Kim Thompson

An Unlikely Grace Kim Thompson

As Esther Flores prepares to settle into a serene middle age, she's abruptly beset by boredom, a condition with which Esther has never dealt well. Max, Esther's husband, demands Esther overcome her downtime more productively than she has in the past for the sake of both their sanities. While Esther contemplates the issue, she is bombarded by a slew of troubled relatives and decides that managing other's disastrous lives is precisely the activity she needs to fill her time creatively. Certain of her imminent sainthood, Esther moves her elderly, brilliant, professor father into her home when he begins to demonstrate symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. Esther's decadent, hedonistic, but always charming and happy older brother, Howie, suddenly develops mid-life misery, which Esther decides will only be made right by finding a wife, although Esther is determined she must do the choosing, as Howie is too dumb to marry correctly. Esther also decides she must commandeer Lizzie, her beloved teenaged niece, before Lizzie veers into wildness and ruin if left in the hands of Lizzie's moronic father and simple-headed stepmother. These are only a few of the lives Esther entertains herself managing, but it is when Max is diagnosed with a severe and perhaps terminal illness, that Esther-for the first time in her life-is called upon to truly think and behave as an adult, a challenge to which Esther is the first to admit she is not likely to rise. Esther tries to handle Max's illness as she has always handled the unpleasant, but despite her expertise in the art of self-medication, her finely honed denial skills, a dark and macabre sense of humor, and her amazing ability to create her own reality, the truth insists on slapping Esther silly when she least expects the blows. Max will not be managed nor manipulated. He will, Esther discovers, live and die only as he believes right. It is through the choices Max makes in living his life that Esther begins to understand the notion that grace is possible for even the unlikeliest of us.