Amy Inspired PDF
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AMY INSPIRED Amy Inspired Copyright © 2010 Bethany Pierce Cover design by Andrea Gjeldum Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise— without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews. Published by Bethany House Publishers 11400 Hampshire Avenue South Bloomington, Minnesota 55438 Bethany House Publishers is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pierce, Bethany, 1983– Amy inspired / Bethany Pierce. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7642-0850-8 (pbk.) 1. Authors—Fiction. 2. Authorship—Fiction. 3. Women college teachers—Fiction. 4. Adultery— Fiction. I. Title. PS3616.I346A83 2010 813'.6—dc22 2010016347 For my grandmother, who taught me the art of optimistic thinking. Contents Prologue Part 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Part 2 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Part 3 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Discussion Questions Acknowledgments PROLOGUE “Find something you love to do,” my father told me, “and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Optimistic advice from a man who spent fifteen years selling insurance, a job he detested for fourteen. Eventually, my father did follow his passions, out of insurance and into the arms of a local attorney who loved him, presumably better than my mother, and made six figures. If my parents had anything in common, it was the shared belief that life was good. When Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl left me in a rage, my mother recommended that I read something nice; it was best not to think about things I couldn’t change. She believed in marriage, despite her divorce. She had no pain in childbirth. In our home, glasses were half full; when God shut doors He opened windows; and you could be anything you wanted to be when you grew up, even —and especially—the president of the United States. Mostly I wanted to be an astronaut. I studied constellations and memorized planet names and orbits. I hung upside down from the school monkey bars to practice zero gravity and studded my ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars. Grandma’s new refrigerator, a black shiny monolith with blinking green and red lights, functioned as Ship’s Main Computer. Alone in the kitchen, I’d push the flat plastic buttons, whispering, “Red alert!” and “Fire torpedoes when ready!” “You all right, Sugarpie?” Grandma would ask when she spied me in conversation with the ice dispenser. She later voiced her concerns to my mother: “You’d better get that girl’s teeth checked. All she wants to do is eat ice.” Mom had heard worse. Only a week before I’d subsisted five days on little more than freezer pops and baby food to train my stomach for an all-liquid diet. “Moon food,” Mom called it, pureeing peas into paste for my dinner. “Moon?” I asked. I had my sights on Mars. When I was informed we couldn’t afford Space Camp, I realized it was best to have a few backups. A girl has to keep her options open. My top ten careers in descending order of importance, as outlined at age ten: 1. Astronaut 2. Pilot 3. Stewardess 4. Showboat singer 5. Prima donna in manner of Mariah Carey 6. Forensic scientist 7. Olympic gold-medalist figure skater 8. Wedding cake baker 9. Bank teller 10. Famous novelist I spent my childhood rehearsing to be an adult, tripping over legs that grew faster than my ambition, testing my abilities with scientific objectivity. I got motion sick on the merry-go-round, which eliminated astronaut for good, taking pilot, stewardess, and Olympic figure skater (all that twirling) with it. I had a nice voice but was never properly recognized as a budding talent. Though I campaigned diligently for the part of the Virgin Mary in the Christmas pageant, Mrs. Blythe, the children’s church director, favored piety over talent and lacked the imagination to accept a redhead as Mary. She refused to give me the solo three years running, discouraging my chances of parochial celebrity and, by extension, obliterating any hopes of international acclaim. I got a C in chemistry, the only letter other than A I’d ever received on a report card. I decided I hated science. What talent I had in reading recipes could not surpass my pleasure in reading fiction. Lost in a Baby-Sitters Super-Special when I should have been watching the butter I was warming in the microwave, I melted my mother’s favorite Tupperware bowl instead. The microwave was replaced, my kitchen privileges were suspended, and I never earned that coveted Girl Scout cooking badge. At fourteen I received my first checkbook. Consequently, banking lost its appeal. By the age of fifteen I had eliminated every career possibility but one. For better or for worse, the love of writing stuck.
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