The debut novel of El Paso transplant Eugenie Montague weaves a murder mystery over three parts, telling the stories of how the violent event impacted three interconnected lives.
“Swallow the Ghost,” published August 2024 by Mulholland Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group and Little, Brown and Company, is the latest selection of the El Paso Matters Book Club.
Here’s an excerpt from the second section of the novel, which focuses on Jesse, a journalist turned public investigator looking into the death of his friend while he juggles caring for his mother who has dementia. It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.
Part II
If you’re wondering how I, Jesse Haber, became a modern-day private detective, it’s a story as old as boy meets girl. Except in my case, it’s boy wants to be a journalist and entire enterprise of journalism implodes while he’s in college. Boy does okay at freelance and even manages to break a few great stories while supporting himself until boy’s mom is diagnosed with early-onset dementia at fifty-six. Boy’s mother – a former high-school vice principal – earns a pension of approximately forty thousand a year, with another two hundred a month coming from the Social Security benefits of her late husband, a pit piano player who died young (also boy’s dad). Due to a variety of factors boy might have written about in his former life as a journalist, around the time of boy’s mom’s diagnosis, her modest two-bedroom in Yonkers was suddenly supposedly worth four hundred thousand dollars, making her ineligible for Medicaid under both income-level and asset-based requirements.
Altogether, boy’s mom has access to about two thousand dollars a month and health insurance, which seems like it should be enough, except that boy learns most health- insurance plans do not cover any kind of long-term care. Indeed, while good insurance will provide a home-health aide to come to your house daily if, say, you break an ankle or have to recover from an operation, it will do this only when there is a clear end date: Until your ankle heals. Until you no longer need help using the bathroom. If someone requires permanent assistance with the activities of daily living, your only options are to pay out of pocket, break your mom’s ankle once every three months, or provide the assistance yourself. The estimated value of unpaid labor performed by caregivers for family members with dementia is $257 billion a year. That’s another article I might have written in my old life, but instead of writing it, I moved back to my childhood bedroom in Yonkers and took a job with Thorton Investigation Services.
If you feel like you haven’t heard that story yet, don’t worry, you will.
The transition I’m describing was not an easy one for me. First, to be back in that childhood home. The memories I bumped into getting milk from the refrigerator or climbing into my old bed. How I scooted out of the way coming around a corner to avoid knocking into my mom — not this woman losing her mind who I shared a house with, but my mom, shoving a turkey sandwich into a bag while yelling at me to get my ass in gear for school. The shadow echo of that silent piano in the corner. Sometimes I couldn’t hear over it.
No one has ever had more fun than my dad had playing the piano. Certainly not me. There is a satisfaction that comes with writing. There is a feeling I get when I write the perfect sentence, when I break a story. But fun? No, writing is not fun. Not the kind of fun my dad had. Sometimes I wish I were more like him, that he had wanted to open up that part of himself and pass it on. But mostly I’m happy he had so much fun before he died.
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