The House on Olive Street Read Online Free PDF

the brunch food out of the refrigerator until Sable cleared her throat. Sable threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin. She’d try the next lesson with eye contact. “From now on, Dorothy, I would like you to speak to me as if you can abide my presence. You’ll say good morning. You’ll say good night. We’ll start with those two things and see how you handle them. And you’ll say them pleasantly, kindly, as though you actually give a shit whether I live or die.”
    They stared at each other for a long moment.
    “Starting now, Dorothy,” Sable said.
    “Goo…Good morning, ma’am.”
    “You can call me Sable, you know.”
    “Good morning, Sable,” she said.
    There, Sable thought. We’re making progress.

THREE
    B arbara Ann’s pulsing brood did the best they could with her delicate condition of grief. They restrained their voices to some degree, erupting now and then out of pure habit. Mike and the boys knew Gabby, but they weren’t exactly close, so the loss was not theirs by any means. It was hers and hers alone. And none of the other women would ever know how much she had lost. Maybe loss wasn’t the right word. Ended was closer. They would never know all that had ended today.
    She cried through the afternoon and then at four o’clock, like an automaton, she zapped a roast and then threw it in the oven to finish cooking, boiled potatoes and carrots, heated buns and tore up lettuce, all through the narrow slits of her swollen eyes. Barbara Ann had the survival skills of a mother of four wild boys; she could do everything fast and many things at once. She could condense the cooking of a four-hour meal into forty minutes, and while the microwave purred, she collected a pile of dirty clothes. On her way to the laundry room, she wiped the hair and spit out of a bathroom sink with a T-shirt. On her way from the laundry room back to the kitchen, she picked up seven pairs of shoes and tossedthem into their respective cages, then caught the potatoes before they boiled over.
    Once everyone was informed as to the reason for her pain and tears, all she had to do was lift her chin with that injured air and purse her lips tightly together, and the din would subside.
    For example, when Joe came home from basketball practice, about the time everyone else was going for their second helpings—
    “Jesus Christ, get outta here with those feet, buttface.”
    “Bite me! This is my house, too!”
    “Not when you smell like bad cheese, it ain’t!”
    “Matt!” in a desperate whisper. “Mom!”
    And then, warning taken, in a much smaller voice, “Sorry. His feet smell like goat shit. Jesus.”
    While Sable sipped her vodkas in her sterile environs and cautiously took herself back through the hard days before she was rich and famous, Barbara Ann Vaughan took a cup of coffee outside to the patio of her two-story home in search of peace. She had to kick aside a pile of wet towels to pull out a chair from the patio table. It wasn’t yet pool season; they couldn’t be there from last year! Car washing, perhaps. Used her good beach towels to dry off a greasy, tar-spattered car. She removed jeans and a T-shirt from the chair so she could sit. She pushed aside the mess from a partially constructed, radio-operated model airplane so she could put her coffee down. The craftsman, Bobby she thought, had probably lost interest by now; she’d been complaining about it for two weeks.
    From the house she could hear her little darlings, the smallest of whom was six feet and a hundred and ninety pounds, and her loving spouse.
    “Way to go, dickhead. I was gonna eat that!”
    “It wasn’t that great anyway.”
    “You wanna shut the fuck up, I’m on the phone here.”
    “Hey! Watch your mouth! I don’t want to be hearing that shit outta you! Got that?”
    “Got it.”
    Eat what? Barbara wondered. She’d just thrown a slaughtered cow at them. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, an odd habit she’d acquired somewhere, and felt