About the Book:
Sixteen-year-old Penny can't rest in peace. She has come back to set the record straight. Aside from her personal vendettas and the love of her homosexual son, this multitasking kid has shocking paranormal news and an alarming homicidal request for 50-year-old maintenance man, Ronald Jackson.
“Why me?” the behemoth of a man asks himself. He isn’t willing to get on board, nor is he mentally prepared to deal with the rage of the murdered teenager.
Ronald is caught completely off guard by the secretly kept love his pint-size, younger co-worker Pradine has for him. She soon has him swept off his feet, much to Penny’s jealous objection. The two vie for his attention and fireworks ensue while surprise after surprise flavors their dangerous journey.
Will either make it out alive? Will Ron fulfill his destiny?
Excerpt:
I met her August 1985, in a discount department store. Her long red ponytail stopped just short of her waistline, which blended perfectly with her red silk jogging suit and red open toe high heels. She was poetry in motion. The lights from an overhead light fixture shined on her while she was comparing items. Her creamy white skin was a pleasant contrast against the bold red. She was as clean as a bar of ivory soap. Her fragrance was that of fresh flowers, which had me intoxicated. It was love at first sight and smell.
Not long out of tech school with a respectable degree in building engineering and at six feet and four inches, two hundred and thirty five pounds of ripped muscles, I was an alpha male all the way. I watched her as she walked up to the aisle. I envisioned her next to me while riding with the top down in my candy apple red Firebird with her hair blowing freely in the wind. She was pushing a shopping cart loaded with school supplies, which led me to believe she was a teacher. I couldn’t remember any teacher I'd ever met that looked like that. I circled around in order to have a face-to-face encounter.
Then, there she was.
“Wow,” I mumbled and stopped in my tracks. I hadn’t noticed the white framed glasses or her perfectly painted fingernails and toenails, all of them painted white. Some kind of strange mental lapse paralyzed me for a few seconds. My confidence, strong muscles, and especially my legs, weren’t working as well as usual. The closer I got to her, the weaker they got. The fight or flight hormone kicked in, but it was too late. We were face to face. I reached for her hand and tried to introduce myself.
“Hi, my name is Vohn... I mean John… I mean Ron.”
Looking back at our meeting, I would think me pegging the names of her sons would have creeped her out, but it didn’t. Actually, a little time after that we laughed about it and chalked it up as a pleasant omen.
With my hand in hers, she said, “You’re shaking. Are you okay, Vohn John Ron?” Her tenderness and unassuming approach put me at ease right away.
“Yeah, that’s what too much caffeine will do to you,” I clumsily responded. She had me pegged. She knew I was under her good-witch spell, so she prodded me a bit.
“Are you sure caffeine will do all that to you?” she asked and then threw me a lifeline by taking the lead. “Let’s try it this way. My name is Cindy and which one of the three is yours?”
“It’s Ron,” I said. We talked for a while before I asked her on a date and the rest is history.
The young love hard. And I came to find out in Pradine's case it was her high school sweetheart and their unborn child. She lost both to tragedies. Him to a fatal car accident and the child to a miscarriage. Heartbroken, but not hopeless, she was confident Mr. Right would immerge from the shadows and they would live happily ever after. Whenever we would talk, I’d catch her tearing up from time to time, especially concerning family matters and holidays. Although exceptional in my eyes, she was no exception to the proverbial rule: Into each life, rain will fall. She had her demons too. When her demons got the best of her and she broke down, I was there.
I'd wanted a few kids of my own, but due to physical difficulties with Cindy, the love of my life, it was not going to happen for me.
Fall had arrived, but summer was saying its last goodbyes. The day had been muggy and warm but cooled to a comfortable seventy degrees Fahrenheit by the time I hit the highway headed to Cindy's house. It was a slow and easy hour’s drive from the Southside of St. Louis to St. Clair County, MO. It was Friday and I was looking forward to spending the weekend with Cindy, since it was her weekend to host.
The wind at sixty miles per hour in a top down convertible was freedom…freedom….freedom! I reflected back on the week. Neither Pradine or I had heard anything else from Penny since Monday night. Why she was being silent, I was not sure. Maybe she was waiting on us to follow her instructions to go to the asylum and check on the boy. Or, maybe she hadn’t shown her face to prevent from choking Pradine. We both were pretty tough cookies. Me, a black belt in karate and she, well she’s just tough anyway. The warrior gene was alive and well in us. Yet, we kept sweeping that visit under the rug. We could hardly talk about it the whole week.
Maybe it was fear. But of what? I asked myself. It was possibly the unknown, dark urban legends the asylum was known for that made it hard for us to talk about it. Like the one that said patients checked in but never came out – never to be seen or heard of again.
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About the Author:
Ronald Harvey Gordon, the youngest of seven, was born and raised in St. Louis, MO. He was not given a day’s notice when at the vibrant and youthful age of 45 he was thrown into the torture chamber of depression and anxiety. He was even led to death’s door twice. Mentally and physically, he was unmercifully humiliated by the disease and was considered unfixable by the medical community. Not willing to be a victim, he fought his way back to sanity. He credits his indomitable spirit to three events: His new birth when he heard and believed the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the unintimidating persona of the greatest boxing heavyweight of all times, Evander “The Real Deal” Holyfield when he fought “Knockout Monster,” Iron Mike Tyson, and the heroic stance of his dearly departed mother and sister against cancer. Unearthing a buried treasure, his ink pen, it screamed for him to write… write… write. Upon the inspirational advice of the dearly departed Maya Angelou to pursue his writing with passion, he followed through and the result is A Daughters Rage!
