Pineapple Street

by Jenny Jackson

she was of a generation that despised difficult conversations, and shut down at the slightest hint of conflict or unpleasantness.

Her own family was a restaurant booth—you could always scoot in and make space for one more. Cord’s family was a table with chairs, and those chairs were bolted to the floor.

She was a receptacle for an emotional outburst, the human equivalent of screaming into a pillow.

It was the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, whereby once you noticed something new you saw it all over the place.

“Terrible people can do good things,” Kristin mused. “Like, even Bin Laden loved his grandchildren.”