Are You Going With Me

Emotionally scalded by his excommunication trial in Vienna, Shake Tauffler returns to Salt Lake City. A failed missionary with a near-broken spirit, he must face everything but the music that brought him both joy and Mormon converts on an aborted mission. He sets aside the trumpet. He sets aside happiness. He sets aside all desire. Shake abases himself before his family and the church, marching slowly on a painful road of redemption, beginning with a carefully choreographed public confession. He repays the church for his plane ticket home. He attends church. He mows lawns, is an airport driver for the Holiday Inn, and a mobile home roofer. He tries to take classes at the University, but without direction. In fencing class he is confused by the kindness of classmates. He doesn't deserve kindness; he doesn't deserve anything. Mired in shame and self-hatred, Shake tries to protect his sister and brothers from the family dysfunction, whose toxicity penetrates nearly every meal and conversation.

But he can not save them from the shame, anger and crazy that warps their family dynamic. So, adrift and disengaged, Shake moves out of his childhood home, spiritually dead. In a searing, dark valley of solitude, far from the Mormon church, tendrils of life appear. Shake purchases a used Porsche, the coolest car he had seen in Austria, and joins a weekend car club, where the pleasure of motion, companionship and the quiet growl of an air-cooled engine grounds and re-humanizes him. His new roommates introduce him to waitress Annie, whose champagne locks and kind eyes call Shake out of his tortured, silent mortification. Annie's family invites Shake into an unfamiliar universe shaped by love, forgiveness, and acceptance. The tension between her family and the Church's punishing rules force Shake to make profound choices between his father's smothering faith - and the raw, practical, "of the world" love Annie offers.