Kindle Edition Amazon Larry Enright Larry Enright Category:  Literary Fiction Publisher: Lawrence Enright ISBN-10:  1479210005 Type: Fiction Pages: 354 Copyright: Sep 21, 2012 ISBN-13: 9781479210008 The story of a man trying to escape his past only to find himself in the most unlikely place.  A story of life, love, and a journey of a thousand years… It was Monday, May 19th, 1975. I’ll never forget that day. The Vietnam War had ended with the fall of Saigon that April, and the world was mired in one of its worst recessions ever. Unemployment in the United States was nearly nine percent, inflation even higher, and leadership lacking. The Watergate scandal had cast a smear across American politics, resulting in Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 to avoid impeachment, and his successor’s immediately pardoning him to close the book on an unhappy chapter in U.S. history. It was not a good time for anyone and a particularly hard time for the old Victorian town of Cape May. The crown jewel of the New Jersey shore had fallen into neglect and disrepair and was dying a slow death. Once the elegant summer home to presidents and kings, it had become the last refuge of the deposed. That’s where I met Tom Ryan. Tom was a king, or so he would have you believe, but unlike Richard Nixon, when Tom was dethroned, he wasn’t sent home with a slap on the wrist. He was sent to prison. He was a convicted draft dodger, but one of the lucky ones released early by President Ford as part of his mass clemency after Nixon’s pardon. The problem was, Tom had nowhere to go when he got out, so he took the money his dad mailed to him and spent it on a bus ticket to get as far away as possible to a place where nobody cared who he was or what he had done, a place where nobody cared about anything. That place was Cape May. As hard a time as it was for everyone, it was harder for me because that was the day I met Tom Ryan. I should have turned and walked away. I knew it when he first looked at me, but I didn’t, not my first mistake, but one that would make Monday, May 19th, 1975 the hardest day of my life.  This is the story of how Tom Ryan and I met and how things never quite work out the way you think. You might find a love story in here somewhere. You might not. You might find a message hidden in one of the nickel pop bottles collected by the beachcombers from some of the most beautiful white sand beaches in the world. You might even find a little mystery, but life is a mystery, isn’t it? Excerpt Tom Ryan was never one to let anybody else do the talking for him. There was a time when his friends would have told you he did too much of it, and had you bothered to ask, they would have pointed out that most of it was bull. You see, Tom grew up as the oldest of five children thinking he was king of the world, so not only did he do all the talking back then, but his rule was absolute. Ask anyone. There were only two ways of doing things in Tom’s kingdom: his way and no way. That’s just how it was. Things never stay the same, though, do they? Times change. People change, and Tom doesn’t have friends anymore. After all, there’s only so long a person will put up with that kind of nonsense, and it’s not nearly as long as it took Tom to catch on. He just kept pushing and pushing and pushing, until one day he pushed too hard. He wound up in jail, and his youngest brother, Harry, wound up dead. A little late, but Tom had finally figured it out. Now he doesn’t see himself as king; he doesn’t see himself as much of anything, and he doesn’t do much talking anymore. So why should you care about one more person who went down life’s crooked road? The world is full of them, more than you can count, and their stories are all pretty much the same. They had a choice just like everybody else. They just picked wrong. I won’t try and convince you that Tom’s is a story worth your time. I’m not sure it is myself. All I know is that I owe Tom Ryan everything. Of course, he would never admit to that, so if anyone is going to say anything on his behalf, I guess it’s me. His is a story about a journey to a place most of us have been to at one time or another. It’s not the kind of place you choose to go to willingly. You just end up there. It’s a story about a Cape May diamond. Legend has it that the Kechemeche Indians who used to live in Cape May were the first to discover them on what is now Higbee Beach on the southern shores of the Delaware Bay. They’re not really diamonds. They’re pieces of quartz worn so shiny and smooth that they resemble diamonds. The story the Native Americans told was that these rocks took thousands of years to make the four-hundred mile journey from the birthplace of the Delaware River to the mouth of the