A Good Girl

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GRACEY REITER confronts a painful past and an intimidating future with the approaching death of her father, HENRY MUELLER, the self-described "last Mohican" from the chaotic gene pool known as the Walsh-Mueller family. The present holds the answer, and the last opportunity for Gracey to understand her father's alcoholism, her mother's infidelity, and her siblings' version of the truth. Always present is Gracey's past: the voices of her grandmother, VIOLA MUELLER, and her great-great-grandmother, Irish immigrant PATRICIA WALSH MUELLER. Patricia arrives in Texas in 1847 from the pestilence and starvation of Ireland. The first twenty years of her life she buried family members and lived among strangers. The cruelty of her immigrant life transforms her into an overprotective mother for the six sons she brings into the world with her German husband, EMIL MUELLER. Her fear of death and anxiety of tragedies wrought an inheritance of alcoholism and abandonment beginning with her son, JONAS MUELLER, followed by his son, WILLIAM MUELLER, and finally, to "the last of the Mohicans, " Henry Mueller, the first born son of William. The voices of the past give Gracey the courage to find her voice. Using biting humor and gut-level truths for the first time in her life, Gracey walks across the land mines created by a crippling family legacy.Henry's funeral and the Irish wedding of THERESE MUELLER, Gracey's and husband, MARK MUELLER's daughter, coincide by a few weeks and serve as a completion of the family circle. With the closing of one door, and the opening of the future, Gracey finds forgiveness by realizing six generations of the Walsh-Mueller family, saints and sinners, criminals and heroes, the abandoned and the celebrated, are forever family, forever bound by blood and the dreams of an Irish girl, Patricia Walsh Mueller. A Good Girl examines the numbing work of raising children and burying parents through six generations.