Legacy's Child
Some inheritances come through blood. This one comes through the hands.
Helen Calloway's hands know things. Not visions — nothing anyone could enter in a chart. A palm laid flat against a man's calf and the certainty that the blood in it has begun to gather wrong, days before the leg will admit it. She learned what her hands could do in an evacuation tent in France, with shells coming over and no time to chase a dropped stethoscope. She spends the rest of her life deciding what to do with knowing more than she can prove.
What she carries did not start with her. It came down through a Yaqui man who died on a mountain nobody climbs, and through the man before him, and it has no intention of stopping with her.
Legacy's Child is historical fiction about the price of a gift — what it buys, who it costs, and the hands it finally reaches. It runs from a copper town in the Mule Mountains to a county hospital in Los Angeles to the high granite country of the Chiricahuas, and it is held together by two objects that outlast everyone who owns them: a porcelain parrot with a chip under one wing, and a smooth gray river stone with a cross scratched into its face by a boy's mother.
The books
- Within Reach — Bisbee, 1940. A young woman counting her father's breaths in a back bedroom, and the war that carries her from a mining town to a surgical tent in France.
- A Stone's Throw — Bisbee, 1955. A hospital nurse who is right more often than a nurse is permitted to be, and the one honest way to use what she has.
- Out of Touch — Pasadena, 1971. A physician whose reach has grown past anything medicine can hold, and a life emptying out one person at a time.
For readers of Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Woman of Light and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams — the American West as inheritance, where the land keeps its own counsel and what one woman carries has to find hands to go to.
