The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin

Author:Willy Vlautin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

15

At Cully and 62nd, Lynette took a side street where the pavement turned to gravel, and she hit potholes and water splashed under the wheel wells and twice the car bottomed out. As she came to the house where she’d lived for eleven months when she was sixteen she parked the car, shut off the engine, and knew what she was doing was a mistake. She closed her eyes and waited until the song playing on the radio ended and then got out of the car and headed toward the front door.

There was a run-down vintage thrift shop on Alberta Street that Lynette used to stop in on Saturdays, a day that twice a month her mother let her have to herself. She was a freshman in high school and the owner, a forty-two-year-old man named JJ Benada, noticed her. He gave her free clothes if she helped in the store for the afternoon. Sometimes he’d order pizza and have her pick it up down the street and they’d eat it together. He paid attention to her, told her she was beautiful, told her jokes and made her laugh, and always he had a movie playing on a TV behind the counter and a beer going that he’d drink out of a coffee cup. After a while he even let her sit behind the counter with him. He taught her to use the register and how to price clothes, then began inviting her to parties and gigs that she was never able to attend.

When she ran away, the first thing she thought of was money. She needed a job and went to the vintage shop and asked JJ for one. She remembered standing in front of him in tears one afternoon telling him she had nowhere to live, and he stepped out from behind the counter and hugged her. When the store closed that evening, he took her to his house, got them Mexican food, found her a sleeping bag and a bath towel, and gave her the couch.

For eleven months she learned to drink, smoke weed, and do cocaine in that house. And it was there that she lost her virginity to JJ and slept with other men, and a woman, too. It was also where she first fell apart, where her anger finally erupted, where she lost ten pounds, had hives on her back, and spiraled into her first depression.

The house itself was single story and painted dark purple. Security lights came on and lit the property as she walked up. The yard was overgrown, abandoned to grass, weeds, and blackberry bushes. The shrubs and trees next to the house nearly blocked it from view.

A pregnant girl answered the front door, dressed in pink sweats and black-and-white slippers with panda bear heads sewn on the toes. Her hair was short and dyed blond. Her arms and legs were so thin and long she looked anorexic, yet her chest and neck were so thick they looked nearly compressed. She had a pushed-up nose and sad green eyes.

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