Close to the line

In April 1999, twenty-four-year-old Jo Redd arrived in Columbia, Missouri with a fiancé, two suitcases, and a plan to start over. Two weeks later, in the break room of a brand-new Steak 'n Shake on Clark Lane, a night-shift manager named Levi walked in to run her orientation - and something in her chest went off like a drop light in a dark garage. There was only one problem. Actually, there were two: Levi had a girlfriend, and Redd was engaged. So she made the most careful decision of her life: she would make Levi her best friend. Nothing more. Over one unforgettable year of night shifts, nickel poker, Magic: The Gathering, tornado warnings, truck drivers, football Saturdays, and the night a jam band let out at the Hearnes Center and four hundred hungry strangers materialized out of the dark, two people took a friendship right up to the line - and held it. While Redd and Levi kept every promise they'd made, her fiancé James was keeping a secret of his own: an affair with the woman who was supposed to stand beside her at the wedding. When the truth finally surfaced in January 2000, everything Redd had planned fell apart - and everything that mattered began. Set against the real Columbia, Missouri of 1999 - the Mizzou football season, the Twilight Festival, First Night Columbia, and the Y2K panic that had the whole town holding its breath - Close to the Line is a bittersweet, big-hearted memoir about the almosts: the milkshake split two ways, the arm's length on the curb, the love that stays patient long enough to learn its own name. It was never an affair. The love was real. The line was real. Both things are true.