THE KING ATLASBetaA WORLD BETWEEN STORIESSingle-book characters / Named cast
4 named character entries recorded in The Last Rung on the Ladder. Open a snippet for the book’s wording.
These entries belong to this story; they do not establish matches to characters in other books. Read about this work and its recorded connections.
This is a growing catalog, not a claim that every character has been found.
When Dr. Pedersen, the GP from Columbia City, came out to the barn with my father and me, he looked up into the shadows for a long time. The last rung on the ladder still hung there, aslant, from one nail. He looked, as I said, for a long time.
I haven't made many close friends in the last few years, and my wife Helen and I divorced in 1971. What we exchange now are Christmas cards. How are you? How's the job? Have a happy New Year. I've been awake all night with it, with Katrina's letter.
I understood it better after getting Katrina's letter. We grew up eighty miles west of Omaha in a town called Hemingford Home—my dad, my mom, my sister Katrina, and me, I was two years older than Katrina, whom everyone called Kitty.
There was only a single sentence below the “Dear Larry.” But a sentence can mean enough. It can do enough. I remembered my dad on the plane, his face seeming old and wasted in the harsh sunlight at 18,000 feet as we went west from New York.