Year of Lesser Read Online Free PDF

that. Even later, after talking about it for a while, he hits at his leg. His excitement affects Loraine. Her fingers shake. She remembers this one time as a teenager, sitting on the rocks at Winnipeg Beach. She was wearing a bathing suit and talking to some boy she’d met two days earlier. She could sense the heat escaping from the boy’s skin and her bum felt the roughness of the rock. Her buttocks feel now as if they’ve been scraped along rock.
    Johnny’s quiet for a bit and then near Sprague he says, “Jesus, Loraine, the thought of you is killing me.” He looks at her on the other side of the car and clicks his tongue against his teeth. Loraine dips her chin and slides over and lays her head on Johnny’s lap. He’s wearing suit pants and they’re cool on Loraine’s cheek. She slides a hand deep into his cowboy boots and pulls at the hair on his calf. She wants to crawl inside him. “Hey, Johnny,” she whispers.
    “Hey,” he says back. He pulls the car over onto a side road. He lifts Loraine’s head and says, “Who’d have thought, you and me, huh?” And he takes her in his big hands and turns her small body, lays a nose on her flat stomach, gurgles and says, “Oh, my.”
    And as for Loraine, well, she’d let him do anything. She and Johnny have been lovers off and on for years now. He comes to her when he’s lonely, or tired of his wife Charlene, and Loraine lets him because she likes his hardness, the way his jaw moves, his crooked mouth. Now, in the front seat of the Olds, she clings to him and won’t let him go. “My little fucking monkey,” he says. She chatters in his ear and sucks on his neck. “Yes,” she says.
    Johnny doesn’t go to his appointment. Instead they cross into the States and drive the country roads, Loraine deep under Johnny’s arm, and then they head back up to Steinbach for lunch.
    Loraine watches Johnny eat. He likes to put things in his mouth; she is just one of those things. She says, “I’m worried about Chris. He’s tough these days, doesn’t talk.”
    Johnny’s elation has worn off. He’s stirring sugar into his coffee and staring out the large front window towards Main Street. “Chris’s been hanging out with this Krahn girl,” he says. “Melody’s her name.”
    Loraine is surprised and hurt. It’s unfair, Johnny knowing this. She wonders what this Melody looks like. She knows the parents but can’t picture the daughter.
    “Do you like Chris?” she asks.
    “Sure,” Johnny says. “Yeah.” Then, “I was thinking. About us and what we’re going to do. Leaving Charlene would kill her.”
    “Would it?”
    Johnny is scratching at a match. It finally lights. He is looking over Loraine’s head, at something only he can see. He refocuses, seeks out Loraine. “Yes, it would,” he says.
    Johnny pays for lunch and, out on the curb before climbing into the car, he pulls Loraine close and pushes his nose against her hair.
    Loraine doesn’t really like the town of Lesser. Most of the time she tries to stay away. She does her shopping at Super Valu in Winnipeg, except when she runs out of butter or milk and then she drives into Lesser and stops at the Solo store. Loraine finds she doesn’t fit in the town. She’s the wife of a dead farmer and it’s still strange for women to run their own farms. She can’t hobnob with the boys at Chuck’s; she has no desire to. Lesser’s an ugly little place with a sickness at its core; it’s full of death and gossip and churches. This is what Loraine thinks. It’s made a man like Johnny go all to pieces. He doesn’t know any more who he is. Hewants to be a Christian and a do-gooder but he keeps falling and people laugh at him; they want him to fail. And when he does fail he comes running to Loraine.
    She remembers the day Johnny’s father committed suicide. It was eight o’clock in the evening and she was in the refrigerator room, stacking flats. She’d seen Johnny earlier that day. He’d come by and