Secondhand Purses

ELIZABETH BUTTS

Copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Butts

All rights reserved. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 1522887067

ISBN-13: 978-1522887065

Many thanks to A. E. Murphy for her continued friendship and help in this whole writing thing that she forced me into. A huge hug and kiss to my amazing husband, Mike, who puts up with being ignored as I lose myself to reading and writing. To my mom and dad for their never ending doubt growing up that who I could be was limitless. To my sister wives, thanks for the endless material.

CHAPTE
R
ONE

2005

I looked at my watch and sighed. I kept walking. Why did I have to tell mom and dad that I was going to hang out with friends after school today? Now I had at least another half hour to kill before I could go home. If I went home now, I’d just have a ton of questions to answer. “Why are you home so early?” “Did you have a bad time?”

If I could just hold out another forty five minutes I could answer the ‘did you have a good time, sweetie?’ question with a quick ‘yeah’, and run up the stairs to my room. Why did I think this city was going to be any different?

We had moved every few years because of my dad’s job. I should have known by now that the bullshit they always told me about getting to start over and how exciting it is was just that. Bullshit.

They wanted me to make friends. They wanted me to be happy. I wanted to make friends and to be happy, too. It just wasn’t easy for me. Some people were able to walk into a room and they were instantly BFFs with about ten people. Me, I had to take time to get to know people and build a friendship. I just wasn’t the type of person that people flocked to. Plus, when you moved all the time, you had to deal with being ‘the new kid’ all the time. Being the new kid was the same as being a social pariah. And if you had to start a new school, new city in the middle of the school year? Forget about it. And somehow, every time, the new classmates knew that I wasn’t ‘popular’ material. I swear, word must have been sent ahead. So if I told mom and dad that I was hanging out with friends, they were happy and they would leave me alone.

I turned the corner and saw an older woman in her front yard, beating the crap out of a rug. I couldn’t tell her age from looking at her, but she seemed to be somewhere between seventy and one hundred. However, she must have been a body builder because the way she was beating the rug, I was surprised it hadn’t unraveled. Mental note – don’t piss her off.

“Hey, why are you beating that thing?” I leaned over her fence, rocking back and forth on to the balls of my feet.

She turned and looked at me in surprise. Wow, if central casting was looking for the picture perfect Italian grandmother for their movies, I found her. She was wearing a housecoat and an apron. She was rocking some crazy slide on shoes, and it looked like she was also wearing support hose. I tried not to stare. It was so freaking hard not to stare.

“To clean it.” Well, that was a surprise. Instead of a voice heavily accented with the flavor of the old country you would expect, she sounded like pure Providence. If you took Long Island, NY and Boston, MA accents, put them in a blender and mixed them up good, you’d have the Providence accent. We’d only been here a few months but so far I’ve found it to be my favorite accent so far. Well, that and Dallas, Texas.

“Dontcha have a vacuum cleaner?”

“This is how my mother, my grandmother and her grandmother before cleaned their rugs. If it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.” With that she wound up and delivered a beating that makes me cringe out of sympathy for the poor rug. I mean, seriously, what did it ever do to her?

I was lost in my thoughts about the poor rug’s punishment, and didn’t notice that the rhythmic ‘thump, thump, thump’ had stopped. I looked up and saw her looking at me as if I was supposed to be doing something. Holy self-conscious moment.

“What?”

“Well, are you going to come over and give it a whack, or not?”

“Why on earth would I want to do that?” What the hell, this old broad wanted me to do her chores for her? Not happening.

She started walking towards me, squinting her eyes as she gives me a slow once-over. She didn’t say a word, and I found myself taking an involuntary step back, uncomfortable under the assessment that I was obviously getting. She gave me a quick nod.

“You’re upset about something. You’ve been pacing by my house for the last hour, and some of the times you’ve been in an animated conversation with yourself.” I cringed at that one. It wasn’t the first time someone had caught me having a conversation with myself. I mean, a full conversation. Questions and answers. People have always said it’s not crazy to talk to yourself, it’s only crazy if you answer yourself. Well, apparently I was hella crazy.

“So, if you are upset, and want to get some aggression out, come take a whack at the rug. It’s how I deal with the memory of my dearly deceased husband, may the good Lord bless his rotten soul.”

I knew what my face must have looked like. I mean, I started following her and then almost tripped when she said that.

“Oh, don’t just stand there catching flies, get to work.” With that she handed me the wooden handled rug beater and I took a couple weak swings at it.

“Really? That’s the best you’ve got? Put some power in those swings, girlie.” She grabbed the wooden handle and laid a whooping on that rug. She even added sound effects as she landed each hit. Dust flew everywhere, in the air, in my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I was coughing up my lungs and she stood there laughing at me. Great, even a thousand year old woman made fun of me. I turned to leave. I put up with this at school, there was no way in hell I was sticking around to be this chick’s amusement for the afternoon.

“Wait, wait, I’m sorry I laughed. You just reminded me of myself when I got my first cigarette at age ten. I was coughing up all sorts of fun stuff. I didn’t mean anything by it.” I stopped. I didn’t know if I wanted to go back or not. I stood there for a few seconds, weighing out my options. I could either go back to walking around the neighborhood, begging time to go by faster so that I don’t have to let my parents down; or I could stand here beating a rug with an eccentric old lady.

I sighed. I reached for the rug beater, returned to the rug and laid into it. Every hurt, every lonely day, every lunchtime spent alone, every snickering comment laced with “Icky Vicki” was getting beaten out of that rug. I felt silly, especially when I realized that I had tears running down my cheeks. I was suddenly exhausted from the exertion and my hand lowered slowly to my side.

