Coming Home (Paperback)

Delia Marsh is forty-seven, an alcoholic and cocaine addict with seventy-two days sober, when a 6:15 a.m. phone call pulls her back to Grayport, Maine. Her mother left the stove on and nearly burned the house down; adult protective services is involved; and her mother keeps asking for Ruth, the sister Delia lost while she sat in a county jail cell. Coming home means facing a mother who sometimes knows her and sometimes doesn't, a boy who hates her with the clean hate only the young can manage, and a town that remembers every version of her, especially the worst ones. With her sponsor's voice in her ear, Delia walks through one winter of showing up — meetings, amends, the guitar she carried for four years and never played — to find out whether a person can truly come home