The Geranium Girls by Alison Preston Read Free Book Online Page A

bathroom where he watched her as she bathed. And dreaded what came next.
    Scrub and rub.
    With Hort kneeling in the tub and Boyo kneeling outside of it, he bent over to her demands. He soaped up the wash cloth and scrubbed her clean. Down there. He rinsed and soaped again. Rinsed. Then came the worst part. With his bare fingers he rubbed her. She guided him with her movements and her own hand, till she lurched and shuddered and told him to stop.
    “Did you enjoy that, Boyo?” she asked.
    What could the right answer possibly be?
    “No?” he tried.
    Wrong. Duct tape on his tender parts. Not just the head of his penis this time.
    “Did you like that, Boyo?” she asked on another occasion.
    “Yes.”
    Wrong again. Standing perfectly still. Not moving. Not moving for hours. Or else.
    An idea forms in his mind now: he could wreck the flowers. All of them! The hanging ones will be easy; they are fairly small. But he’ll have to think about the big pots and the ones behind the glass. That will be harder to pull off without getting caught.
    His aunt was practically hairless, even down there. He never saw another woman so sparsely haired, unless it was on purpose. He knows that sometimes women shave themselves. Lots of his movies have shown him that they do.
    The last hooker he used was that way. That was why he’d ended up killing her. It wasn’t planned; it was over before he realized what he was doing. I guess you could say it was an accident, but not the type you could own up to. The accident took place the winter before last. He hasn’t used a woman since.
    His mail girl knows the geranium woman. Boyo saw her coming out of the shop one afternoon last week. This makes sense to him. It connects.
    Mail Girl Kyte has hanging plants in her yard too, but at least they’re not geraniums.

Chapter 12
     
    “I love kissing.” Beryl sighed luxuriously.
    She stretched her arms above her head and opened her eyes just barely, to look at Dhani. She lay next to him on a blanket in St. Vital Park. On a grassy patch, almost dry.
    “Kissing any old person?” Dhani asked.
    “No,” Beryl said. “Not any old person. Kissing you is pretty good, though.” She realized, not for the first time, that if she was going to be spending time with Dhani, she would have to get better at thinking a bit before she spoke. He was very easy to get into trouble with. She wasn’t sure she wanted to work that hard.
    For instance now, Beryl didn’t want to think just yet, didn’t want to interrupt the light shimmering through her blood. She felt a little irritated with Dhani and his question at such a time, even though she had started it with her kissing comment.
    He was the first man that Beryl had kissed since Georges. And that was two years ago and a bit. Georges had blown in from Montreal several years ago — transferred within the post office — and then blown away again three years later, to points further west. But not before capturing Beryl’s heart.
    Georges wanted to be free. Now and then Beryl had tried to talk to him about freedom being more a state of mind than a physical movement from say, Portage la Prairie, Manitoba to Lethbridge, Alberta. But Georges disagreed.
    “I have to change my location from time to time,” he said. “It’s who I am.”
    Beryl wanted to laugh when he said stuff like that. After all, he was never wild and free enough to leave the post office behind. She got to thinking he was a phony towards the end. But he didn’t know he was a phony, so she couldn’t blame him.
    On the day he was leaving she smiled to herself as she spread peanut butter on slices of whole wheat bread. Georges stood in her kitchen watching her.
    “Are you making fun of me?” he asked, noticing her smile.
    “No! God! No! I’m not making fun of you. I’m making sandwiches for you,” Beryl had said.
    “What are you thinking about?” Dhani asked now.
    So Beryl told him about Georges.
    “Do you miss him?” Dhani asked.
    “No,”