Characters

I did not plot out the novel and follow a script to write it. I simply kept asking the question: What happens next? I didn’t even ask why? that something would happen. I never told why! that something had happened. I tried to make sure each twist of the story was organic to the first characters as I had conceived them.

Wendy Magnum was a tough-as-nails working-class Southern woman. She worked part-time in a daycare taking care of three-year-olds because she seemed to not be able to have children, although she desperately wanted them, and worked her off days in Ray’s shop. She and Ray began dating when she was fourteen, not long after she lost her daddy in a drunk-driving accident and had married right when she finished high school. They had been married ten years when Katrina came through Hattiesburg. She loved the men in her life and knew how to handle guns but could not handle herself when she thought she was going to die in the hurricane without Ray to protect her, as he had throughout their life together.

Judd McKay was a wild one from Mandeville, Louisiana. He had gone to LSU and had lived and worked in Hattiesburg until his father died, leaving him his childhood home. He moved back home and began working as a traveling salesman selling first chainsaws, then generators, for Jackson Equipment Company. He and Ray had known each other for years. He had been married for three years to Laine McKay, who matched him in wildness and meanness, recognizing what he could do for her as well as what he couldn’t. He never had any sense when it came to a good-looking woman–something that had been his undoing more than once in his life.

Ray Magnum was four or five years older than Wendy and had been a baseball player in high school with blond hair and brown eyes. He owned his own business, Magnum Hardware, with his partner, Tommy Cade, and also worked as a professional firefighter to have a steady income. He was a stoic man who was capable of great love, moving into his mama’s house with Wendy to take care of his mama until she died. But working at the firehouse forty-eight hours on and seventy-two hours off at the shop, he could only do so much–when Wendy needed more.

They were a combustible mix–and I keep lighting fuses.