Father to the Man by Barbara J. Olexer
If the boy is father to the man, Keith Kovacek had two fathers, himself and his identical twin brother, Kurt. The twins are about to graduate from high school as the story opens. Life in their small town of Ashland, Oregon, is good and the boys look eagerly forward to whatever life has in store for them, confident of their ability to meet whatever the future holds. Disaster strikes when Kurt is killed in an accident as he and his pregnant sweetheart, Merrilee Corbin, are on their way to be married.
Keith is unwilling for his brother's child to be aborted or born a bastard and given up for adoption so he talks Merrilee into marrying him. Her parents hated Kurt and they easily transfer that hatred to Keith. Merrilee's pregnancy is difficult and Mrs. Corbin is delighted when the baby is still-born. With the reason for their marriage gone, Merrilee divorces Keith and they go their separate ways.
After obtaining his degree in architecture, Keith returns to Ashland to practice. He and Phyllis Rowe fall in love, marry, and produce a daughter. When Lindsay is three, the marriage falls apart and Phyllis leaves Keith for another man. She leaves Lindsay behind and moves away so that Lindsay grows up without any further contact with her mother. Keith adores his little daughter and delights in her company. He hires a housekeeper and they manage well enough until Lindsay's second year of high school. Then his love for Lindsay and his determination to help her through the challenging years of adolescence force Keith to confront issues of responsibility that he would much rather duck. The pregnancy of one of his girlfriends brings Keith full circle to deal with the same problems that he dealt with vicariously for Kurt twenty-odd years earlier.
Soft cover, 299 pp., large print, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9800514-1-4
pBook $17.95, eBook $4.95
Review
Father to the Man is a true tragicomedy. Keith Kovacek is a big frog in a small pond, together with his identical twin, Kurt. The boys and their bosom buddy have a hilarious running feud with a cop that amuses them much more than it does the Law. The twins get into a fight with some movie types over a calliope, of all things. This is basically a coming-of-age story and after Kurt is killed in an accident, Keith has to grow up for both of them. He becomes a single father whose adorable little daughter brings him joy and laughter. Lindsey is a handful and she knows exactly how to manage her daddy. His maturity gets side-tracked but when Lindsey is an adolescent, Keith is forced to grow up along with her. This story is sad and funny and sweet and thoroughly enjoyable. Set in beautiful
Excerpt It wasn't until the night before the Winter Formal that they tangled with Officer Simonson again. They knew that he was looking for a chance to nail them for something and it had a nuisance value. For one thing, they had to keep their driving speed down almost to the legal limit, especially in the vicinity of the old barn. For another, they had to be very circumspect about drinking, which meant that they had to find a couple of new spots. Lithia Park ought to have been safe but they knew that Simple Simon would have enlisted the municipal cops to help him in his vendetta. So they'd had to go farther into the park, which was inconvenient, or up Lora came over from Fort Klamath the Friday afternoon before the dance to stay with Merrilee. Keith had broken up with Carla Springer and was dating Jackie Bartolini. The three couples were together in the twins' car when they put their latest plan into operation. Taking back roads, Kurt drove as near to the barn as he could and parked in a disused lane, behind a stack of hay bales. Leaving the girls in the car, the three boys advanced stealthily to the barn. Jazzy and Keith went along one side while Kurt crept along the other. A couple of nights earlier, they had attached a hasp to the doors. Jazzy carried a brand new padlock. Through the cracks between the shrunken boards, they could make out the outline of the patrol car parked just inside the doors, nose pointing out, ready to leap into pursuit of any malefactors who might happen along. Keith and Kurt swung the doors closed and Jazzy snapped the padlock through the hasp. Gasping with suppressed laughter, they listened a moment to Officer Simonson as he jumped out of the patrol car and hammered on the doors, yelling impotent threats. "Come on," Jazzy said. "He won't keep that up for long. He'll be radioing for help in a second." The boys hurried to put the second part of their plan into action. About a quarter of a mile from the haystack where their car was parked, there was a dirt road, just a track, really, to allow the farmer access to his fields. It was so dry that the dust was deep and powdery. They figured that sooner or later Simple Simon or one of his brother officers would come down the road, looking for them. They crouched down in the shadow of a huge mound of blackberry vines to wait. In a few minutes they heard a siren and knew that help for the cop was on the way. The siren got louder and louder and then stopped. A few minutes later two sirens ruptured the silence of the night. One raced down the highway away from them, the other shrieked up the secondary road toward them. Quickly, the boys jumped up and scuffled their feet madly in the deep dust at the end of the access track. They retired back to their shadowy hiding place and enjoyed the spectacle of Simple Simon racing past the cloud of dust, slamming on his brakes, and backing up to drive into it. As soon as he was past, the boys ran for their own car. The girls were in an agony of suspense, wondering what the sirens meant and if they were about to be arrested and sent to juvenile hall. Along with that picture was the picture of their parents and how on earth they were going to explain their descent into juvenile delinquency. When the boys got into the car, the girls bombarded them with questions, which the boys were laughing too hard to answer. The girls demanded to know what had happened but the boys were intent on the final phase of their operation. "Let's go," Kurt said. "Even Simple Simon will eventually begin to wonder why there was such a big dust cloud at the end of the track and none anywhere else." "He'll be back this way any minute," Jazzy agreed. Keith drove the car, without lights, slowly over the pasture to the barn. He backed in as far as he could and killed the engine. Kurt broke out a case of beer and the boys told and retold how they made their great coup. The girls were wide-eyed with admiration and pleasurable excitement and apprehension. They drank beer and listened to the cop come racing back down the road onto the highway. They whooped and shouted and forgave Officer Simonson his sins against them in their jubilation over their own cleverness.
To purchase: click here to access our order page or click here to order from Amazon.com. In the Amazon.com search box, choose Books and type in Olexer; that should bring up all of our books listed on the site. For an eBook, click on this Scribd.com URL: http://www.scribd.com/doc/17283975/Father-to-the-Man-?
