Re: Quicklog: Marvel, Clem & Jake
[Jake didn't know enough about his momma to know where the line left off. He knew Clem's face well enough to make it pen and paper and pencil lines, and he knew his momma out of photographs well enough to sketch them real similar.
He hadn't been raised to eat anything unusual, but he drank in new experience like a man real parched offered ice-water and Jake folded up his menu and ordered along with Clem, an expectant echo. He wasn't comfortable, in rich places. He stuck out too much, real sure now that the clothes he'd figured were fine in the little room, looked cheap alongside the table linens and the women who laughed quietly, glossy and their hair colors of butter and caramel, as richly expensive as the place itself.]
I never thought about it much. [He'd thought real hard about the man who'd murdered his mother. He'd thought enough to go buying a tank full of gas and to pack up his things that awful night, and to go heading out of town until the sky met the highway and nothing else but yards and yards of dirt.] People figured I'd go on and play football. I didn't want to go to college, didn't sit right. [Which wasn't true exactly: he'd seen boys who weren't on the football team ribbed real hard for good grades, and he'd striven to be on the right side of that line, so long he couldn't remember anything else.
And art, art wasn't a career. Not in the small town that was the limit of Jake's experience.] Maybe I'll become a chef.