From off-beat business ventures to run-down mobile homes and the struggle to “be better,” Mary Troy’s In the Sky Lord deftly entangles the lives of complex characters deeply rooted in the Midwest, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
These ten short stories feature waitresses, widows, erotic dancers, orphans, recurrent toy dolls, abandoned dogs, “potato lake” marine owners – a dizzying array of relatives, friends, and communities. The owner of Dew Drop Inn studies particle physics, a waitress is working on her dissertation, a worker at Cappy’s craft shop decides to study plumbing, another creates her own odd-ball business “Rent-to-Kill.” Nikki the social worker at an orphanage teaches Imogene, one of the “unchosen,” the lesson of “pushing back,” a skill that helps her survive but also places a roadblock to “connecting” with others.
Troy creates wholly believable yet wildly esoteric and quirky characters who know the difference between love and “left-over” love, living at “the back end of society,” while trying to improve their situation, even if it requires shunning well-intentioned family, neighbors, and friends. It’s an idiosyncratic juxtaposition, people striving to get ahead and those heading in the opposite direction, a simultaneous need for closeness and detachment. They recognize the benefit of an extended family, but also accept the impossibly of knowing everyone in their “flock.”
The prose itself is compassionate, full of wisdom and humor. In “Butter Cakes” Troy examines how laughter as a coping mechanism can interfere with our perceptions of reality and can encourage the illusion that, for our lifetime of kindness, we get a trip to Hawaii. While Troy has the exceptional ability to find humor in harsh realities, underpinning all of this is her love for her characters, a sense of empathy and nurturing, for both the people and their dogs.
In the Sky Lord shows Mary Troy’s masterful use of the short story to reveal the humanity in all of us, regardless of the forms it may take, from the tough and mean to the sincere and fake-sincere, to an unblinking courageous examination of what makes life worthwhile.
