Ten to Eight

Some family stories are whispered.
Others take flight.

Keek has always known how his parents met. A man fell into a lake. It's the sort of family story that improves with repetition, particularly when nobody can remember exactly which lake or why he was falling in the first place. Keek has heard it most of his life. His mother, Hope, has her version. His father, Otto, has another. His grandmother Pearl has several.

But when Keek and his husband, Nepal, return to Accurate, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2006, the old story begins to wobble.

They've come back to the family house on Lake Mendota to visit Keek's parents, although neither is quite willing to admit whether they're visiting or considering coming home. Grandma Pearl is presiding, over the house and everyone's business, while Otto is entertaining an assortment of old friends whose conversations have the peculiar quality of conversations that have been going on for thirty-five years and have somehow never reached the important part.

Then the stories begin.

There was an airplane. There was money. A parachute. And a hijacking. And, increasingly, there was Otto.

Keek discovers that the man who supposedly "fell into a lake" may actually have fallen out of an airplane. A different airplane.

Thirty-five years earlier, an ordinary passenger flight became anything but ordinary. Someone took control. Money was demanded. Crew members were separated from what they knew. Bags were switched. And somewhere along the way, a man disappeared into the sky beneath a parachute.

Except the hijacking wasn't exactly a hijacking. The money wasn't exactly ransom. And the man in the parachute wasn't who everyone thought he was.

The deeper Keek digs, the more absurd-and disturbing-the past becomes.

There are code-like rituals involving a Zippo, a memo, a folio, a rhino and a chapeau. There are bowler hats, prosthetic noses, suspicious bags, and at least one person who appears to know considerably more than she is willing to say.

There are stories about Scotland, Wisconsin, airplanes, and lakes. And then there is Grandma Pearl. Pearl remembers things. Not everything. Not necessarily in the correct order. But enough to make Keek wonder whether the story of how his parents met was ever really a love story at all.

As the reunion progresses, Keek assembles the truth piece by piece. Each answer produces another question. If the hijacking was staged, what was its real purpose? If the money was part of the deception, where did it go? If Otto was involved, what exactly did he do after he landed? And why has everyone spent decades protecting a secret that apparently ended long ago?

Meanwhile, the present-day family gathering becomes increasingly charged. Old friendships are tested. Long-suppressed memories surface. Hope, Pearl, Otto and their guests begin telling stories that collide with one another, sometimes hilariously and sometimes with consequences nobody expects.

Keek has spent his life believing that his family began with a man falling into a lake.He is about to discover that the lake was only the beginning.

As the pieces finally begin to fit, the meaning of one seemingly insignificant phrase changes everything. It is the time that everything starts. It is also the time it ends. And somewhere between those two moments lies the secret Keek's father has carried for thirty-five years.

TEN TO EIGHT, the humorous runaway hit of the season, is a literary mystery about family myths, improbable friendships, buried secrets and the dangerous distance between the story we inherit and the truth we eventually uncover.