She was ten years old the first night. She went back every night she could for seven years. And in forty-two years she has never once been able to keep his face. Charlene Whitfield falls asleep in a back bedroom off Washington Boulevard in March of 1979 and opens her eyes on her own street in the middle of a warm, clean afternoon — same stucco, same cracked step, same ficus pushing up the sidewalk — with the helicopters gone and the buses gone and a boy named Odell sitting on the step with a screwdriver, glad she came. It is always three o'clock there. No time passes. Nothing hurts. She can't bring anything in and she can't bring anything out — except her shoes, and a tune he hums while he works, one that isn't off the radio and isn't out of any hymnal. She comes back to exactly where she left off, every time, as if she'd only stepped inside for water. And the boy gets older right along with her, on a day that never ends. Then she is seventeen, and a phone rings at two in the morning, and a girl standing in a hospital hallway learns that she is the one now — the one who picks the suit and signs where her grandmother can't see to sign. She decides that rest is for children. She shuts the door on that street and stands guard on it for thirty-four years. What follows is a whole life built on the other side of that door. A bad marriage in Inglewood. A good man who came late. Two daughters raised on a hum she never explained. A job at an admitting desk where she says good morning and date of birth and hands the card back, and checks — without ever deciding to — the walk and the stand and the right hand of every tall man who comes through those doors. Until a tired, grown woman with a pressure the doctor doesn't like does the arithmetic one night and says out loud, in the dark, like a woman signing something: All right. I'll go. A novel about a woman who spent her life looking for a face she was never allowed to keep — and about what she finally set down instead. Where I Left Off is told start to finish in Charlene's own voice, the way a woman tells a stranger the one thing she never told anybody at her own table. From the author of the Odessa Pruitt and Ruby Jean Turner mysteries.
