Excerpt from The Slip by Lucas Schaefer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1. Tomato Can Tomato Can

Let me tell you something," said David Dalice, twenty-seven years in Texas from "the baddest shanty in all of Haiti" and Director of Hospitality at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center. "To get to your woman's heart, you get down between those legs, stick your tongue in deep deep deep, and get as close to that pulsing organ as you possibly can."

David offered this lesson as he led his newest trainee on morning rounds. It was a standard part of the How to Please Your Woman seminar he'd been presenting to his teenage male underlings for decades. The year was 1998, the city Austin, the floor Assisted Living. The trainee was Nathaniel Rothstein, and this was his first day on the job.

The job, a volunteer position, was to assist David in making Shoal Creek—a "luxury eldercare community," according to the brochure—feel like home to its residents. As Director of Hospitality, David was responsible for the happiness of all of them—from the still-with-it here on the first floor, to the losing-it on the second, to the lost-it on top—and walking these long halls was the bread-and-butter of his every day. He'd remind passersby of the 10 a.m. calisthenics class in the multipurpose room, poke his head into the games parlor to visit with the ladies playing bridge. ("Arthritis acting up? On a young thing like you? Madam, you don't look a day over nineteen!")

David had worked at Shoal Creek since immigrating to the Texas capital back when he was twenty. Now forty-seven, he'd become, over the years, a star in this place, and he strode the floral-carpeted corridors with the low-key bonhomie of a man sure of his position.

"And hello to Dr. Abruzzi!" David said as a stout and whiskered woman walkered past. Dr. Gloria Abruzzi was David's favorite resident: a retired psychologist whose sharp tongue belied her increasingly foggy memory.

"A most beautiful purple on that shirt," David told her now.

"Matches my varicose veins," said Dr. Abruzzi, winking at David, then grimacing as she passed his newest charge.

Nathaniel Rothstein raised a hand, then stuffed it back into the pocket of his oversized Patriots hoodie. He was the sort of pudgy, sullen sluggard who slunk into Shoal Creek each June from the torpid swamp that was the high school volunteer pool: baby face smattered in freckles, with a puff of coarse brown hair and a blank expression that suggested he might be filled with a simmering rage, or else nothing at all.

Since arriving at Shoal Creek at sunup, the boy had been almost silent, lagging a few paces behind David like an adolescent Igor, nodding slightly whenever advice was offered, but otherwise uninterested to the point of near invisibility. Few of the residents seemed to notice him.

Only during David's sexual digressions did Nathaniel show signs of life, glancing up from his grubby Vans to examine his new mentor. David was soft and strong, like a snowman in scrubs. He wore a thin mustache, parted in the center, and often sported the sort of authoritative grin that would've gone well with a crown and scepter. Each time he caught Nathaniel looking at him, he looked back, and the speed with which Nathaniel then turned away made David Dalice feel powerful as the sun.

"Comrade, I'm signing you up for community service," the boy's uncle, Bob Alexander, had told David three weeks prior. This was at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym, where David's Saturday morning workouts had evolved, in middle age, from exercise with a side of gossip to the other way around. Bob was among his favorite conversationalists, a fifty-eight-year-old history professor and David's most consistent source of weed.

Bob had explained the situation as they collapsed into two worn barber's chairs along Old-Timers' Row after their workout. He needed to find a volunteer gig for his sixteen-year-old nephew, who'd be spending the summer with the Alexanders as a favor to Bob's younger sister "back east." Days before, Nathaniel—"a schlemiel of the first order"—had gotten into a fight with "some lemon" at school. "Big deal, right? High school stuff. Except…" Here Bob leaned into David. "My guy snaps. Breaks the other kid's jaw! Police and everything."

Excerpted from The Slip by Lucas Schaefer. Copyright © 2025 by Lucas Schaefer. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.