bay, and in that time they acquired the wisdom of the land, making them worth more than gold or diamonds to anyone lucky enough to possess one. The larger the stone, the more wisdom it could impart to its owner. The Indians used them as gifts and traded them to European colonists for food and liquor until the colonists drove them from their homes. Today, beachcombers collect them, cut and polish them, make them into jewelry, and sell them as souvenirs. Oh, they’re nice enough, but when you come right down to it, they’re just worthless castoffs that ended up on Higbee Beach with the rest of the things the river didn’t want. Tom’s journey began when he was drafted during the Vietnam War. His country told him it was his duty to fight. It was his turn, but he didn’t see it that way. He didn’t want to fight for them. He didn’t want to die for them. The truth was, deep down, the king was nothing but a coward. You can only imagine the things a man like that will try, the tricks he’ll pull out of his sleeve to get out of military service, but nothing worked for Tom, nothing but the one thing he’d never figured on — Harry. Harry was a kind and gentle soul and a joy to be around, but more to the point, he and Tom looked so much alike that people who didn’t know them often mistook one for the other. The fall that Tom was supposed to report for duty and Harry was supposed to go off to college, Harry stole Tom’s ID, left him his own, and headed off to war to fight Tom’s battle for him. He left without notice. He left without saying good-bye. All he left was a note asking Tom to take his place at college and pretend to be him, make the most of it, and when it was all over and he came home from Vietnam, things would go back to normal and no one would be the wiser. It was a dumb plan, a stupid thing to do. Tom could have stopped him. That would have been the right thing in most people’s minds, but he did what his little brother wanted because, in the end, being a coward trumped doing the right thing. So Harry went off to war and Tom went off to college again. He could have coasted through. He’d already graduated from college once, but to his credit, Tom did do his best, better than most, and they were in the home stretch of Tom’s senior year as Harry and the final year in Harry’s tour of duty as Tom, and it was looking like the crazy plan might just work when it all fell apart. Harry was killed in action. Now there was no going home for Tom. When he got the letter saying that Sergeant Tom Ryan had died a hero, his life was over. His little brother was dead, and Tom might just as well have been. When the authorities figured out what he’d done, he was convicted of draft evasion, and they traded in the king’s throne for a metal toilet seat in a cell in a minimum-security federal prison. They wanted to charge him with more. Even Tom thought he deserved more. Five years hardly seemed a fair price for a good man’s life. Funny thing was, Tom was released from prison after only two years thanks in part to Richard M. Nixon, a man himself dethroned and disgraced like Tom, but who also happened to be President of the United States, a man who, unlike Tom, insisted to the end that he was not a crook. When Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford succeeded him in the Oval Office, President Ford did what many thought was the right thing for the country. He pardoned Nixon to close the book on a unhappy chapter in U.S. history, but in doing so, was forced to grant clemency to all the draft dodgers in jail, all those who had tried to run from the war that had become Nixon’s fault in most people’s minds. So, Tom Ryan was set adrift again and washed up on Higbee Beach in Cape May. That’s where I first met Tom after his release from jail in 1975, in a little mom and pop restaurant called the Dew Drop Inn on Beach Avenue in Cape May, New Jersey. It wasn’t really an inn. The name was someone’s idea of a joke. To be honest, it wasn’t much more than a hole-in-the-wall. There were five booths along the windows that faced the ocean, a space near the jukebox where the owners, Mack and Mindy Wells, set up high-top tables during the summer tourist season, and a lunch counter that doubled as a bar. They served breakfast till five, and soup, sandwiches, and drinks until 2:00 a.m. When the kids were out of school for summer vacation, some nights they had live folk music. Anyone with the nerve could take the open mike and play as long as it was folk music. Mack and Mindy liked folk music. Bob Dylan was their favorite. They even had a framed, signed photo of him on the wall behind the counter taken when he showed up one night unannounced. Nobody recognized him until he sat down and started playing The Times They are