Floating [Paperback]

Winner of the MTV Fiction Contest
Marking the debut of a vibrant new voice in American fiction,Floatingis a poignant and sharply original novel about the fragile boundaries between desire, love, and betrayal. For most people, Whitticker, Arizona, population 641, is just a rest stop on a highway to somewhere else. But for twenty-five-year-old Ruby Pearson, there is nowhere else. With husband in jail and an eight-year-old son at home, Ruby knows what she wants what she doesn't -- and is determined to break free of a life going nowhere. When a pickup-truck cowboy named Sean rolls in off the interstate, bringing with him a world possibilities, Ruby is given her chance. Problem is, Sean's her husband's brother, her son's uncle...and maybe her best shot at true love and a ticket out.Robin Troygrew up in Connecticut and graduated from Harvard University in 1996. She currently lives in Denver and is working on her second book.Chapter One
There is only one road leading out of Whitticker, Arizona, and Ruby Robert Black Pearson was walking down it -- past the sign that reads Population: 641, toward the rest of the world -- the afternoon her husband held up the 7-Eleven at the edge of the freeway with an unloaded pistol. The mechanics at the service station next to the 7-Eleven had kept Ruby's truck jacked up toward the ceiling for the past six days, and Ruby was tired of walking. In high school alone she had walked this three-mile stretch of road out of Whitticker more times than she could remember, promising herself each time that she would keep on going, anywhere but back. But now, years later, with a child and a husband and the resignation that she was destined to grow old in the only town she'd ever known, Ruby would just as soon have had a car, any car, to whisk her out to the edge of the freeway and back before the truth hit her, yet again, that at the end of the road she was turning around. She'd had enough of walking.
Ruby walked to the serlƒ.