The Prodigal Pro Tem

Barnes walked away from a comfortable future to paint watercolors that don't sell. Ten dollars to his name and climbing a hill in the country, he feels more free than he ever did in New York boardrooms. Then he finds Miss Van Patten crying over a letter about her estranged brother Joe - and makes an offer that will trap him in the most intimate of lies: he'll impersonate the missing son for her blind father, who hasn't seen his boy in years. What follows is a strange, tender comedy of deception. Barnes moves into the household, becomes the son the old man remembers, and discovers something he didn't expect - that pretending to be someone else's family might teach him what his own choices have cost him. The prose has the easy warmth of early 20th-century American humor, but underneath runs a darker current: what we owe to blood, what we choose to give, and whether any of us are truly free from the ties we've cut.