A-Changin’ for the ten people sitting around drinking and talking. After that it became selection number one on the Dew Drop Inn’s jukebox and got played every night at five to let the regulars know that breakfast was over and the bar was open. Mack and Mindy Wells were an older couple. They’d lived in Cape May long enough to have seen it when it wasn’t just a rundown shore town, but that was a long time ago. In 1975, it was a place where you could find street after street of old Victorian houses, neglected, whitewashed, and boarded up, a perfect place for a nobody like Tom Ryan. Lucky for him, even nobodies have relatives. Mindy was his aunt, his father’s older sister. She was born in Ireland, but as Tom’s granddad used to say, she turned her back on the old sod when she married into the Crown. It didn’t matter that Mack was from Hoboken. Wells is an English name, an occupational name like Fletcher or Hunter. It comes from Wellman, which was the job of the man who saw to his town’s watering hole — fitting for a barkeep but not so much for the husband of an Irish lass. Tom had been in town for about a month. He was looking to start over. Imagine that — twenty-eight years old and looking to start over. Seems hard to believe until you imagine spending two of them in prison for being a draft dodger, and until you imagine being responsible for the death of your youngest brother. If you can imagine that, it makes perfect sense. It wasn’t a good time for anyone in 1975. The Vietnam War had finally ended with the fall of Saigon in April of that year, and the country was mired in one of its worst recessions ever. Unemployment had risen to nearly nine percent and the rate of inflation was even higher — not a good combination. Things were bad all over, so bad that President Ford pushed through a fairly sizeable tax cut that spring, but what good was that for the nine percent unemployed when they had no income to be taxed? Tom and I met Monday, May 19th, 1975 to be exact — a week before the official Jersey Shore season opened on Memorial Day and five years after the entire town of Cape May had been listed on the federal government’s National Register of Historic Places. That single act had come with such flourish and publicity and such promise for the once-beautiful little town that it had everyone in Cape May expecting a miracle, a miracle that never happened. Being historic didn’t attract any more tourists. It just added that word to the decaying shore town’s résumé of empty adjectives. The bottom line was that nobody wanted to pay thirty-five dollars a night for historic when all they got was a dilapidated room in an out-of-the-way town where the only thing going on was bad folk music at the Dew Drop Inn, especially when they could spend the weekend in Wildwood just up the coast. Wildwood had some of the best beaches in the world and a boardwalk that rivaled Atlantic City’s. It was a happening place with great seafood, and nightclubs and bars that catered mostly to the younger set, and if you weren’t part of the younger set, you went even farther away from Cape May to Ocean City: a family town, a clean town, a place that wasn’t a dead end. There were groups trying to change all that, but Cape May had gone a long way downhill, and it’s hard to turn around on the downhill when you’ve got no brakes. Tom was doing what he did every day at the Dew, sweeping the morning’s breakfast droppings out onto the sidewalk, and when I showed up, he held the door open for me. That was a nice gesture, so I smiled and thanked him. That was how it started. Had I known where that smile would lead, I might have kept it to myself. He nodded to me and swept the last bits of egg, bacon, toast, and home fries over the curb into the gutter where local strays and birds would have one last shot at them before the next rain. I took a seat in one of the booths and slid over to the window. He was watching me as I pushed my hair back from my face and cleaned the salt spray off my glasses. The wind had really done a number on me, and I probably looked like I had just blown in off the ocean. I knew he was watching me, or maybe it was the gray and murky North Atlantic, a sea filled with jellyfish and crabs, and other things you didn’t want to know about. When I looked up at him, he turned back toward the beach, and leaned on his broom, trying to look cool. A gray sky met the sea that morning like on a hazy, horizonless day in the desert where a mirage of waves laps an endless beach. Some gulls had been circling above and looped closer to the restaurant. A few of the braver ones landed in the street near the scraps and waited until Tom tamped the broom on the curb and came back inside to give them their space. His aunt, Mindy, was