Read Online The Glass Butterfly by Louise Marley - Free Book Online

He understood, later, that it made no sense, but he hadn’t gotten around to telling her that. Or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to say it, and receive a therapist sort of answer about adolescents and their feelings. Sometimes he thought, when he was still a teenager, that she must not really care, or she would be angry, scold him, shout at him the way other mothers did. The way Mary Garvey shouted at her kids and her husband.
    But Tory wasn’t like that. She was . . . contained. Controlled. He rarely saw her show emotion except when she was listening to music.
    The silence of the house, as they got out of the car and approached the front door, added to the strangeness of the day. When Tory had been here—and Tory had always been here when Jack came home, something that used to irritate him and now filled him with desperate sadness—music had met him, pouring out through the front door, or through an open window in summer. If it was early in the day, it was baroque. Bach, Vivaldi, Handel. If it was afternoon, Tory would have progressed to classical—Haydn, perhaps, or Mozart. Jack would always know the workday was over if the music that greeted him was opera. He had resented it, felt as if she was imposing her own tastes on him and anyone else that came into her sphere. He had often plunged up the stairs to his room to play opposing music, punk or metal or even country, cranking it up as loud as he dared.
    Other times he would come upon her, curled up in the wide stuffed chair beside the Bose system, headphones on, tears streaming down her cheeks as she listened to some music she particularly loved. He hated finding her like that. It was embarrassing, as if he had caught her without her clothes on.
    He had been, he thought now, the cliché of a teenager. He hadn’t improved much as a young adult, either.
    Now, opening the front door into the quiet house, the full impact of his mother’s absence struck him like a gust of winter wind rolling out from the empty hallway. He froze on the doorstep, with Kate behind him.
    â€œAre you okay, honey?” Kate murmured. She put one hand on his back, not insistently, but gently. Her hand wasn’t slender, with firm, muscular fingers, like his mother’s. It was plump, the palm soft and warm. “Do you want me to go in first?”
    Jack shook his head. “No, I’m good,” he said, but he couldn’t get his legs to move.
    Kate said, “Right,” and stepped past him into the hallway. She turned on the porch light and the hall light and then stood, holding the door wide, giving him time.
    The lights helped. Music would help. Kate left Jack to carry his suitcase up to his room, and she went to the kitchen to start putting a meal together. Jack trudged up the stairs, and stood uncertainly outside Tory’s bedroom. The door was open. The bed was made, everything looking neat and tidy as always. A book lay facedown on the bedside table, open at the place Tory had stopped reading. Without going in, Jack could see that a bathrobe hung on the hook of the open bathroom door. A towel had been used and then spread to dry over the rack.
    He turned away to his own room. He tossed his suitcase on the bed, and looked around at his things, carefully kept just the way he had left them. His Little League trophies lined the shelf above his desk, where his college thesaurus and dictionary still rested. His bookshelves were orderly, dusted, his old favorites waiting in neat rows. The same old band posters, curling now at the edges, studded the walls. His bathroom had towels on the rack and soap in the dish.
    â€œGoddammit,” he muttered. It was all just as he had left it, although a good bit tidier. She had kept it ready, as if she expected him to return at any moment. Or hoped that he would.
    A single, painful sob forced itself through his constricted throat. “Goddammit,” he said again. “Mom—I’m sorry. I’m