Photo Credit Mary Hays

Robert Hays has been a newspaper reporter, public relations writer, magazine editor, and university professor and administrator. A native of Illinois, he taught in Texas and Missouri and retired in 2008 from a long journalism teaching career at the University of Illinois. He has spent a great deal of time in South Carolina, the home state of his wife, Mary, and is a member of the South Carolina Writers Workshop. His publications include academic journal and popular periodical articles and seven previous books, one released in paperback under a new title. This is his third novel. Two earlier novels, Circles in the Water and The Life and Death of Lizzie Morris, also were published by Vanilla Heart. Robert and Mary live in Champaign, Illinois. They have two sons and a grandson and share (long story!) a cat named Eddie with the family next door.   

     

 

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Circles in the Water by Robert Hays

When young Jimmie Broder witnesses the death of a friend's father in a brutal domestic quarrel, he's left with a sense of helplessness and an unwitting habit of taking the easy way out that follow him into adulthood.  Unable to face their painful circumstances, he runs away and seeks refuge as an Army paratrooper at the very time Colletta, the woman he loves, needs him most.  This is the backdrop of Circles in the Water, which picks up Broder's story after a training accident leaves him seriously injured, brings Colletta back into his life, and forces him to face not only a jumpless future but also his troubled past.  His ordered military existence and the exquisite thrill of the jump no longer insulate him from memories of life in small-town South Carolina, surrounded by poverty, racism, alcohol and drug addiction and, finally, rape and its terrible consequences. 

Just when Broder least needs the added complication, he gets caught up in a mysterious and dangerous conflict between two superiors that places him in a vulnerable position that feels all too familiar.  No longer the "good soldier" who follows orders without question, ready and eager for service in Iraq, he comes to renounce war and knows that he can never again follow orders blindly.  And worst of all, Colletta disappears as suddenly as she had come back into his world.  He wants to reconcile with Colletta and learn to love her child, to settle into a peaceful life.  But are his earlier failures too much to overcome?

Whatever else this story may be, it is primarily one of young love—of childhood sweethearts in a setting both charming and ugly, and the young man and woman they become.  It interweaves their contemporary lives with the chronicle of their early years as part of an inseparable foursome of troubled youth and the tragedies that befall their comrades, DJ and Ray-Gene.