Show Me Your Face: A Novel About Paraplegia and Domestic Violence

Everything is suddenly different for Molly Bennet. It's 1983, she's fifty-two years old, a recent widow, someone who has never worked outside of her home. She has just moved across the country to Seattle where an old friend has offered her a job in a shelter for abused women, a field she knows nothing about. As she unpacks her rental truck, she meets an enormously attractive man, Kevin Corwin, who uses a wheelchair, a situation that Molly finds difficult to accept at first. As they spend time together and Molly sees how capable, intelligent, warm, generous, caring, and protective Kevin is, she prides herself on learning to accept his disability. She sees how he gets in and out of a car, handles curbs, uses an escalator, and helps her plant tulip bulbs, but also sees that he is easily angered. At the same time, as she becomes accustomed to her work at SCAWF (Seattle Center for Abused Women and their Families), she learns the routines of shelter life, how the women manage their chores, how they begin to make plans to change their situations, and what happens when someone breaks the confidentiality rules. As she grows into her work with the SCAWF clients and counselors and sits in on some of the group sessions, she begins to fear that there may be other problems in her relationship with Kevin beyond his wheelchair use. Anyone who reads this book will learn a lot about domestic violence and living with spinal cord injury.