Josie and Jack A Novel by Kelly Braffet

Author:Kelly Braffet
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780618441433
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Published: 2005-02-04T08:00:00+00:00

Jack came home later that day. I was wearing one of the dresses that Becka had bought for me. I felt stupid in it and he laughed when he saw me, which didn’t help my mood or hers. Finally he suggested that he and I take a drive around Erie, so that I could get my bearings, and Becka said, her voice heavy with sarcasm, “Oh, what a nice idea.”

“The Becka Capriola mood swing is a force of nature,” Jack said when we were alone in the car. “Watch for it. It bites.” Becka’s house was on the east side of town. Jack drove west down tree-lined streets through a neighborhood full of Victorian houses and wide grassy lawns, and I thought, this must be how the other half lives; but a few blocks later, we were back in the land of small box houses, scrubby ill-watered lawns, and old cars with paint fading under a thick coat of dust. Closer to the water, the boxes had been painted, and sleek, expensive cars sat in front of tidy gardens. To the right of us, the bay between Presque Isle and the mainland stretched and glittered in the sun, and I thought, of course. Now that the water’s cleaner, this is hot property.

“There’s not much money here,” I said.

“It’s hidden. The summer people live up near the state park, on the peninsula. Gated themselves off from the highway and everything.” Jack’s lip curled contemptuously. “They’re the ones who are going to buy all that stuff we took from Raeburn.”

“What are we going to do? Go door to door?”

“Becka’s got a friend who can fence things for us.”

“Great. Let’s meet him.”

“You really want to get out of here.”

“She doesn’t like me, Jack. She doesn’t want me here.”

“She wants me here,” Jack answered. “And if she wants me, she’d damn well better be nice to you.”

That was true and we both knew it. All the same, it didn’t take Becka long to get sick of me. I understood. She was in love with my brother, or at least enthralled by him; I could tell because when she talked about him, her voice held the same awe as when she talked about the characters on the soap operas she watched in the afternoons. She and Jack had met in a tattoo parlor on Peach Street, she said.

“Jack doesn’t have any tattoos,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Becka said. “But one of the ink guys down there is a friend of mine. I go down to see him sometimes, on my day off.”

“What was Jack doing in a tattoo parlor?”

“Meeting me. What the hell does it matter? I went in there to talk to Mike, and there he was. He was staying with this awful girl, over on Sixteenth Street. Wasn’t a week later I said to him, ‘Sweetheart, you just go ahead and move your stuff in with old Becka until you decide you need to be moving on.’ And the rest is history.”

“And then I came along and ruined everything.

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