behind the counter making a sandwich. Tom put the broom away and sat down on a stool beside her. “Are you hungry, Tommy boy?” she asked, handing him a rolled up piece of bologna. “No, I think I’m going for a walk, Aunt Mindy.” His uncle, Mack, came in from the back, wiping his hands on a brown paper towel. “It’s going to rain in about an hour,” he said. Mindy looked at him sideways and went on with her preparations. “Oh, is that so? Since when did you become a weatherman?” “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” His laugh was deep and rich, but trailed off into a hacking cough. “You know what Doc Ellis said about your smoking, Mack Wells.” “It’s nothing. I just caught a little cold.” “That’s no cold.” “It’s a cold, and I’m down to a pack a day.” Mindy pointed both barrels of her twelve-gauge scowl at her husband. “I’m not hurting anybody,” he insisted. “Only your stupid, bullheaded self and everyone who loves you.” Tom got up to leave. “I won’t be gone long. I just need to get out for a bit. I’ll see you later.” Mindy handed him a slice from the tomato she was cutting up. “Going to Higbee again, are you?” It wasn’t hard to tell that Tom liked her smile a lot more than her scowl. “I guess. Maybe I’ll find you a great big diamond today, Aunt Mindy.” “Oh, wouldn’t that be nice.” Aunt Mindy and a friend polished Cape May diamonds and made them into jewelry, mostly pendants. They were the easiest to make: just polish the stone, drill a hole in it, and attach a silver chain. They sold them at the craft fairs up and down the coast. Tourists paid a lot for local native crafts. Of course they weren’t exactly real natives but then they weren’t exactly real diamonds either, just chunks of quartz that had been beaten smooth by a river for a thousand years and dumped on a beach. Higbee and Sunset Beaches were the best places to find them, along with other things that washed up after a storm. Mack planted himself at the counter, and Mindy served him his sandwich. “I don’t know what you see in that place,” he said. “The beaches are better right here.” He was right, the white sand beaches on the Atlantic side of the island were far nicer than those on the coarse and rocky Delaware Bay, but as Tom pointed out: “You can’t find Cape May diamonds down here, Uncle Mack. Besides, it’s quiet, and I like the walk.” “Cape May diamonds. Worthless junk.” Mack grimaced at his sandwich. “There’s not enough mayo on this.” “I made it just the way you like it,” Mindy said. “If you didn’t smoke so much, you’d be able to taste that, you big oaf.” “I do not smoke too much, you old cow, and there’s not enough mayo.” “Oh, it’s a cow, is it, you old goat? Is that what you say when I come back from the crafts with fifty dollars found money?” “Your little trinkets are a hobby, nothing more. The money’s right here, darling.” “Money? What money? This country’s so bad off that no one can afford to eat in a restaurant anymore.” “Oh, but they can afford to spend their grocery money on rocks? Was that what was in the soup last night?” The record changed on the jukebox, and Tom frowned at the song that began to play. “Well, are you going or aren’t you?” Mack said to him. “Take my slicker if you like. Just be back before five.” He pushed his stool back and muttered his way toward the kitchen. “What about your sandwich?” Mindy called after him. “Put more mayo on it. I’m going for a smoke,” he said and stormed out the back. “Is everything okay?” Tom asked Mindy. “He’s just worried,” Mindy said. “We all have our share of that.” “He just seems tense or something.” “He’ll be fine after his cigarette and the rest of his sandwich.” Mindy turned up the music and went back to her preparations. Tom looked across the restaurant at me. I was the only customer in the place, and I hadn’t been served. They’d been too busy arguing. He came over to my booth and waited, but I was more interested in looking out the window than in ordering breakfast. “Can I get you anything while you’re waiting?” he asked. The table hadn’t been wiped down, I didn’t have a clean place setting, and the menu was still wedged behind the napkin holder. I shook my head. “I just came in to sit down for a minute.” “How about a glass of water?” “No thanks.” He called to Mindy and pointed to the booth when she looked up. “In a minute, dear,” she said, placing another tomato on the cutting board. “Well, I tried,” he smiled feebly. “Thanks; it’s fine, really,” I said. Tom left the Dew and turned right, passing the windows in no hurry, watching me watching him leave. I could tell he was trying to figure out where he’d seen me before. Mindy came over to wipe off the table and was setting out a new paper placemat and silverware when he crossed the street and