A trilogy of sisterhood

Life goes on, and then it goes on some more. A novel may impose a beginning and an ending on the flow of events, but even a character’s death doesn’t mean his or her story is over. “Goodbye, Earl” is supposed to be an ending -- the third volume of Jo-Ann Mapson’s trilogy about hard-luck women who find sustenance and sisterhood on a 40-acre flower farm on California’s Central Coast -- but it’s clear, after we turn the last page, that Mapson could go on writing about these people forever.

For example, Mary Madigan Caringella, the central figure of Volume 2, “Along Came Mary,” is largely absent from this novel, which begins five years later. All we learn is that Mary has dumped “Rotten Rick” Heinrich, who in Volume 1, “Bad Girl Creek,” broke the heart of another farm resident, Nance, a Southern belle and anorexia sufferer. It’s easy to imagine Mary’s story being revived in a later installment, just as Nance’s story is in this one. Nance has married James DeThomas, brother of Phoebe, the owner of the farm, and is desperately trying to have a baby though she’s 45 and has had four miscarriages.

Phoebe DeThomas, who has heart and spinal problems and uses a wheelchair, is still mourning her almost-husband, Juan Nava, who died in a car crash on their wedding day, when she was already pregnant. Her daughter, Sally, is a demanding 5-year-old. Will Phoebe ever find love again? In “Goodbye, Earl,” she meets a charming disabled man, a fellow artist, but hates the idea of their being a cutesy crippled couple. Meanwhile, Ness, the HIV-positive African American blacksmith who was absent from Volume 2 -- nursing a gay friend, David Snow, who had AIDS -- is freed by Snow’s death to return to her friends on the farm, where a good-looking, enigmatic black man seems to be stalking her. And the farm, which Phoebe and the other women have struggled to make profitable, suddenly has competition across the road. Will the marketplace blight Bad Girl Creek like an untimely frost?

The “Earl” of the title is the wealthy bookstore-owning, guitar-playing boyfriend of Beryl Anne Reilly, who served time in prison for the murder of her abusive husband before finding refuge at Bad Girl Creek. Beryl has spent the five years between novels with Earl in Alaska. The zing has gone out of their romance, however, and once she mentions this to Earl, he disappears. Foul play or panic? The truth, when Mapson gets around to revealing it, isn’t particularly believable, but it achieves its purpose, which is to reunite Beryl with her girlfriends in California after a period of bewilderment and depression in which she is helped by an elderly Anchorage police detective and finds temporary solace in the arms of a Native whose cleft lip and flat feet are offset by his talents as a “bird whisperer.”

Birds and animals -- Ness’ horse, Nance’s dog, Beryl’s foul-mouthed parrot, the wildlife treated by rescue agencies -- are important in Mapson’s novels. They are beautiful and innocent; their troubles are mostly humans’ fault. Their situation echoes that of Mapson’s heroines, who are buffeted by all sorts of calamities but whose basic integrity is never in doubt. Men are a different matter. They are inherently suspect, and even the seemingly good ones, such as James and Earl, are on indefinite probation. The only really good men -- Juan and David -- are dead.

A key test -- which James passes and Earl flunks -- is whether a man pulls his woman away from Bad Girl Creek or lets her continue to partake of the entrepreneurial success, artistic ferment, fine food and unbuttoned conversation that the farm offers. It’s a haven whose unaffected warmth owes a lot to the presence of big money behind the scenes. Nothing chases the blues away like a bequest of oceanfront property in Big Sur. But the fact of warmth is undeniable. Though Phoebe, Ness, Nance and Beryl are edging into menopause territory, a younger generation is growing up among them, and the dead (including Phoebe’s Aunt Sadie, who left her the farm and whose gardening journal, full of plant lore, introduces every chapter) are as alive as ever. Having devoted as many words to these characters as Tolstoy did to “Anna Karenina,” Mapson may be tired of them. But her fans surely aren’t.