Set in contemporary small town America, this is the story of Verbena Martin Eckert McHale ("Bena," for short), an indomitable woman who is damned-but not doomed-by the bad behavior and bad luck of her two husbands. When Bena's first husband, Bobby Eckert, dies in a car wreck, she's left with their five children, a little mortgaged house, a little bit of insurance, and a big empty place in her heart. Not to mention that the hole Bobby left is jagged around the edges-he wasn't in the car alone and Bena hadn't had a clue about his girlfriend. So now she's a cheated-on widow with five grief-stricken children to finish raising. No matter. No matter that she almost burns the house down when she discovers the marijuana farm in their backyard or that she has terrible, loud crying jags in church. When it gets down to it, Bena's backbone bends minimally and her moral center holds. By the time she's ready to invest again in romance, Bena know what she wants. When she finds the right man and the right circumstances, she doesn't hesitate-she marries Lucky McHale. And what does he do? He disappears off the face of the earth. Verbena is the vibrant story of an extraordinary ordinary woman-strong, emotional, headstrong, sexy, funny-an especially American woman, one worth knowing and cheering. Nanci Kincaid is the author of two previous novels, Crossing Blood and Balls, and a collection of short stories, Pretending the Bed Is a Raft. She lives in Hawaii with her husband. They have four grown children. Looking back, it seemed Bena's life had more or less belonged to her right up until Bobby died and took it away. With Bobby in the grave Bena's life had quickly become doing what Bobby wasn't there to do. Get the lawn mowed, keep the car running, pay off the mortgage, and raise his kids right so that they'd all turn out decent, reasonably athletic, and basically honest--which she'd done. Not a criminal among them. They were serious children--maybe that was true. When Bena looked back she worried that probably they hadn't laughed enough or ever found the pleasure of pure out-and-out silliness and she was sorry about that. But on the other hand, not a one of them was mean. It was more than five years ago now, but sometimes it still seemed like just last week. The news--which is how they talked about it still. The night we got the news. When he told Mama the news. When the news hit school. Marcus Langley, one of Bobby's fishing buddies, was standing at the door in his Alabama state trooper uniform looking like a total stranger. He had on his official law enforcement expression, which Bena had never seen before. Beside him was his nervous partner whose eyes were darting wildly like he was afraid to take a hard look at Bena under the circumstances. "Bena, honey," Marcus said. "There's been an accident. It's Bobby. Killed in a rollover. And Bena, now, he was not alone. There was a woman." The news had come at once like that, packaged in sentence fragments. She'd been at home with the kids that night, the five of them. Eddie, the baby, was almost ten and Sissy, the oldest, was a sophomore in high school. The TV was on and every radio and stereo in the house was blaring out some competing noise. Bena was grading papers at the kitchen table. She had the kind of mind that could cut right through the distractions of life and stay focused on her task. She was a sixth-grade teacher then, a good one. That was before she found out they would pay her better money to fill out government forms than they would to teach the children anything about the government. They'd let her do it in an air-conditioned office too and not a sweatbox classroom where all the papers were turned in wet and smeared since it was way too hot for anybody to get a grip on their pencils--or their thoughts. Then there came the knock on the door that changed ever...