More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And was she not holding her husband right? Why else would he take his joy out of the house? A helpless kind of terror had risen up in her and it never occurred to her that he had gone out for reasons that had nothing to do with her.
She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.
“You shine on, boy. Harder than anyone I ever met in my life. And I’m sixty years old this January.”
“Get you kinda lonely, thinkin you were the only one?”
A lot of folks, they got a little bit of shine to them. They don’t even know it. But they always seem to show up with flowers when their wives are feelin blue with the monthlies, they do good on school tests they don’t even study for, they got a good idea how people are feelin as soon as they walk into a room. I come across fifty or sixty like that. But maybe only a dozen, countin my gram, that knew they was shinin.”
“Wasps?” she said, and for a moment she was inside herself, almost detached in her realization. That her mind cross-patched, and knowledge was connected to emotion.
And suddenly he found that he didn’t like the Overlook so well anymore, as if it wasn’t wasps that had stung his son, wasps that had miraculously lived through the bug bomb assault, but the hotel itself.
He cocked a finger gravely at his temple, a small boy unconsciously burlesquing suicide.
Wendy nodded—of course she thought Danny would be quite a man—but the doctor’s explanation struck her as glib. It tasted more like margarine than butter.
Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.
“I remember it,” he muttered, but the coals of resentment had begun to glow around his heart.
He told himself he would get down on his knees and beg Al before he let that happen, but still the words struggled to pour out, and the hand holding the hot wires of his rage felt greased.
