Telling Sonny: A novel

Forty-six-year-old FABY GAUTHIER keeps an abandoned family photograph album in her bottom bureau drawer. Also abandoned is a composition book of vaudeville show reviews, which she wrote when she was nineteen and Slim White, America's self-proclaimed Favorite Hoofer (given name, LOUIS KITTELL), decided to take her along when he played the Small Time before thinking better of it four months later and sending her back home to Vermont on the train. Two weeks before the son she had with Louis is to be married, Faby learns that Louis has been killed in a single-car accident, an apparent suicide. Her first thought is that here is one more broken promise: Louis accepted SONNY's invitation to the wedding readily, even enthusiastically, giving every assurance that he would be there, and now he wouldn't be coming. An even greater indignity than the broken promise is that Louis's family did not bother to notify Faby of his death until a week after the funeral took place. She doesn't know how she can bring herself to tell Sonny he mattered so little in his father's life he wasn't even asked to his funeral...