Orin drags Avril's dog behind the Volvo; her uncanny, "creepy" overloving response

texture · UNDATED (Weston era, ~Orin's mid-teens B.S.) — S. Johnson

• When: UNDATED (a summer weekday, Weston, soon after Orin got his license, ~Orin's mid-teens)
• What: Per Bain (n269): Orin, impaired, peeled the Moms's pale-yellow Volvo out of the E.T.A. drive without checking that her beloved dog S. Johnson was leashed to the back, and dragged the dog to a grotesque death down Commonwealth Ave. Avril's response was "not conventionally abusive, but seemed almost too unconditionally loving and compassionate and selfless to possibly be true": she mourned the dog in audible private for weeks (a "heartbreakingly small cherrywood coffin") while bombarding Orin with extra compliments and favorite foods so he'd never feel blamed, and "refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility." Bain reads this as philanthropy-as-self-display ("I suspect she was badly abused as a child"). Hal (n110) hears Orin's "hit-and-run-and-back-up" cover-lie the same way.