COMMUNITY DAY begins as an earnest comedy about the relationships and happenings in contemporary small-town America. By the end, it is a tragedy about the costs-mistrust, conspiracies, selfishness, loneliness, and violence-when community disappears. Over the course of 13 days in January 2021, a former public servant recounts the deadly events of a neighborhood gathering that took place two months earlier. But to fully, fairly explain all that happened and why, he believes he must tell a longer story about his depressed rural county, his colorful neighbors, and the terrible effects of decades of isolation made worse by the pandemic.
As the tragedy Community Day 2020 is slowly revealed, we learn about the narrator's career and broken relationships and begin to question how much of his entertaining account can be believed. He tells of wild scenes at a rundown roadhouse, a sprawling consignment shop, an afternoon house party, and a residential compound surrounded by a massive concrete wall and moat. His characters include an ever-anxious vehicle dealer and a wise, goodhearted lush; a theatrical animal-lover and her moody, musical son; a corrupt HOA president and a regret-saddled bartender; a clueless, self-important government official and the neighborhood's self-declared health expert.
Though he cannot admit it, he has been shaped by his family's dysfunction, including his mother's mental illness, his father's abandonment, and his sister's drug-induced disappearance. The geographic backdrop for the narrator's story is the region's generations-long deterioration. His county is beset by a dying river, struggling farms, exhausted mines, lost jobs, alienation, and frayed community bonds. All of the narrator's tales, including the final, heartrending events of Community Day, center on a mysterious local recluse and the abandoned bus stop at the neighborhood park.
A junior defense attorney and a senior hospital administrator hope to get to the bottom of his story, which includes tales about feuds over the park's playground equipment, protests of a Little Free Library, lawsuits over an unauthorized animal camp, a government prohibition on repairing a vandalized garden, a collection box for the county's "nuptial equity fund," an emergency card game of the local teachers' union, and a brawl over a sold-out food truck.