I turned away from the rug, afraid that she was going to make fun of me some more for crying. Or laugh at how hard I beat the rug, or how ridiculous I looked doing it. But she was gone. During my big emotional rug beating experience, she bailed. Great. I had the ability to drive away even

the psycho elderly. I laid the rug beater on the ground and started to walk towards the gate.

I heard a noise and turned towards the house to see her struggling with the door and two glasses of water. What? She wasn’t weirded out by me? She held one of the glasses out to me.

“Thanks.” I mumble, probably not sounding too convincing, but I was confused by this person. She seemed rough and a little scary, but she was being really nice to me.

“Why are you being nice to me? You don’t know me.” I realized that I had just said that out loud. I hated when there was no filter between my brain and my mouth.

She let out a sharp bark of laughter at the look of embarrassment on my face.

“What’s your name?”

“Why do you want to know?” I was always a little suspicious. You learned that in a life when you moved around a lot. Don’t trust anyone.

“Well, you’re telling me that I don’t know you, and therefore I apparently shouldn’t be ‘nice’ to you. So if you tell me your name, I’ll know you, and I’ll have your permission to be kind.” Her eyes sparkled as she says this to me.

Her reasoning made sense to me.

“Vicki. My name is Vicki.”

She tilted her head as she looked at me. Again, that weird assessment thing. I felt uncomfortable but at the same time impressed. I had to learn how to do this. It seemed like a pretty cool skill, kind of like a mental x-ray of the person. One quick scan and you figured out all their inner thoughts and their demons. That could be really helpful in high school.

“What’s your
real
name, child?”

I cocked an eyebrow and looked at her. This had to be the weirdest day that I’d ever had. She’d asked for my name. I told her my name. This should have been the point in the conversation where she told me
her
name; not questioned me further on mine.

“I don’t understand.”

“What is your
real
name? The one your parents gave you at birth. When you said your name was ‘Vicki’, you didn’t sound like you were too happy about it. So, what is your name?”

I wondered if this woman was a witch. Like, a Hansel and Gretel witch. Or maybe a mental hospital escapee. That was much more interesting, I thought. I smiled, my parents would just
love
to find out that my first friend in this place was a million year old mental patient who may or may not have been a witch that liked to eat small children.

“My name is Victoria Alexandra Edwards.” Yeah. That was my name. I always thought it sounded like my mom was trying to turn me into a royal with a name that sounded like it should have a Roman numeral after it. You know, Victoria Alexandra Edwards III or something like that.

As I looked at my neighbor, whose name I still didn’t know, I realized she was giving me the same odd look everyone else gave when they heard my full name. I got it, seriously, I did. I didn’t match my name one bit. It was a very flowery, fluffy name, and I was not someone who could ever be accused of being remotely flowery or fluffy.

My mom was an only girl with five older brothers. Somehow, with all that testosterone surrounding her, she had managed to come out very girly. She had always prayed for a little girl, so that she could have someone to be girly with. I was an only child. From what I’ve been told, my mom sobbed with joy when the ultrasound showed nothing was hanging out between my legs. Starting that very same day she started buying every pink, purple and frilly baby thing she could get her hands on. My dad was just wanting a healthy baby, so he didn’t really care one way or another whether I was a boy or a girl. I could only begin to imagine what his reaction was as the little room that they had designated as a nursery started to overflow with frilly and frothy concoctions.

I’d read somewhere that sometimes those ultrasounds can be wrong. I liked to amuse myself sometimes with imagining my mom’s reaction if I’d been born a boy, even after she’d been told I was a girl. I have a strong feeling mom would have ordered hormone therapy and a sex change right then and there.

Unfortunately for mom, she got a girl who’s not very girly. I really don’t care to wear pink or purple at all. Ever. I have a feeling she gave me an aversion to it by the fact that it was
all
I wore until I had the ability to choose my own clothing. And by ability, I mean, when I was allowed to. It’s not like I wished I was a boy or anything, it’s just that I wasn’t very feminine. Someone once told me I should have been born a boy. Who knows, maybe I had been originally a boy in the womb but mom prayed my ‘willie’ off.

I wasn’t cute, I wasn’t shapely or anything. I had a hell of a growth spurt last summer and now I towered over everyone in my class except for a handful of the boys. I had always tended to be closer to the chunky side of the scale, and really didn’t care to involve myself in sports. I wasn’t someone who purposefully put herself in a group of peers. It usually didn’t end well for me.

“That’s quite a name. What made you choose to go by the name ‘Vicki’?”

“Who said I got to choose? No one gets to choose what they are called.” I was thinking of that horrid nickname. “Icky Vicki”. I heard it a lot. Braces and acne have not helped my popularity contest.

“You have more choices in your life than you will ever understand.”

What the hell did she mean by that? I was sixteen years old. I had no choices in my life. I didn’t get to choose where I live. I didn’t get to choose how long we stayed

“Maybe once I’m older I will get to choose stuff, but for now, I have to go with what is chosen for me. When I was little, they called me Vicki. So, I’m Vicki.”

“Who would you like to be?”

Seriously, my head was starting to hurt with this woman’s crazy questions.

“Don’t you mean ‘what would I like to be’? Like when I grow up?”

More laughter from my new…friend?

“I wouldn’t be so stupid as to ask you what you wanted to be when you grow up. I think it’s stupid that
children
are told to make a decision on what they want to do for the remaining sixty or more years of their lives, when they haven’t even figured out how to live their lives. I want to know
who
you want to be.”

I shook my head, wide-eyed at this woman.

“I have no idea.”

“Well, that’s a start.” She picked up our empty glasses and stood up, slowly to return to her house. It looked like she was saying good bye.

“Wait. I don’t know
your
name.”

She smiled slowly, and for some weird reason I felt like I’d passed some psycho test of hers.

“You can call me Nonna.”