Olivia Read Online Free PDF Page A

Olivia looked exactly like him—minus the facial hair, of course.
    “Hey, Eugene,” she said on a heavy sigh.
    The excess of energy she’d had at Kitty’s had disappeared on her drive home. It took everything she had to pull her heavy body up the steps to the wooden deck attached to the trailer. She didn’t move in to hug her father, and he didn’t get up from the plastic lawn chair he was sitting in to hug her. Her family did not touch.
    “Chester ran away,” he said without making eye contact. Her family didn’t look at each other, either.
    “He’ll be back,” she assured him, same as she always did.
    Chester was her father’s horny Boston terrier. The dog could smell a bitch in heat anywhere within a fifty-mile radius, and had sired over a hundred offspring before the humane society finally convinced Eugene to have the dog neutered. It stopped the unwanted puppies, but not the incessant humping of every female dog in Juliette and the tri-city area. Even without fully-functioning balls, Chester still ran away at least once a week to get his groove on.
    Eugene didn’t hug or pet or cuddle Chester, but it was obvious in the way he said the dog’s name that he loved the horny little bastard more than he loved Olivia. Depressing, yes, but Olivia had come to terms with that sad fact of her life a long time ago.
    Olivia unlocked her front door. “You want to come in for awhile?”
    By way of answer, he took a long drag off his cigarette and his boney knee bounced away.
    “Ok… Good night, then…”
    Olivia waited for a response, but she shouldn’t have bothered. Eugene wasn’t much of a conversationalist. He was a little like Rain Man, but with a milder case of obsessive compulsive disorder. He wouldn’t look at you, touch you, or really talk to you, but he had never met a broken small appliance he couldn’t fix better than new.
    Eugene spent his days, and a good portion of his nights, repairing toasters and coffee makers and waffle irons for people who were too cheap or too poor to fork over the thirty bucks at Walmart to buy a new one, but he refused to take any money for it. He’d been collecting disability for as long as Olivia could remember, and he worried Uncle Sam would find out about the extra income and throw his ass in the slammer. Due to his deep, debilitating fear of forced human contact that jail would entail, Eugene insisted all payment for repairs made come in the form of one of the three C’s—Camels, Coca-Cola, or Cheez Doodles—or a combination thereof.
    Because of Eugene and his phobias, Olivia learned how to clip coupons before she mastered coloring inside the lines. Eugene had done the best he could to raise her, but he was wired for living a solitary life, preferably in a cave somewhere. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people, he just didn’t like them being anywhere near him. How Olivia had managed to be conceived in the first place was one of life’s greatest mysteries.
    Her mother, Camille, was a bit of an enigma. Olivia knew for a fact that she existed, but that was pretty much all she knew about her. Olivia didn’t even know if Camille was her mother’s real name. No one ever talked about her, especially Eugene, which had made her even more intriguing to Olivia as a child.
    Olivia was born at the Women’s Correctional Facility in York, Nebraska, where her mother had been imprisoned for fraud and embezzlement. Other than the five minutes her mother had held her immediately after she was born, Olivia never saw her again. When Olivia was a little kid she used to tell people she was an ex-con released on good behavior, like her mother, but once she realized how pathetic she sounded, she decided to quit talking about her con of a mother and the story of her birth altogether, and has since kept that bit of information to herself.
    Olivia gave up on waiting for a response from Eugene and went inside. George’s granola bar had done nothing to fill her up, so she made a bowl