Greg Hollingshead

The Roaring Girl

Published 1995

In the title story, an eight-year-old boy's life is transformed when his parents take in an adolescent drifter. She stays in the basement and works at his father's service station, and she is as tough and unreachable as the boy is sensitive and vulnerable. She curses, she lies, she fixes cars, and she eventually steals from the cash register and runs off with the middle-aged alcoholic mechanic. To the boy, though, she is mysterious and beautiful, straddling the grown-up world and his own.