Juggling act...

So...Brendan is no longer Brendan. Except he is. But his aunt and uncle want him to play along even though they won't tell him anything more about himself than they absolutely must. Which makes no sense. The only good thing about it is, he knows the British aren't looking for him in connection with the bombing. He's now part of the modern Irish diaspora.

As for his new identity, he's not expected to tell anyone about his past. His cousins simply accept him as who their parents claim him to be, but that doesn't stop the B-girls from causing a situation when they decide it's time for him to tell them who Joanna was, since he had her name tattooed on his left shoulder. This causes a near relapse in his emotional collapse and leads to him living in the pool house.

His cousin, Scott, had set himself up in there but is evicted by his parents. They insist Brendan stay close by them, but won't tell him why except he'll be safer. But now Scott is pissed off at him so that makes things more than a little awkward, later.

Bren thinks he wants to forget his past...forget his family, but he can't. He's worried about his brothers, Eamonn and Rhuari, and his sisters, Mairead and Maeve, back under the boot of the British Army. In fact, Eamonn is arrested for helping smuggle in guns. He reads Mairead's letters to his aunt, to keep up with how they're doing...and can see she's playing along with the charade. To his confusion, he's feeling both freed from Derry and yet alienated from it.

I'm not sure how this will be going, yet, because as I go back through Book Two I'm finding aspects that need to be removed and others that need to be added. He's still tender, psychically, over what happened but getting better. He's back to concentrating on making repairs, which helps center him, and wrangles a part-time job out of his uncle at a bar the man just bought in Houston's Heights area.

At least I'm still plugging along with it, again. Who knows? One of these centuries I might get this thing done.