The Things I Used to Do

NEWLY UPDATED IN BOTH KINDLE AND PAPERBACK! It’s summer. Anything can happen. But mostly, things don’t happen because Carlton, Illinois, is a small, rural town, surrounded by cornfields and not much else. And anyway, twelve - almost thirteen - year old Maybellene “Maybe” Best, doesn’t even live in town. She lives outside of it, in the country, with her handsome Dad, Pete, a general contractor who operates Best Construction, and her dad’s mom, Gramma Ike, who teaches Foreign Language classes at Carlton High School. Her own mom is dead but Maybe doesn’t remember her given she was only three when she died. Maybe’s thirteenth birthday is in August, before school starts back up. She is eagerly awaiting it, and alternatively dreading it. Her chief complaint with being a kid: Nobody tells her shit. Set against the backdrop of the summer of 1990, when hair metal was waning and America first put its warships on high alert in a far away place called the Persian Gulf, this novel explores the challenges of coming of age for a girl like Maybe Best, who never says the right things or wears the right clothes or styles her hair the right way and who’s pretty sure that everyone likes her little cousin Sylvy better than her. Everyone, that is, except Bass. She meets Bass one day down by the Hole, where she’s not supposed to swim because someone drowned there once. Bass isn’t all there, but Maybe is used to never knowing the whole story, and she quickly strikes up a friendship with him. In doing so, she unwittingly sets forth a chain of events that causes her small world to be blown wide open and all of the secrets that everyone in her life - Aunt Dorrie and Uncle Ricky, Sylvy and Randall, Gramma Ike, Mrs. Wates and Billy Benson, Jimbo and Bass and especially Dad - has held tight to bubble to the surface. In the end, Maybe must do her best (no pun intended) to come to terms with everything that happened to her over the summer - you know, all of the things she used to do.

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