Strange as this Weather Has Been

Lace and Jimmy have their worst fight yet, and for the first time, Jimmy leaves. Lace thinks guiltily about him, pitying that he “[n]ever got to make a man. Him boy, then middle-aged, no in-between, the boy in the middle-aged body, and how much did I take from him? That slow low ruin. Down in a hole” (331). She sees his leaving as him finally growing up at the age of 31.

Dane wakes up worried because he knows that Jimmy left in the middle of the night. He remembers the terror of last night, when he heard Jimmy and Lace fighting and saw the monkey at the end of the hall. Even though he’s never seen the monkey in real life, he knows what it looks like from Tommy and Corey’s descriptions. He had to pee, but he felt compelled to look down the hall, like it was beckoning to him. It was “[l]imp on the carpet, twisted funny unlike any live thing would lie, and its dirty fur swished a little, Dane saw it move, the way it swishes when water passes over it” (337).

That morning, he is eating cereal on the porch when he sees

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