Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Do you celebrate the day by wearing green and eating corned beef and cabbage?

Several years ago I asked readers to share their favorite recipes for Corned Beef and Cabbage and I received some surprising news...

I learned something new about St. Patrick's Day from book club members. It's an after-the-big-day realization, from emails readers sent in, and it came as quite a surprise. Did you know that Americans are the only people who celebrate St. Patty's Day by dining on corned beef and cabbage? I didn't, until book club reader Maureen O., wrote...

"Suzanne did you know that in Ireland folks do 'not' eat corned beef and cabbage--ever? It's an American-Irish dish borrowed from Jewish neighbors when the Irish flooded into New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the genocide-starvations in Ireland. In visiting my Irish relatives in Ireland, none of them had heard of corned beef and cabbage except from American relatives who asked about it. Our family ate baked salmon, scallops, and potatoes with cabbage along with Irish bread on St Patrick's Day." -- Maureen
 
(Note from Suzanne:) From my research, Maureen is correct. Corned beef and cabbage did not originate from Ireland, and the meal isn't actually Irish at all. Corned beef was used as a substitute for bacon by Irish-American immigrants in the late 19th century.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book All The Other Mothers Hate Me: A Novel by Sarah Harman. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

PROLOGUE

The missing boy is ten-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he's a little shit.

I realize that's a horrible thing to say about a child, particularly one who is missing. But—and I'm not proud of this—if I'd had to choose a boy in Dylan's class to vanish in broad daylight, Alfie would have been at the top of my list.

There are some kids you just kind of want to punch, and Alfie was one of them. Perhaps it was his hair—that pale red shade we used to call strawberry blonde. Or his dull, raisin-colored eyes. Or the way his sharp little teeth gave him a distinctly ferret-like appearance.

Their sharpness is a point of fact: Last year he bit his nanny, Cecilia, so hard she needed stitches. For weeks, she appeared at afternoon pickup like a sad ghost, clutching her bandaged forearm.

The one time I volunteered to chaperone a school trip, a class picnic to Hampstead Heath, Alfie leaned over a plate of sausage rolls and told me, very casually, as if we were two adults at a bar, that he "quite liked my slag fingernails."

And then there's his family. They weren't just run-of-the-mill St. Angeles rich. They were in a whole other league.

"Like richer than God," one of the other mothers had whispered to me during last year's spring fundraiser, as we arranged sugar cookies on tiny plastic trays.

But if I'm being honest, my feelings about Alfie had nothing to do with his hair or his wealth or his ferret teeth. No. My dislike of Alfie stemmed entirely from the way he treated Dylan, my precocious, sensitive only son, like he was a bug to be crushed.

And nobody crushes my kid.

1

Shepherd's Bush, London

FRIDAY, 7:45 A.M.

I wake up with a girls' night song stuck in my head.

To be honest, "The Quake" never took off like the label had hoped. It didn't help that a devastating, 8.9-magnitude tremor had ripped through Southern California the same week our single was released, collapsing a multistory parking garage like a soufflé and trapping 346 people inside. The song itself is still a jam, though.

You're like an earthquake,

Richter 10 heartbreak

Said you wanna "short break"

Then takin' up with that skan—

I hum to myself under the covers, imagining that I'm performing to a sold-out Wembley Stadium instead of about to take a lukewarm shower on the ground floor of half a Victorian terraced house. Not even the whole damn house.

"Dylan!" I shriek. "Get up! You're gonna be late for school!"

My son appears in the doorway, fully dressed, right down to his St.

Angeles cap and tie.

"Ha-ha, very funny, Mum." He rolls his eyes and presses a cold can of Red Bull into my hands.

I take a sip. Our morning ritual complete, I pull the warm duvet back over my face.

"Seriously, though, can we not be late today?" my son pleads. "Ms. Schulz says the coach won't wait this time."

A dim memory of a permission slip surfaces, of scrawling my initials in eggplant-colored eyeliner and checking the "not available to chaperone" box.

"Because of the field trip?" I murmur, from beneath the duvet. "Yes. The Wetland Centre. Bird-watching. Can you get up now, please?"

"Right. You excited?" I'm stalling, but he's in an even bigger hurry than usual. Perhaps this means the bullying has finally stopped.

Dylan turns his pleading green eyes on me. "Can't I just walk by myself?" he says, half question, half whine.

I remove the duvet from my face for a second time. Dull late-autumn light is filtering through the shutters now, piercing my retinas. I drag myself upright. Why does it have to be so 'bright' in the mornings?

"Dylan. We've been over this. You're ten. You're not walking to school alone. You wanna end up in some hairy old pedophile's basement? Hmm? You wanna spend the rest of your life—"

Dylan interrupts me. "It's called a 'cellar' here, Mum. Only Americans say basement."

The way he wrinkles his nose when he says the word 'American' is like a tiny hatchet to my heart.

I chug the rest of my Red Bull and toss the can toward the sprawling collection on my dresser. Dylan glares at my row of empties as if they're discarded yellowcake uranium cartridges.

"You're going to recycle those, right? Aluminium is one of the most energy-intensive materials on the planet? Mr. Foster showed me this documentary—"

"Not now, Greenpeace. We'll be late."

Dylan groans loudly as he stalks toward the kitchen. "Fine," he sighs. "But, Mum—" His voice floats down the hallway. "Can you puh- leez just wear a normal shirt today? Like the other mums?"

I glance down at my Girls Night 2008 tour shirt. Of all my band shirts, this one's my favorite. It's from the early days, before the whole Rose debacle. The front has a screen-printed photo of my own much younger face. On the back, my name, florence, is spelled out in block letters, like a football player's jersey.

I slide the offending garment over my head, allowing a taurinetinged burp to escape. A sparkly orange crop top catches my eye from the pile on the floor.

"You got it, kid."

2

Shepherd's Bush

FRIDAY, 7:58 A.M.

The air outside is cold and clear, that dreadful slice of mid- November when the clocks have gone back but the Christmas parties haven't started yet.

Dylan races out the front door ahead of me, his backpack swinging loosely on one shoulder. Our neighbor Mr. Foster—the aforementioned aluminum documentary fanboy—is standing in front of his terraced house, sorting his glass cans into a bin. Dylan gives him an enthusiastic wave. I wince. I'm not thrilled that the seventy-six- year-old local recycling zealot is currently my son's best friend. I'm even less thrilled that he keeps giving Dylan live crickets to feed his pet box turtle. But that's a battle for another day.

"Oh, Florence," Mr. Foster says, looking up from a pile of cans. "Did you see that—"

(continued on Tuesday)

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