Jumpy, ain’t you, Marcus wants to say, but suddenly it doesn’t quite feel fair. With a wave of something like emotional vertigo he realises there’s something eerily familiar about how Joan snaps defensively at anything that could even vaguely be construed as a slight or a suggestion of weakness. He wasn’t much different in his twenties. Sometimes he’s not much different now.
So he scowls and flicks his eyes up to heaven, but he doesn’t make fun of her. Instead, he says, “Nothing good ever came out of England. You’re looking at exhibit A.”
With a sidelong glance, he grins at her, and says, “Not worried about timing, not with this engine. Just trying to work out if you’re telling me to floor it.” A beat, and he says, “You know what, I’m just gonna assume you were,” and acts accordingly.
*
Pallas, Massachusetts is a picturesque coastal tourist town, but it’s the off-season and quiet. It doesn’t feel like a great place for drug-dealing or drag-racing or ministering to the sick. It feels, to Marcus, like a great place for an exorcism, small-town frustrations bubbling up into anger in the doldrums of winter when tourist money isn’t coming in.
The O’Neills own a B&B and want Marcus to stay there, but he and Joan are in a motel just outside of town. He doesn’t tell the O’Neills that, they’d be heartbroken to hear about the cheap competition. But then they’re sort of heartbroken already. Their oldest son Daniel came home from college because he was sick and wanted to recover at home: now he’s tied up in the attic, screaming profanities in Latin night and day.
Joan’s as good as her word: they don’t see too much of each other. But Marcus feels responsible for her being here: guilty, maybe. It’s not exactly rich pickings. But she’s resourceful, she’ll make her way, he reassures himself.
Maybe that’s what makes him lax enough to not bother with convincing lies. He’s tired and she won’t care. When he comes back with a bruised throat and bloody knuckles, he just gives her a raucous grin and tells her he walked into a lamppost. He assumes she’ll find it funny.
He’s at the O’Neill’s now, no thoughts of Joan crowding his head. Daniel is trying to bite him, spitting and snarling, the ropes at his wrists fraying and starting to smoke, the lights flickering — with a snap and a spray of sparks, a bulb explodes and Marcus breaks off praying to swear.
no subject
So he scowls and flicks his eyes up to heaven, but he doesn’t make fun of her. Instead, he says, “Nothing good ever came out of England. You’re looking at exhibit A.”
With a sidelong glance, he grins at her, and says, “Not worried about timing, not with this engine. Just trying to work out if you’re telling me to floor it.” A beat, and he says, “You know what, I’m just gonna assume you were,” and acts accordingly.
Pallas, Massachusetts is a picturesque coastal tourist town, but it’s the off-season and quiet. It doesn’t feel like a great place for drug-dealing or drag-racing or ministering to the sick. It feels, to Marcus, like a great place for an exorcism, small-town frustrations bubbling up into anger in the doldrums of winter when tourist money isn’t coming in.
The O’Neills own a B&B and want Marcus to stay there, but he and Joan are in a motel just outside of town. He doesn’t tell the O’Neills that, they’d be heartbroken to hear about the cheap competition. But then they’re sort of heartbroken already. Their oldest son Daniel came home from college because he was sick and wanted to recover at home: now he’s tied up in the attic, screaming profanities in Latin night and day.
Joan’s as good as her word: they don’t see too much of each other. But Marcus feels responsible for her being here: guilty, maybe. It’s not exactly rich pickings. But she’s resourceful, she’ll make her way, he reassures himself.
Maybe that’s what makes him lax enough to not bother with convincing lies. He’s tired and she won’t care. When he comes back with a bruised throat and bloody knuckles, he just gives her a raucous grin and tells her he walked into a lamppost. He assumes she’ll find it funny.
He’s at the O’Neill’s now, no thoughts of Joan crowding his head. Daniel is trying to bite him, spitting and snarling, the ropes at his wrists fraying and starting to smoke, the lights flickering — with a snap and a spray of sparks, a bulb explodes and Marcus breaks off praying to swear.