The Flowers Read Online Free PDF

men. Especially except the part about this Cloyd man. How could she? I don’t mean the practical part. I meant, How was she planning to live here with him every day? How was she gonna get out of here clean? She did not like him. So I wanted her to tell me inwords, to describe it to me kind of, well, so it’d be a story that made sense, and I’d see it that way.
    All you had to do was look around the apartment to know this Cloyd wasn’t right for either of us. That big dinner table which he called the supper table, with the heavy wooden chairs all around it—I don’t think I’d ever seen so much wood, even in a picture of a forest. And we never ate dinner at no table before, unless it was at a restaurant. My mom told me the furniture was maple. That was the same wood as all around the house, the end tables and the coffee table, the little knickknack shelves, and a china cabinet. I figured it was that maple went with the color of a dead deer’s head. Those were in the living room—that room next to where the dinner table was—hanging from a wall. Okay, all the others were in his office, and there was only one deer head in the living room. A buck, he explained. Another body on the wall was a prize-winning rainbow trout, he said—it was a fish, to me, before he said it—and another was an owl, which took over the top of the maple cabinet, its claws gripping a branch which shot off a thicker branch which was in a varnished slice of a tree trunk. He didn’t shoot this owl, Cloyd told us. His son just gave it to him as a present. Not on a birthday or Christmas, no holiday whatever, just plain gave it to him to be his kind of cool. His son was a taxidermist and did the work himself. All of it, in fact, was his own professional work. The lamps, wood with flying birds—mallard ducks, he said—painted on them, he bought those at a store for decoration.
    He asked if I wanted to hear about the day he shot that buck. I was supposed to say yes. I couldn’t stand there nice and listen, could not. No, not even if I sat on that ugly red sofa or that big leather chair, the one that was his favorite chair, he said, more reliable than any woman—his Sil here excluded, of course! I was welcome to sit in it too, he said, but if I got used to it, I betternot be surprised if he just landed on my lap. He was so funny, huh? I wanted to laugh. Yeah, he’d been sitting in it for so many years it was like a bed to him. He liked to fall asleep in it after work. He’d get so comfy and cozy he’d get mad at himself when he woke up past his bedtime. A couple few beers, he said, a couple few sips of Old Grand Dad, and, well, that chair was the one to make
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s in. But no anyways, not even if I could sit in that chair of his, did I want to hear about the buck that was up above, across from it. Maybe later, I told him, as polite as I could make myself.
    I was slouching against that red sofa, waiting for the end. “So when is Goofy gonna be able to come here?”
    â€œWe’re working on that,” Cloyd said. “We’re trying to figure that one out.”
    My mom was pretending not to hear my question, and I did not want to talk about it with him. But I didn’t want her to say some lie to me either. She was always lying.
    â€œWhat happened to her?” I was asking my mom.
    â€œShe’s with my son,” he said.
    â€œYou mean the dude who stuffs dead animals?”
    â€œThat’s not what’s happening,” he said. “Be smart.”
    â€œHe is smart,” my mom said.
    â€œLet’s not get in a fight over this,” he said.
    â€œI just don’t think you need to say anything like that about Sonny,” she said.
    â€œI only wanna know what happened to Goofy,” I said.
    â€œAnd all I meant to say, all I said was, she’s fine,” he said.
    My mom got pissed off eyes for him, so didn’t look at him. “She