The Boulevard Monster by Jeremy Hepler

Author:Jeremy Hepler [Hepler, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodshot Books
Published: 2017-04-07T05:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

New Home, Same Problems

Neither Brianne nor I had ever owned a house, and she had only lived in cheap rental properties. Having a place of our own meant a great deal to me, but even a greater deal to her.

She never said so, but I think she saw owning a house as proof that she’d risen above her troubled upbringing. That she’d bested her past, her mom, her drunkard dad who she hadn’t spoken to since she was ten. Some people need a college education to feel that. Others need the notoriety associated with becoming a doctor or lawyer. Or landing a role in a blockbuster movie. Others need a higher calling from God or Allah or Jehovah, helping the poor or saving souls from the fires of Hell. Brianne needed a house. A permanent home.

In August, a few months after I’d kicked and buried the woman at the Latino bar site, one week before Sera started her freshman year at Mercy High, and two years after I’d met Luther, we closed on a two-story brick home in Ridgecrest. It was the last house on a dead end street on the northwestern edge of Mercy. Eighty-year-old cottonwoods surrounded the house. Beyond the backyard, open plains rolled as far as the eye could see.

The house was built in the 1930s but had been renovated in the late ’90s. “Classic charm with modern comforts” was how our realtor described it. It had four spacious bedrooms, a large kitchen, a living room, and a den. Our furniture didn’t fill half the house, our plates and cups and pots and pans not even a third of the storage space in the kitchen. We spent every weekend for a month shopping for new tables, sofas, and other various decorative pieces. Brianne picked out a new bedroom set for us. All but our queen-size bed. We’d bought it at a garage sale when we moved in to the duplex together, and she thought it would be bad luck to switch it out.

We gave Sera her pick of the three bedrooms upstairs. She picked the one with the most windows—four. One window looked out over the driveway and detached garage, the other three, the backyard. We also let her pick out her own bedroom furniture, which tickled her to no end. We spent two days hopping from antique shop to antique shop because she wanted to “go vintage.” She bought an oak, hand-carved queen-size headboard, a ’40s style dresser with a large mirror, a metal vanity, and a small desk that came from a school that was abandoned in the ’50s.

The backyard was as large as the entire lot our old duplex sat on and had a wrap-around porch like the one on that farmhouse in Field of Dreams. We bought a wooden swing for the porch that Ryan helped me assemble, and Brianne hung a couple of asparagus ferns in macramé holders on either side of it.

My dad and Brenda helped us unload the U-Haul the

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