Christine’s Reviews > War Games > Status Update

“His expression turned resigned. A little tired. But not bleak, not dark, not despairing. Human. Him. He sighed, and it was the sigh of Joseph Pascal who had finished his homework and wanted to mess around, but knew that Nerva would insist on studying for at least another hour.”

“I’m done.” Lou had finally settled on words. “That’s it. No more friendship. No more calling me, no more ‘oh Lou, Okinawa is lovely this time of year,’ and gangsters jumping out of ceilings. In fact, I’m quitting my job.”
(The side characters are are blast too)

“But he hadn’t really understood love. He had thought of it like a switch, either on or off. In love, or not. He hadn’t known that love could expand, sink deeper like the furled roots of those monstrous trees… so deep it couldn’t be cut out without tearing the landscape to gory, jagged pieces.”

“Are you lying to avoid the hospital?” Pascal asked bluntly.
Lou looked at Pascal as if having forgotten he was there, and blurted out, “Are you kidding me? I’m not gonna lie right to your face, you’re terrifying.”

He said it with such plain surprise, Pascal had to believe it.

“for a moment he didn’t even see the changes the last decade had worked — all he saw was the boy who had hotwired his car and somehow parked it on the roof as a birthday prank. The boy who had cheated flirtily off of Nerva’s every test. The boy who had stolen his first kiss, his notes, and one time been chased scrambling out of Nerva’s window by Henry and his shotgun.”

“That cold spot of grief continued to choke him, over a decade later, and a decade later he still held onto these grim mementos like some wartime widow. They barely represented their original owner any longer; they represented only Nerva’s personal pain, his compounded grief and inability to function.”

Henry was an angry chef. Nerva could picture him in that kitchen, one eye on the window peeled for car headlights, one eye on the oven, not even glancing at his hands as he chopped vegetables with terrifying speed… Nerva remembered meals like these when he was younger. Most people cooked because they enjoyed it, because they loved to see people fed and happy. Henry cooked because he wasn’t allowed to hit them.