The House on Olive Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

the tears begin to trickle from her eyes again. She particularly loved it when her husband, Mike, disciplined the boys with statements like, “I don’t want to hear that swearing shit outta you, asshole.” There was a time, long ago, when his failure to see the irony in such a statement seemed precious in its simple, straightforward way.
    Gabby, Gabby, Gabby, how could you leave me to this! I’ll disappear into a blot of grease and never be seen again! I’ll fall down the toilet in the middle of the night!
    The sliding door opened and Joe and Bobby, seventeen and nineteen, spilled outside with their fight, a dish towel-snapping tussle. She splashed over some of the hot coffee and groaned. She glared at them meanly. They didn’t see her right away, hidden as she was in the deepening dusk, alone on the patio. When they stopped long enough to take notice of her, they suddenly relaxed their weapons.
    “Sorry, Mom.”
    “Yeah, sorry, Mom.”
    This was not the life she had envisioned when, twenty-three years ago, Mike Vaughan begged her to marry him and send him off to Seoul, Korea, as a fulfilled helicopter mechanic. “Marry me, Barbara Ann, and I’ll come home, I swear to God, in one whole piece, and give you a shitload of kids.” She had been twenty—barely. A naive, only child who had not done anythingfor herself since birth. So naive it never crossed her mind that there was no war in Korea in which Mike might be injured or killed, but Vietnam was fresh in her mind and she didn’t take the time to differentiate between military bases and their functions. She married him to keep him safe. She had worked in a Realtor’s office, answering phones, until he returned. Ten months after Mike came home, Matt was born. Then Bobby, then Joe, then Billy.
    “As long as you make them comfortable, they’ll stay,” Eleanor said of her sons.
    “Don’t fight it, Barb. Just use your book money to get a small, tidy apartment nearby to write in,” Sable advised. “And stop indulging them in everything. Force them to make their own lives. At least two of them are over eighteen.” Sable—the voice of parenting experience.
    “I would do anything to have four sons,” said Beth, who’d been trying to get pregnant for years.
    “You can change your life in many ways, Barbara Ann,” Gabby said, “but people are permanent. And you have blessings in Mike and that half a baseball team of yours.”
    But people aren’t permanent, are they, Gabby? she thought, tears running over.
    Barbara Ann loved Gabby deeply and her feeling of loss was incredible, but the emotion that was pouring down her cheeks was combined with something else. My God, I could die before I’ve done what I want to do! Gabby was only fifty, healthy as an ox! I could die before I make any real money on a book, before I succeed at this, before I’m known at all, before even one of these louts gets a life of his own! Before I ever live in a house where a single toilet seat is down!
    Barbara Ann was so disappointed in her life. Not that she didn’t love her family. She must, she put up with a lot from them. Mike, though older and a little thicker around the middle, was still a handsome and lusty man. He could still get to her, easily seduce her, make her feel like a girl again, even with some of his inept flattery like “Honey, you’re just pretty as shit.” And the boys, each one of them damn good-looking, were just like their dad—rugged, masculine, athletic. Men’s men. Romance-novel men. Rough, loud and big. God, were they big. They took up so much space; the smallest shoe she ever tripped over was an eleven.
    It seemed to Barbara Ann that her life kept expanding without getting much better. The boys grew into men and required more space; they were in need of an awesome amount of fuel; their possessions became larger and more complex. She and Mike bought a five-bedroom house to accommodate them, but they kept adding on to it, in search of places to put