Free Sunny Dreams by Alison Preston Page B

over the edge and landed on the tablecloth. He pierced it with his fork and placed it back among the others. It left a tiny green stain on the white linen.
    “I don’t know, Helen,” he said. “I don’t like the idea of a stranger sleeping down the hall.” He glanced at me and pushed a little chunk of potato off his plate.
    “For goodness’ sake, Will, stop fiddling with your food!” said Helen.
    They could have been children again, the small boy and the older sister who was left too soon to look after her little brother. My dad had been only twelve when my grandpa drowned. My grandmother had survived the sinking of the Titanic only to die a few months later from pneumonia. So at the age of twenty-one Helen had had to adjust her dreams and plans to accommodate the needs of a twelve-year-old boy.
    “Jackson isn’t a stranger,” she said now. “And it was your rickety old ladder he fell from, Will, your garage he was helping to build.”
    “He should go home to Montreal,” said my dad. “He should be in touch with his parents about this.”
    “Maybe there’s a rift between them,” said Helen. “Maybe they’re estranged.”
    “He’s too young to be estranged from his parents,” Dad said.
    “You know better than that, Will.”
    They both looked at me then as if there was some deep dark secret about familial estrangement that I wasn’t supposed to know about.
    This fight didn’t need me. I gnawed away on my drumstick.
    “I’m going to broach it with him,” said my dad. “The idea of him speaking to his folks, going home. I could front him a little money if need be.”
    They were quiet for a while as we dealt in our own ways with the food on our plates.
    “What about Benoit?” Dad said quietly.
    “Benoit can stay in the tent until the garage is finished and then go or stay as he pleases. He isn’t our worry. Jackson is.”
    My dad didn’t like the set-up Helen had in mind; he didn’t like it one bit. But he looked up to his older sister and I think he knew deep in his heart that it was the right thing to do. First, though, he insisted on discussing with Jackson the possibility of his heading back east to his family.
    Outside the dining room window I could see Benny sitting at the picnic table with his supper in front of him. His eating alone out there seemed wrong somehow, but I knew now wasn’t the time to mention it. One stranger at a time.
    In the days after Jackson’s accident Benny stayed very silent except for his hammering. He went into more trances than usual. I guess he was looking harder than ever for a fissure to slip through that would free him, however briefly, from his difficult life.
    The three of us went to the hospital after supper: Dad, Aunt Helen, and me.
    We let my dad talk first.
    Jackson did not want to go home.
    “I can’t go back home yet,” he said. “I need to complete what I started.” He didn’t elaborate on what that was and none of us asked. Good manners, I guess. Surely it wasn’t work on the garage or hard labour in the sugar beet fields that he cared about finishing.
    It seemed to me as though he was trying to prove something to someone, his parents maybe, someone back home who had perhaps accused him of being less than who he was supposed to be. He wanted to show someone what he was made of. A girl? An employer? That was my current theory. Or maybe he didn’t want the life that a wealthy background offered him.
    He finally coughed up that he lived with his mum in Westmount and that his dad was dead. He had died the previous winter from a massive heart attack. That was as far as he would go. He knew his broken arms changed things drastically, but he said he would rather live with his broken arms in a hobo jungle than go home before he had done what he’d set out to do.
    “What exactly is that, Jackson?” asked my aunt. Yay, Helen! I could feel all of our ears perking up.
    But Jackson didn’t respond. In fact, he closed his eyes and for a moment I