Jane (2010) by Lindner April

Jane (2010) by Lindner April

Author:Lindner, April [April, Lindner,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2011-01-14T19:11:59.468000+00:00


The first reasonably affordable hotel room I could find was fifty blocks downtown. Once I’d settled in, I walked around town, window-shopping and people watching, waiting for Jenna to call me on my cell phone. At dinnertime, I had a pleasant, solitary meal — just me and a novel I’d brought along — at an Indian restaurant across from the hotel. The food was fragrant and delicious, and I could enjoy it as long as I managed not to think too hard about my dwindling savings account. I went to bed early, but the buzz of traffic from the street twenty stories below acted like caffeine on my nervous system. All I could think about was Mr. Rathburn at Thornfield Park with Bianca Ingram. I stayed up for hours, longer than I’d intended to, forehead pressed to the window, watching a string of tiny cars glide below me, headlights and taillights pretty as a string of beads. At 1 a.m., I went back to bed.

Jenna hadn’t called me by ten the next morning, so I phoned her.

“I’m not sure when he got in.” She sounded sleepy and crabby. “He’s snoring now in the back room. I’m not going to wake him up and get my head bitten off. You come here and do it.”

“No,” I said. “When he wakes up, see if you can get him to go out to a coffee shop. Then call me with the address.” I’d thought it over and realized I’d be better off meeting my brother in a neutral public place, where he couldn’t get too angry or violent.

Jenna sighed and hung up. I didn’t hear from her again until midafternoon. Once she’d given me the address, I hurried to the nearest subway stop. I found Mark hunched over his laptop computer at the Greek coffee shop up the street from Jenna’s place. A cold half cup of coffee sat before him. The table was littered with crumpled sugar packets and emptied creamers. I slid into the seat opposite him, and he looked up, apparently surprised to see me. He was thinner than I remembered. His light brown hair had begun to recede.

“I’ll take a coffee,” I told the bored-looking waitress. “Hey,” I said to Mark.

“Hey yourself.” He typed for a few more minutes as if I wasn’t there. His T-shirt was wrinkled, and it looked like he hadn’t shaved for days. Finally he snapped the laptop shut. “I see Jenna called in the cavalry.”

I poured cream into my coffee. “She’s worried about you.”

He snorted. “She’s worried I’ll never get off her sofa. You look the same. And that’s not a compliment.”

I decided not to take the bait.

“I assume she told you,” he said, “about how my skanky bitch girlfriend locked me out of my own house.”

“From the sound of it, she had a good reason to lock you out. You hit her, right?” I’ll admit that it took some courage for me to speak my mind, but we weren’t children anymore. Even if he lashed out, even if he got physical, I didn’t have to sit back and take it.



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