The Porch Light (Paperback)

The Porch Light: A Novel of a Mother's Love and Letting Go

A novel about the one who waits up — and what it costs to keep waiting.

Every night at dusk, Ruth Callahan turns on the porch light at 14 Maple Street. She has done it for years. It is the light her son comes home by — when he comes home at all.

Ruth is fifty-four, a widow, working the front desk at the town library and raising her nine-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, in a small New Hampshire town. Sophie's father — Ruth's son, Ben — is twenty-nine, a finish carpenter like the father he lost at seventeen, and an addict. Pills after a fall from a ladder. Then worse. Then jail, and promises, and the slow arithmetic of a mother counting clean days that never add up.

This is not Ben's story. It is Ruth's.

Through collect calls she can't afford and money that goes missing from her purse, through a fall fair where a little girl watches the gate for a father who doesn't come, Ruth does everything a loving mother is supposed to do — and watches it fail. Until a friend at church says a word she'd never heard aimed at her: Al-Anon. Until a woman named Marlene teaches her the hardest sentence in the language: you didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it. Until Ruth has to decide whether love means opening the door at 2 a.m. — or keeping it locked with the light on, and her heart breaking on the inside of it.

Told entirely from the family's side of addiction — the side that sets the extra plate, pays the bail, and tells the nine-year-old the truth in words she can carry — The Porch Light is honest about addiction without ever glamorizing it, honest about faith without ever preaching, and honest about the ending: Ben's recovery is his own, day by day, with no miracles promised. Ruth's recovery is hers. And hers is the one this book can promise you.

For every mother, father, grandparent, or spouse who has ever left a light on — and for anyone learning that letting go is not the same as giving up.

Also available as an ebook: https://payhip.com/b/uYK7k