Re: [Jack & Clem: family reunion]
Jack couldn't remember Clem giving a sweet damn about anyone she didn't feel deserved it. It was a good show, until the lights went out. The coffee was stale as well as cold and it had been cheap, when it was hot and fresh which meant that it was bitter in three different ways on the way down.
Clem had flocked boys in that small English village, helpless bees to showy, bright flower. He imagined Michael hadn't managed to get a word in edgeways once Clem was in full flow, and had done very well to get an apology out. The apology did not, Jack consider, certify that Michael had been in the wrong. It simply meant he knew the fastest way past whatever it was that had happened. The headache was throbbing at tempo now.
"He deserted you," he repeated now, for the space it gave him to try and remember whether he had any painkillers in the desk, and to eye the spreading fluff of that sweater on his couch. He'd be finding pink fluff for days. "I imagine you were helpless. Pathetic. Incapable." Dry, dry, the slam of a drawer as he dug for plastic bubbles of pills.
"Did you descend on this town en-mass?" God, a family three-ring circus. He was trying to calculate how far removed this Penny could be (enough that he could plead total familial ignorance) when she slid in the snide as if it were sugared sweetness.
"The scoop on bingo is limited when your source leaks it to the grocery store clerk." Success was a handful of four aspirin: Jack threw them all back at once and chased them with cold coffee. "I'm dredging the one I've got into the dirt. It's still serviceable. So how are you going to make his life miserable?" He imagined this was the plan.