dread

I am reading Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning, a surprisingly beautiful coming-of-age novel about a boy suffering through his high school years during the Second World War.  This is one of those crumbling, brittle-paged books that I must have inherited from my parents, who apparently inherited it from one Joanne O'Neill (or so says the name inscribed on the first page).

Particularly moving, to me, is the relationship shared between the main character and his father. And this scares me, because the father has volunteered for the Navy and is off battling U-boats off the coast of France. It seems practically inevitable that he will end up not coming home, and I'm afraid this will break my heart.