Read Online Into the Great Wide Open by Kevin Canty - Free Book Online

target. So far Kenny’s sympathies were all with Mom. So far Junie was acting badly.
    “It was never sold as a Wright house,” the mother said. “I don’t know if
fake
is the right word.”
    June explained to Kenny: “I was looking through a book about him in the library downtown and I came across plans for the house, and then a picture, which was very weird—I mean, the furniture was all different, the stuff outside the windows. It was a picture of the living room.”
    “Did you see the living room on your way in?” the mother asked.
    Kenny shrugged, sure.
    “It’s a very nice room, I think. But it’s meant to be photographed as much as, maybe more than, it’s to be lived in. There are a lot of inconvenient touches.”
    Some kind of competition, Kenny thought, with himself as the audience; though he had the feeling that any audience would do. He was
fungible
. Neither of them was looking at the other, neither of them was exactly looking at him. That faint bitter smell. The thing that felt odd to Kenny was that there was no attempt to smooth things over, keep the ball rolling. They both seemed to be itemizing some long internal list of disappointments, one by one. Jinx Logan, six or seven months pregnant by now, sat forgotten by the window, staring over the transom at the bare leaves outside, the gray sky. She had that inward look, like she was listening to Mars on her dental work. He hadn’t seen her for a while at school, not that he was usually paying all that much attention. He wasn’t stoned today, though.
    “Kenny,” Junie finally said, “come on. I want to show you my pictures.”
    “Thanks. It’s good to meet you, Mrs. Williamson.”
    Junie started to laugh.
    “What?” Kenny asked.
    “Mrs. Williamson,” Junie said. “Everybody calls her Jane. I haven’t heard anyone call her Mrs. Williamson for a long time.”
    Jane Mrs. Williamson—as Kenny now thought of her—rose to the bait. “There’s nothing wrong
in itself
with trying to be polite to others,” she said. “There’s nothing necessarily false about it.”
    “I didn’t say there was,” Junie said. “It’s just that nobody calls you Mrs. Williamson.”
    “They call me
Doctor
Williamson at work. That doesn’t seem to bother anyone.”
    “Why are you so worried about it?” Junie asked, and left before her mother could reply, pulling Kenny along in the eddy behind her. He was actively wishing he hadn’t come. As naked as he felt himself with his shabby car and schoolbooks, he wasn’t prepared for the family drama of Junie and her mother. Why couldn’t they just keep it quiet? Her mother seemed like a perfectly reasonable person, Kenny thought. And the worst part, to him, was how schoolgirl Junie’s bad acting seemed, how eighth-grade. He thought he had found a mystery at the Girl Scout camp, half-girl, half-woman, as tall as he was. Now he wondered if he had just gotten in the way of a bad mood. Incredible Shrinking Junie.
    Out of place as ever and maybe worse, in his cheap clothes, he followed her up the stairs and past the Mayan goddess; stuck halfway through the birth, condemned to the most painful part forever. Or maybe past the pain, simply out of it. Kenny thought longingly of the joint in his backpack in the backseat of the car.
    “I’m sorry,” Junie said. “More family shit.”
    “If you figure out a way around it, let me know.”
    “The thing is, you liked her, right? Everybody likes her. I like her myself. I’m the only person in the whole world that can’t get along with her.”
    They were in the front hallway, but she spoke like they were in private, like there was no chance of being overheard. He thought of the brother, the mother, the pregnant friend; though he had never known Junie to be a special friend of Jinx’s. Really, he didn’t know anything.
    “I just feel stuck sometimes,” she said. “Most of the time. You know, when you’re doing something and you want to stop and you can’t seem