headed toward the ocean. The beach that day was an unfinished charcoal drawing lacking in definition and interest but for the ripples of light on the water. The artist hadn’t yet sketched in anyone other than Tom walking the beach. There should have been children tossing a ball around, or a woman in a wide-brimmed hat holding it on her head against a gusting wind, or even an arthritic old man playing fetch with his dog, but there wasn’t; just Tom on an otherwise bland seascape. I think he liked it that way. “Do you mind if I walk with you?” I had come up from behind. I guess I startled him. I apologized and pulled my baseball cap lower over my eyes against the glare. “That was a quick breakfast,” he said. “I wasn’t hungry. I told you I just needed to sit for a minute.” “Okay, you don’t have to bite my head off. Nice hat. Pirates, right? Are you from Pittsburgh?” “Maybe.” “What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t you know where you’re from?” The truth of it was, I didn’t. I turned to the ocean and looked down at my red tennis shoes, one with a white lace, the other brown. They had seen much better days. I wondered why I was wearing them. I didn’t particularly like them. I wondered why on Earth I was there in Cape May. I couldn’t remember. Tom exhaled the way people do when they want to show you how they really feel with an exaggerated puff of stale breath: “Okay. I guess I’m just being stupid as usual.” It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer. “That’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “It’s none of my business anyway, but if you still want to walk, I’m headed to Higbee Beach. It’s about a half hour that way,” he pointed west down the shoreline and started walking away. “I don’t remember where I’m from, how I got here, nothing,” I said, and it was true. I couldn’t remember a thing. The odd part was, it didn’t scare me. You would think it would, considering that people’s lives aren’t much more than the sum of their memories, and when your memories add up to zero, what does that leave? But somehow being with Tom just then made it all okay. It was then I realized that, even though I had no idea why, I was there in Cape May on May 19th, 1975, with Tom Ryan for a reason. Tom studied my face. It was plain that over the years he had met many liars, some of them pretty good at it, including himself. “Seriously?” he said. “Yes, seriously.” “What’s your name? Do you remember that?” “Annie Mae Meeham.” “Well, that’s a start. I’m Tom Ryan.” He tried to smile. It must have seemed like the right thing to do, but it wasn’t a very good try. I could tell he was out of practice. “I can be a real jerk sometimes, just so you know,” he added. “Thanks for the warning.” He told me that something about me was very familiar, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. As far as he could remember, there were no Meehams or Annie Maes anywhere in his past. I told him I had never seen him before in my life. He said that my blue eyes reminded him of his college girlfriend, Beth, but he’d neither seen nor heard from her in over two years. When I asked him why, he said it was none of my business. “Do you have a purse or a wallet or something that might have some ID in it?” he asked. “No.” “What’s the last thing you remember?” A flock of gulls scavenging on the beach stopped their haggling over a dead horseshoe crab long enough to let us pass. “I was outside the restaurant and you held the door open for me.” “That’s it? That’s the last thing you remember? Not falling, or hitting your head, or something like that?” “I remember feeling very tired, tired of walking, I think. Tired of everything. I needed to sit down.” “Maybe we should get you to a doctor.” “I feel fine. I was just tired.” “Fine except for total amnesia. What about the police? There may be a missing person report on you. Somebody must be looking for you.” “No, no doctors, and no police.” I was emphatic about that. We walked along the flat damp sand, below the high tide mark and just out of reach of the waves, crunching bits of seashell beneath our feet. The island turned north at Cape May Point about a mile from the Dew Drop Inn. Tom stopped to watch a fishing boat trawling northward. “And on your left is the beautiful Delaware Bay. They really should put a sign up to let people know where the ocean ends and the bay begins. The number of misguided tourists who walk this beach thinking they’re seeing the Atlantic Ocean is appalling.” He waited while I fiddled with a loose thread on my pullover. I hoped he wasn’t waiting for me to laugh. “Aren’t you hot in that?” he asked. “No.” “Not much of a talker, are you?” “I guess I don’t have much to say, but it is nice here.” “I was just thinking that