Summary

The narrator of Chapter 9 is Bo’s older brother Benny. Chapter 9 focuses on Benny’s relationship with his younger sister Mo.

After the death of the siblings’ mother in 1965, 16-year-old Mo retreated to her room and barely spoke to anyone for months. Then Benny caught her having sex with another teenager in the bushes. Benny sat Mo down for a conversation over whiskey, and learned that she was having casual sex with “a whole bunch” of boys from school as a coping mechanism (245). He did not know how to play the role of a parent to Mo and was personally disgusted by the idea of sex, but he was willing to be a sympathetic listener.

A few months after finding out Mo’s secret, Benny packed up and drove south across the bay to take a job on the mainland, in the shipyards of...