The Annie Year. Stephanie Wilbur Ash
Booksellers love The Annie Year!
“Set against a backdrop of Iowa farm life and a burgeoning meth industry, The Annie Year bring to life a warm and wonderful cast of curmudgeonly characters and proves that friendship can save your life. Stephanie Ash makes a huge splash with this debut novel. The Annie Year needs to be on everyone’s 2016 reading list.”
—Pamela Klinger-Horn, Excelsior Bay Books
“The Annie Year is addicting and swiftly pulls you in to Tandy’s need for disruption in her small town life. Tandy makes many questionable decisions, and Stephanie Ash shows that they are often a necessary part of being alive. Funny and full of keen observations, I loved reading The Annie Year much the same way I love reading Judy Blume, James Cain, Tom Drury, and John Irving, other writers with the gift of being able to get us inside a character’s motivation. Ash has created a flawed character, not without judgment, yet we stick with her and root for her, as we should for ourselves.”
—Steve Salardino, Skylight Books
“Stephanie Ash has the voice. Ash’s story is to the Midwest like what Larry McMurtry does with Texas and Carolyn Chute with rural Maine.”
—David Unowsky, Subtext Books
The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2016 by Stephanie Wilbur Ash
978-1-944700-25-6 (ebook ISBN)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952137
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
For Randy and Karen and all the kids of Fayette County
In the absence of specific rules, standards, or guidance, or in the face of conflicting opinions, a member should test decisions and deeds by asking: “Am I doing what a person of integrity would do?”
—American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Code of Professional Conduct, Section 54, Article III: Integrity
Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy.
—Sherwood Anderson, “Tandy,” from Winesburg, Ohio
Contents
I. A Certified Public Account
Chapter 1
II. The Vo-Ag Teacher
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
III. The Sod House
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
IV. Dubuque
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
V. This is Business
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
VI. Faith
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The people in this town will try to tell you that the whole mess that was last year started with the new vocational agriculture teacher, but they would be wrong. I was there so I know the truth. In fact, through my own mistakes and failures, the number of which I readily admit to you is plentiful, I caused much of it to happen. Obviously I am in a better position to recount the events than a busybody pastor or a senile doctor or an out-of-work rail worker or an old, crusty farmer who, though immensely wealthy, operates with the social skills of roadkill.
Also, it is my profession to provide accurate accounting based on quantifiable facts. It is a profession I was raised into and have been making a reasonable living at for nearly twenty years. I have spent my entire life correcting the accounting mistakes of those very people I just mentioned. So, ask yourself: Whom among us would you trust?
It did not start with the Vo-Ag teacher, though I had heard there would be a new one, and, in the interest of accuracy, I must say that I was looking forward to meeting him. I was, in fact, curious about him. I had even asked those who had encountered him before me what their impressions of him were. I am a local taxpayer. It is perfectly natural for a taxpayer to be curious about the new public school teacher.
Plus, new people do not often come into this town with the stated intention of sticking around, as the Vo-Ag teacher had flagrantly declared to Silvia Vontrauer. “I will live out the rest of my days here!” he had told her. Such declarations were of great interest to all of us, though I don’t expect people like you to understand that.
It started when I purchased that big black sleeping bag of a coat, right before the high school musical and the Thanksgiving holiday, specifically to wear to the quarterly meeting of the Order of the Pessimists, which liked to meet before all the holidays that ask you to drum up renewed happiness for life.