myself. Gray water, gray sky, gray beach, who could ask for anything more?” That was actually funny, so I laughed. We continued north. There was land somewhere across the bay beyond the overcast smear of sky and water. The Cape May-Lewes Ferry crossed the seventeen-mile stretch of bay to Delaware and back again every day. Tom said he had taken it once out of curiosity and gotten sick, and then sicker on the ride back. At Sunset Beach, near a little place called The Shack, we stopped to look at the wreck of a ship just offshore. “From here, you can see the world famous concrete ship, the Atlantus.” Tom pointed at the huge hull stuck in the sand in the water offshore. “Uncle Mack said it sank in a storm, and they couldn’t get it righted so they just left it there. That was a long time ago, and it’s been falling apart ever since. He said it’s a real tourist attraction.” Tom skipped a rock across the surf. “Oh honey, let’s drive a couple hours to Cape May to see the wreck of a stupid idea.” He threw another a little farther out this time where it sunk short of the Atlantus. “Sure dear. That sounds exciting.” “Why would anyone build a ship out of concrete?” I asked. “I don’t know. It does seem pretty dumb, doesn’t it? Maybe they ran out of metal or had a lot of concrete left over after paving a parking lot and said, ‘Oh, I have a great idea for a practical joke, let’s build a boat with it.’” We walked north some more with the bay on our left and a coastal dune forest of holly and red cedar, bayberry and scrub oak on our right. Beyond the trees and brush was a swamp. Tom had explored it once, he told me. It wasn’t very big, but it was buggy and not very interesting, so it had that going for it. We stopped at a jetty and sat down. “You’re funny,” I said, “in an odd kind of way.” I had been wondering if there might be a career for Tom in stand-up comedy, but I didn’t think people would get his jokes most of the time. I know I didn’t. “Really? You’re the first person other than me to think so. I take heart in the knowledge that my fan club has just doubled.” “Where are you from?” I asked. “Pittsburgh.” “Are you here on vacation?” “More or less.” Tom scooped up a handful of sand and examined it. “Why are you afraid to go to the doctor or check with the police? Are you hiding something?” “Are you?” I countered. “I’m not hiding anything. You’re the one who says she can’t remember.” “And you’re the one who’s afraid to tell me why you’re here. You’re not on vacation.” Tom let the sand run through his fingers. “You don’t want to know why I’m here.” I got up and brushed off my pants. “Then maybe you don’t want to know why I’m afraid to see a doctor or go to the police.” He stood up slowly and faced me. “It’s very simple. I did two years in a federal prison for draft dodging, okay? I’m here because my family doesn’t want me around. Nobody cares about me anymore. Aunt Mindy, the lady back at the Dew, is my dad’s sister. He forced her into giving me a job because this is as far away from them as I can possibly be without falling into the ocean, and I guess they figured the beach was an appropriate place for a castaway. Happy now?” “Poor little Tom Ryan. Nobody loves him. You’re pathetic.” “Hey, I was happy wallowing in my own self-pity until you came along, thank you very much. Why don’t you get lost?” “I already am.” “So why no police? What did you do? What are you hiding?” “What are you hiding?” “I asked you first, besides, I already told you.” “Not the whole thing.” “How would you know?” The wind picked up from the west. The tide was going out and left glistening foam, seaweed, and debris in its wake. Tom took off his shoes and socks and waded into the waves, searching among the shells and pebbles left behind. “What are you looking for?” I asked. “What do you care?” A lone black skimmer dipped down and skirted the shallows, running its orange and black beak along a receding wave. It was searching for something, too. “What if I told you someone might have died because of me?” I said. Tom straightened up. “What?” “What would you think of me then?” “You don’t look the type.” “You don’t either.” “Is that why you’re afraid of the police?” he asked. “Maybe.” “But you said you don’t remember anything.” “That’s what I said.” “But now you do?” “Maybe.” “Look, stop saying ‘maybe.’ It’s getting really annoying. Either you do or you don’t.” “Don’t be so obnoxious.” “Me? What about you? No offense, but this is all pretty weird. I used to think weird was fun, but I’m into plain and simple now.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so I asked. He said: “If this is your kooky idea of picking up guys, fine. It’s just not for me, so get lost.” As much as I didn’t want to, I turned my back and walked away.

