Jennie's Boy by Wayne Johnston

Author:Wayne Johnston [Johnston, Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

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Early the next morning, before my brothers set out to walk to school through a cold winter rain, I headed for St. John’s with my parents in the Dodge, Dad and Jennie in the front, me feeling very much alone in the big back seat, hugging the passenger door, looking out the window at the wet trees going by, having spent the night wide awake on my bed in the living room—on it, not in it—pretending to read a book, brooding about how Craig had ripped into me and wondering if he had really felt sorry about it or had only pretended to. Maybe he liked to push me to tears because he liked even more the bittersweetness of forgiving me, of pushing himself to tears because he had once again forgotten that I couldn’t take it, that I was more easily hurt than others and needed his protection.

Now, in the car, I tried to decide if I was as clueless as Craig had said I was, and if the rest of the family agreed with him, or if it was true that I was helpless to resist whatever in God’s name it was that made me such a burden on them.

Jennie hadn’t slept, either. I had heard her in her room, lighting up one cigarette after another, three clicks of the lighter for every smoke. Several times, on the way to the bathroom, I’d snuck a glance through the crack of the bedroom door and had just been able to make her out, one hand behind her head as she blew smoke toward the ceiling.

She, too, looked out the car window at the woods she had never ventured into in her life, the dark mid-winter spruce bowing in the wind that slammed the car. I guessed she was talked out from the night before. Though Dad hadn’t been drinking last night, he seemed to be deep in the misery and reverie of a hangover.

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