“Am I the only one who thought that Clayton was going to mysteriously die at the end?” Amber Hutton wrote.
“Yes!” Erica Burton replied. “When Poppy says ‘literally no one would miss you if you disappeared tomorrow, Clayton,’ I was like, she is going to murder that dude! And I’m not going to be sad about it!”
“LOL,” Amber replied, “100%. For a minute I wondered if I’d picked up a really weird romance novel, because the heroine doesn’t usually kill people.”
“Eva, maybe you should be writing serial killer books too!”
I snort as I type out a reply. “Not a bad idea. Watch out, world—I’m entering my murder era!”
The comment immediately starts to get likes and laughs. I have to wonder if they’d think it was funny if they knew who I really was.
“Lucy, dinner!” my mom calls from downstairs, and suddenly I’m sixteen again. I wish I’d gotten the stupid hotel room.
* * *
Dad made dinner. Both my parents cook, but Dad does it most of the time. He’s better at it, and he enjoys banging the pots on the stove really loudly when he’s annoyed.
There’s been a lot of banging tonight.
I offered to pick up Grandma so she could join us, but she claimed exhaustion and told me to come over in the morning. “Exhausted means drunk,” Mom helpfully explained when I got off the phone.
Now, I sit at the table across from my parents. They’re both on the other side, united against me. Or maybe they always sit there. It’s weird, but perhaps they don’t want to look at each other.
I take a bite of roast chicken. Dad’s disappointment doesn’t transfer to his cooking. People like to claim that food tastes better when it’s made with love—like how their grandmother’s pie didn’t taste right when they made it, so it must have been the love that made it good.
This is bullshit, in my opinion. It was probably just extra butter or better-quality sugar that made it good.
Dad’s cooking is proof of this. It is not made with love; it’s made with resentment and disappointment. And it still tastes fucking great.
“How is work, Lucy?” Mom’s using her long, peach fingernails to slowly peel the skin off her chicken breast. She banishes it to the edge of her plate, which seems a shame to me.
I look at my food instead of at her. “Fine. Same as usual.” My parents don’t need to know I was fired. Their opinion of me is low enough already.
“That’s good. You’re still working for that educational publisher, aren’t you? Doing copyediting and such?”
“Yep.” I did have that job for a few months, two years ago. Close enough.
“You always noticed misspellings and grammar mistakes. Don, you remember, don’t you? She used to mark up the church program and give it to the pastor.”
“I remember,” Dad says. “I think that Jan has held a grudge about that forever.”
“Jan should have done a better job typing up the programs,” I say.
Mom laughs, because it’s true. Those programs were an embarrassment. For years I amused myself during sermons by counting all the mistakes, but by about age fifteen I couldn’t take it anymore and I’d hand over my corrections to the pastor after the service. I must have looked like a little asshole to Jan, the receptionist whose job it was to type them up every week.
They replaced Jan after I pointed out that she’d used pubic instead of public in the newsletter. My youth group lost it. Plumpton Baptist Church Pubic Events was the funniest shit we’d ever seen.
Jan was given another job in the church, but she definitely always hated me after that. It’s not my fault that Jan couldn’t be bothered to proofread her work.
I wonder whether anyone (besides my parents) remembers that now. Aggressively copyediting church documents seems rather tame, considering the events of the next few years.
Listen for the Lie Podcast with Ben Owens EPISODE 2—“SHE WOULD NOT HESITATE TO CUT A BITCH”
There’s a wealth of information out there about Savannah. Most of her friends and family have been forthcoming with stories about her life. But Lucy? She’s more of a mystery. A lot of people I spoke with said they wanted the focus to remain on Savannah, not on Lucy. Savannah was the one who was murdered, after all.
However, you can’t talk about Savannah without also talking about Lucy. So, I pressed people for details about her, and what they remembered about her from before the murder. Here’s Ross Ayers, who grew up in Plumpton and went to school with Lucy.
Ross:??????????????I mean, Lucy was … she was okay when we were little. Like, she was sort of nice, I guess. But later she … I don’t know. She …
Ben:???????????????She what?
Ross:??????????????Do I have to be politically correct about murderers now too? Jesus Christ. She was a bitch, okay? She was a huge fucking bitch.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LUCY
The next morning, I go to see Grandma. I invite Mom, hoping she’ll say no, but she grabs her crutches and hobbles out to my car.
“Has she sent you a picture of the house?” Mom asks as I navigate the streets of Plumpton. I remember them well, much to my dismay.
“No.”
“God, it’s awful. I’m so embarrassed.”
* * *
It is not awful. It is, however, supremely weird.
I stand in front of it and cock my head. “Huh.”
Mom grunts as she digs her crutches into the dirt and stops next to me. “She sold her old house—which was paid off, I’d like to add—to buy this … thing.”
“It’s pink.”
“Yes.”
“I feel like she should have mentioned that.”
“She had them paint it that color on purpose. It was supposed to be brown.”
“Huh.”
“It’s two hundred and fifty square feet. Who in the world wants to live in two hundred and fifty square feet?”
“Grandma, apparently.”
“And why is it on wheels? Where is she going to take it? She’s never left Texas.”
That, I must admit, is a good point.
The tiny house is kind of cute, actually. It’s basically a square box on wheels, but it has a certain charm, and it’s not just the cheery pink color. There’s a garden on the left side, and in front, two chairs and a small table. It’s on a plot of land surrounded by trees, a much larger home barely visible in the distance.
The door opens, and Grandma steps out. She wears a loose, faded blue dress with white daisies dotting the hem. Her gray hair is pulled into a bun and her lips are a bright pink color that almost matches the house. I don’t think I’ll look that good when I’m eighty.
“Lucy!” She spreads her arms wide.
I walk across the grass to embrace her. She holds me at arm’s length when I pull away.
“You’re not just my favorite grandchild, you’re also the most attractive one by a mile.”
“Mom.” Mom stops next to me with a grunt. “I wish you would stop saying that. It’s so rude.”
“It’s only rude if you tell the other ones.” Grandma turns away, waving for us to follow. “Come in! I made iced tea.”
I follow her inside, cold air blasting my face as I step out of the heat. Mom shivers. One upside of a tiny house—easy to keep cool in the summer. Or freezing cold, if you’re Grandma.
For two hundred and fifty square feet, the house makes impressive use of space. There’s a kitchenette to my right, and to the left, a sofa against the wall with a television mounted opposite it. For a moment, I wonder whether she sleeps on the sofa, until I see a rollout bed tucked into the wall. There’s a bathroom in the far corner with only a curtain for a door.
“Sit down, Kathleen, you’re making me nervous on those crutches.” Grandma points at the couch, and Mom obediently sits. I put her crutches against the wall.
“See, I can just move the table around when I have company!” Grandma slides the small square table so it’s in front of the couch.