Read Online The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison - Free Book Online
Authors: Dot Hutchison
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grateful for the silence and thinks Eddison must be as well, both men staring at the table. Trauma being what it is, Victor can’t recall a victim interview where sex was such a frank topic.
He clears his throat, turning the photos over so he doesn’t have to see the hallways lined with dead girls in glass and resin. “Your next-door neighbor when you were a child was a pedophile, you said, but when did you see the others?”
“Gran’s lawn guy.” She stops, blinks, and glowers at the bottle of water, and Victor can’t help but think she didn’t mean to say it. Perhaps the exhaustion is setting in with a stronger grip. He files that thought away for now, but he’ll watch for other opportunities.
“You saw your Gran often?”
She sighs and picks at a scab on one of her fingers. “I lived with her,” she answers reluctantly.
“When was this?”
My parents finally got divorced when I was eight. All the questions about money, about the house and cars and all the things were taken care of in one meeting. The next eight months were spent with each arguing that the other should be stuck with me.
Isn’t that fantastic? Every kid should be forced to sit through eight months of listening to their parents actively not want them.
Eventually it was decided that I’d be sent to live with Gran, my mother’s mother, and both my parents would pay her child support. When the day came for me to leave, I sat on my front step with three suitcases, two boxes, and a teddy bear, the grand total of everything I owned. Neither of my parents was home.
A year before, we’d gotten new neighbors across the street, a youngish couple who’d just had their first child. I used to love going over to see the baby, a beautiful little boy who wasn’t broken or fucked up yet. With parents like his, maybe he never would be. She’d always give me a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, and he taught me how to play poker and blackjack. They were the ones who took me to the bus station, who helped me buy my ticket with the money my parents had left on my nightstand the day before, the ones who helped me load everything under the bus and introduce me to the driver and help me find a seat. She even gave me a lunch for the trip, complete with oatmeal raisin cookies still warm from the oven. They were another family I wished I could be a part of, but I wasn’t theirs. Still, I waved goodbye to them as the bus pulled away, and they stood together on the curb, their baby held between them, and waved until we couldn’t see each other anymore.
When I got to the city where Gran lived, I had to take a taxi from the bus station to the house. The driver swore all the way there about people who had no business having kids, and when I asked him what some of the words meant, he even taught me how to use them in sentences. My Gran lived in a big, dilapidated house in a neighborhood that was moneyed sixty years ago but quickly went to shit, and when the driver had helped me unload everything onto her tiny front porch, I paid him and told him to have a great fucking day.
He laughed and tugged my braid, told me to take care of myself.
Menopause did strange things to Gran. She was a serial bride—and widow—when she was younger, but That Time convinced her she was dried up and halfway into the grave, so she holed up in her house and started filling all the rooms and halls with dead things.
No, seriously, with dead things . Even the taxidermists thought she was creepy, and you have to be really fucking bad to win that award. She had things she’d purchased premade, like wild game or exotics, things like bears and mountain lions that weren’t something you saw in a city. She had birds and armadillos, and my personal most hated, the collection of neighborhood cats and dogs that had been killed in various ways over the years that she’d taken in to be stuffed. They were everywhere, even in the bathrooms and kitchen, and they filled every single
He clears his throat, turning the photos over so he doesn’t have to see the hallways lined with dead girls in glass and resin. “Your next-door neighbor when you were a child was a pedophile, you said, but when did you see the others?”
“Gran’s lawn guy.” She stops, blinks, and glowers at the bottle of water, and Victor can’t help but think she didn’t mean to say it. Perhaps the exhaustion is setting in with a stronger grip. He files that thought away for now, but he’ll watch for other opportunities.
“You saw your Gran often?”
She sighs and picks at a scab on one of her fingers. “I lived with her,” she answers reluctantly.
“When was this?”
My parents finally got divorced when I was eight. All the questions about money, about the house and cars and all the things were taken care of in one meeting. The next eight months were spent with each arguing that the other should be stuck with me.
Isn’t that fantastic? Every kid should be forced to sit through eight months of listening to their parents actively not want them.
Eventually it was decided that I’d be sent to live with Gran, my mother’s mother, and both my parents would pay her child support. When the day came for me to leave, I sat on my front step with three suitcases, two boxes, and a teddy bear, the grand total of everything I owned. Neither of my parents was home.
A year before, we’d gotten new neighbors across the street, a youngish couple who’d just had their first child. I used to love going over to see the baby, a beautiful little boy who wasn’t broken or fucked up yet. With parents like his, maybe he never would be. She’d always give me a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, and he taught me how to play poker and blackjack. They were the ones who took me to the bus station, who helped me buy my ticket with the money my parents had left on my nightstand the day before, the ones who helped me load everything under the bus and introduce me to the driver and help me find a seat. She even gave me a lunch for the trip, complete with oatmeal raisin cookies still warm from the oven. They were another family I wished I could be a part of, but I wasn’t theirs. Still, I waved goodbye to them as the bus pulled away, and they stood together on the curb, their baby held between them, and waved until we couldn’t see each other anymore.
When I got to the city where Gran lived, I had to take a taxi from the bus station to the house. The driver swore all the way there about people who had no business having kids, and when I asked him what some of the words meant, he even taught me how to use them in sentences. My Gran lived in a big, dilapidated house in a neighborhood that was moneyed sixty years ago but quickly went to shit, and when the driver had helped me unload everything onto her tiny front porch, I paid him and told him to have a great fucking day.
He laughed and tugged my braid, told me to take care of myself.
Menopause did strange things to Gran. She was a serial bride—and widow—when she was younger, but That Time convinced her she was dried up and halfway into the grave, so she holed up in her house and started filling all the rooms and halls with dead things.
No, seriously, with dead things . Even the taxidermists thought she was creepy, and you have to be really fucking bad to win that award. She had things she’d purchased premade, like wild game or exotics, things like bears and mountain lions that weren’t something you saw in a city. She had birds and armadillos, and my personal most hated, the collection of neighborhood cats and dogs that had been killed in various ways over the years that she’d taken in to be stuffed. They were everywhere, even in the bathrooms and kitchen, and they filled every single
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