This Book's a Diamond
Tom Ryan is sullen, clever, a bit nasty at times, but still looking for a positive, uplifting way to fit within his own skin. Emotionally, he's been through a lot - witness his exploits in Four Years From Home, a quiet precursor that roars to a startling, but sad, finish. Thankfully there's more.

Part two of this mini-epic takes place in the sleepy remains of Cape May, New Jersey. A beachfront resort never-wannabee, it was meant for the geriatric set to reminisce: simpler lives retold in morning conversations at the nearby diner. Everyone knew everyone's tales.

Except Tom's. His was an enigma, as he played second string cook and bottle washer for his aunt and uncle's eatery, and lived in one tight but adequate room in their home around the corner. Some particularly nasty individuals invade his hideaway. So do two ladies, one, part of a mystery, one, part of a love story.

To tell more is to give it away, and this yarn is about discovery. Suffice it to say that I cared about Tom as the pages progressed, and was glad for the author's ultimate beneficence. [Okay, that's a bit of a spoiler.]

Larry Enright's verbal paintbrush is amazing. His sleepy village of Cape May mirrors my memories of its peace and quiet for those in need: sand lined sidewalks shaded by old broad leafs, subtle sounds of animals and passing cars, plus an occasional porch swing squeak.

I was also amazed by Tom Ryan's vivid character. Thru the despair engendered by his failures, his constant wisecracks spoke of an individual still claiming a right to oxygen on this planet...and, as the challenges unfolded, a chance to do better.

Sometimes the snappy comebacks didn't even make it to his mouth. On seeing that his recently deceased neighbor's house was being readied for listing, he asked the sign installer if it was being put up for sale. The cranky man with the mallet yelled, "How the hell should I know? They pay me to put up signs and take `em down. That's it."

Tom mused, "His pay apparently didn't include reading them well, but to the guy's credit, the sign didn't actually have the words `For Sale' on it, though there were 2 hooks underneath to hang a smaller shingle which could have said, `For Sale' or `Under Contract' or `How the hell should I know?'"

The warmth and love in the scenes that capped this journey left my eyes a bit watery, but I realized that for me, Tom was an individual who would last - in literary space - well past page 350. What's next? That's up to Larry. But whatever he creates for Tom, I want to read it.

A real gem of a book
This is an excellent sequel to Enright's "Four Years from Home." I prefer reading books in order, so I highly recommend reading "Four Years from Home" first, as the characters in "A Cape May Diamond" are just so much richer when you have the full history. This book does stand well enough on its own if reading it first is your preference.

The previous reviews should be enough to convince you to buy this book immediately, so I'll just add a couple of things they did not mention.

I have read all of Enright's books that I can find and, in case you haven't noticed, they contain many hidden references, Easter eggs, anagrams, plays on words, and other clever tricks that have you reading the book on two levels: one for the story and the other for the sheer fun of finding the little presents he has left for you subtly strewn within the story. Keep your eyes open while you read his books - you won't be disappointed.

If you just zip through the book as a light fiction read, you've missed a lot. How does the title tie into the story line? Who is the mysterious Annie Mae Meeham; where did she come from and what becomes of her? Is there a reason the story is set in Cape May, the town of ghosts? This book has more depth than is evident in a cursory reading. I hate to spoil a book by saying too much so, let me just say, read this book!

A diamond, indeed.
A gem of a Jersey shore town co-stars in a story of a damaged fellow trying to forget a serious mistake by burying himself in menial work and of the novice policewoman who sees character and hope in him despite his wisecracking veneer. A love story settles itself within a mystery involving corruption and deceit, and memorable characters tug at your heartstrings. There is an earnest, helpful young woman who amazes with her seeming ability to vanish, a doctor with a heart of gold and ambitious friends, a hard-bitten cop with an appetite for steak, an older couple ekeing out a living in a luncheonette, a priest who marvels at sacrifice, a widow with indomitable hope and cheer who trolls the beach for diamonds of polished glass. Find your own diamond: read this book!