Julia's Well

by Cassandra Dunn

Julia's tightly managed life is quickly unraveling. An optimist and experienced event planner, Julia is thrown into crisis mode when her father's history of alcoholism catches up to him. She takes on the hospital bureaucracy as she fights for the liver transplant that her father needs to survive—a transplant he may not qualify for due to his age, brief history of sobriety, and a shortage of organ donors. Julia is further tested by her husband's increasing work travel, her lack of a support system in her new role as a stay-at-home mom, her sister's third divorce, and her trouble-making uncle, who has just resurfaced to stir the family pot. After a lifetime of emulating her perfect mother and looking after her father, Julia, who "packs her diaper bag like it's a mission from God," is scrambling for stability. She finds herself even further down her own priority list as she struggles to care for her children, reground her slipping marriage, act as peacemaker between her sister and mother, and get her father the care he needs, even when it is against his wishes.As family secrets unravel, Julia learns of her mother's own struggles with and consequences from striving to have it all. In the wake of this new knowledge, Julia resolves to cherish the little things, dream big, and, when there is no better solution, cut her losses.

16 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 22, 2011

About the author

Cassandra Dunn, a Bay Area native, is the author of The Art of Adapting (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster). She was a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a finalist for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. She's published twelve short stories. She has two amazing daughters and one awesome Vizsla.