Kiss Her Goodbye by Wade Miller. Lion Library (1956), 191 pp.
Ed Darnell and his sister, Emily, are driving east into the desert in response to a stabbing incident in Bakersfield . Ed, at twenty-eight and looking nothing like Emily, has taken complete responsibility for her care. She’s ten years younger and very pretty but suffers from a mental disability that has lowered her intelligence. Although she wants to be a normal teenager with normal responses to other people, she doesn’t always understand their motives and reacts violently when touched by strangers. She and Ed stop at Mr. Tubbs’ run-down motel in a small town outside Barstow. Ed decides to stay and lands a job driving a truck for Cory Sheridan, who also employs an attractive bookkeeper, Marge Wayne. When Cory gets his eyes on Emily, Ed worries that trouble may be on the way.
The story unwinds entirely from Ed’s point of view. He’s in every scene and only his thoughts are recounted. Other characters reveal their ideas in conversations with him. Ed defines his dilemma: Either he ships Emily off to an institution, where her dream of a somewhat normal life will be smothered, or he tries to keep her under his control indefinitely, which will narrow his future and probably won’t be possible anyway. Even though the relationship between Ed and Emily is odd, the authors quickly take incest off the table and hide it in a cupboard. Emily may not be as slow-witted as Ed thinks; she made it through ninth grade before he took her out of school, for example, and he must rely on commands rather than persuasion to get her to do anything. So how does the protagonist solve the problem that drives the novel? He doesn’t. The authors do it for him.