “When it comes to handling local situations, son,” Frank’s father, the town’s previous sheriff, advised him, “you’ll find that peer pressure works just as well as handcuffs. Mostly better.” Hendrie displays a shrewd understanding of the ways in which people interact with one another.