Biking With Andrew Scott

Andrew (Andy) Scott, has entered the terminal stage of AIDS. Rather than wait until the disease degenerates into wasting away and suffering, he elects to take his own life while it still has a high quality index. It’s not an impulsive decision. He’s been reading the Hemlock Society handbook.

Except that he doesn’t quite check out. His ghost hangs around.

His unexpected departure devastates Stephanie, his best female friend; Chad, his lover; and Marie, his mother, an evangelist who refuses to accept that her son’s death was other than an accident.

His most intimate emotional connection has been with Stephanie, and she is the only one to whom the presence of Andy’s ghost is made manifest (or so it appears at first).

Biking With Andrew Scott traces the lives of the characters in the fifteen months following Andy’s death, as they move through the five stages of grief. Most especially, it focuses on the best friend Stephanie. After the initial shock, she starts to fall apart over a period of months as the most central relationship in her life has taken a strange turn and she copes with Andy’s ghost, his lover and his mom. Can she possibly reassemble the pieces of her shattered life and become a whole person again? She is not without resources. There’s Madam Tamara, her favorite tarot card reader. There’s Keith, the friendly Jamaican bartender at the local beach shack. Also dropping in at the shack is Brian, a cute cyclist, but he may become a different kind of resource for Stephanie.