This is my first novel, and it is set in 1986, at a moment when most of the adults in America, particularly those in Texas, believed the future was bright. The story centers on a family of five slowly coming apart. The Buckhorns live in a world before the internet, before constant connection, when music came through car radios and bedroom stereos, when news arrived on broadcast television.
The father, Bob Buckhorn, is a former NASA engineer who has lost both his job and his sense of direction. Raised in emotional austerity, Bob is ill-equipped for failure, intimacy, or reinvention. He spends his days drinking, drifting through a life that no longer resembles the future he once helped build—until one cold morning when he sits down to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, a project he once worked on and passionately hates.
Bob’s three children—Jack, Jennifer, and Josie—are growing up in the loose, unsupervised way common to their generation, learning to navigate the world largely on their own. Jack, the eldest, turns to dealing drugs, drawn by money and a dangerous sense of agency. Jennifer explores her sexuality in secret, finding both freedom and risk in her relationship with the school’s most visible lesbian. Josie, the youngest, watches from the margins, trying to piece together an identity in the shadows of older siblings who are already half gone. Like many children of Generation X, they are raising themselves, shaped as much by pop songs, MTV, and late-night radio as by their parents’ fading authority.
Their mother, Carol, restless and newly aware of the life she did not live, begins a tentative romance with an aging hippie and peace protester—a remnant of an earlier American dream. As her marriage erodes and Jack’s criminal dealings deepen, the family moves steadily toward a reckoning.
The Challenger disaster hangs over the novel as both event and metaphor, foreshadowing the quiet explosion coming for the Buckhorns: a typical American family at the end of its illusions, caught between optimism and collapse, in a decade that promised everything and delivered something far more complicated.
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