An alcoholic divorcé takes his adult daughter, great niece and great nephew he just learned about, and a cat on a roadtrip to propose to a woman he hasn’t seen in 40 years.
I can’t remember what brought this book to my attention, but I’m glad I listened to it. My dad and I took a long car trip together recently, and though he balked at the title, I told him he had to give it at least an hour before rendering judgment.
When the hour was up, he agreed it was enjoyable and to keep listening. He even insisted on listening to it every time we got in the car on our vacation so we could be sure to finish it before we got home. (We barely made it.)
To describe the setup for this book makes it sound really sad because there is a lot in it that’s really sad. But trust me when I say it does a really good job of balancing the sad with the funny to make it an all-around enjoyable read/listen.
As I said in my opener, PJ Halliday is an alcoholic divorcé who still gets along with his ex wife. She left PJ for his best friend, but his best friend is still his best friend, which I love.
That’s not to say the divorce didn’t hurt PJ. He’s still in love with his ex wife, but he also recognizes how hard it is to put up with him.
The couple had two daughters, but the eldest got so drunk on prom night that she managed to drown in a cranberry bog.
Obviously her death had an impact, not just on her parents and their marriage, but on her younger sister, Sophie, who has had to try to process the loss without being defined by it.
PJ got fired from his job as a postman for being drunk on the job, and his driver’s license was revoked after he got a DUI for driving his car into a ditch. He knows he’s lucky no one was hurt.
He’s also lucky his wife and best friend live just down the street so he can walk over and get breakfast every morning.
Because PJ has had 3 heart attacks, at least one of which happened after seeing something upsetting, his ex, in addition to making him breakfast every morning, cuts all the upsetting stories out of his newspaper for him.
So PJ doesn’t see the story about his niece (whom he never met, despite the fact she lived in the same town) killing her husband and then committing suicide, orphaning her two children, one of whom she accidentally poisoned, but he makes a speedy recovery.
Despite the fact that she never knew her Uncle PJ, she knows he’s family and lives nearby, so she quickly changes her will before she offs herself to leave the kids with him.
When PJ finally gets the call that his great niece and great nephew are orphans and the best thing for them would be for them to live with him, he agrees. He quickly buys a set of bunk beds, a trampoline, and two iPads.
How can he afford all this without a job?
He won $1.5M in the lottery a few years ago.
He does manage to sober up before the social worker brings the kids over, although he does get drunk a few more times throughout the course of the book because the author recognizes that the road to sobriety is rarely straight or smooth.
Before getting the call about the kids, PJ’s ex and best friend had headed out on a months-long trip to Alaska, so PJ is left to fend for himself, although he does technically have access to his best friend’s car…
When PJ reads in the obituary section that the husband of his high-school crush has just died, he figures this is his big chance to drive out to Arizona, where she lives, and try to finally win her over. All this despite the fact that the only time he ever left Massachusetts was when he went to fight in Vietnam.
Sophie now in her 20s and recently unemployed, has also been tasked with looking in on him to make sure he’s still alive while her mom is away. When she realizes he’s planning to take two children on a cross-country road trip when he still doesn’t have a valid license and has a history of heart disease and alcoholism, she realizes she can’t let him do so alone, so she decides to come along as the driver and adult.
As if that weren’t enough, PJ’s grandniece has become convinced her father wasn’t her biological father. She’s been reading her mom’s diaries, and it turns out her mom was sleeping with a guy who’s now a soap opera star.
She’s written to him, but of course he hasn’t responded. So she wants to go to a soap opera convention in Texas to confront him. Texas is on the way to Arizona, and PJ can’t deny a grieving child her hope for a different destiny, so he agrees they can stop in Texas to meet her maybe-biological father before continuing on to Arizona.
Oh, and there’s a cat named Pancakes who can predict death who appears to have adopted PJ just before he set out on his journey, so of course that means he has to come along.
This book is sweet and funny and heartfelt, and an absolute delight to read/listen to. I highly recommend it.