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Children’s graves.
This is where children are buried.
Violent chills attack my spine and I hold back a sob. What’s going on? Graham stands above a small tombstone with pink flowers on top and points at it. It reads Kathleen O’Horn, so I know she is not a relative.
Then who is she?
“Kathleen was only twelve,” he starts, swallowing while staring at the tombstone. He looks so far away. Not physically, but mentally, he is not here. It scares me.
“Her mother worked at my strip club. She was addicted to blow, just like your mom. But unlike Annabelle…she went the extra mile to get her fix.”
I suck in a breath and close my eyes. Poor Kathleen.
“Chrissy pimped her daughter. Kathleen was manhandled and abused. It went on for months until I found out. This was before your mom even started working for me, and I wanted to save Kathleen, but I didn’t know how. I gave Chrissy money, I even threatened her, but she always resorted back to using her daughter to get her next fix, until…”
I touch his shoulder and even though he doesn’t shake me away, I know that he’s way too lost in his story, in his soul, to appreciate the human touch.
“Until one of Kathleen’s clients got too rough, and that’s how she ended up here.”
I close my eyes, feeling a fat tear rolling down my cheek. This makes sense. So much sense. Too much sense. Is this why Graham married my mother? So he can protect me the way he never could when Kathleen was alive? I open my mouth to say something, but he shuts me up by continuing his line of thought.
“I brought Chrissy here from Ireland. We grew up in the same neighborhood. She was poor and didn’t have a job. I thought it’d do her good. But the guilt….” He shakes his head, turning around to look at me. His eyes are sad. For the first time in my life, I see Graham Savage’s sensitive side, and I have a feeling this is not going to repeat itself anytime soon. “The guilt ate me alive, Dolly.”
“So you wanted to save me,” I finish softly, and he lifts his hand, caressing my cheek gently.
“I can honestly say in good faith I walked into my marriage with your mother with semi-good intentions. To take care of you both and to get that green card. But you weren’t Kathleen. You were…stronger. The reason why your mother never sent you to work the streets is because she knew you never would.”
I don’t want to think about it, but maybe it’s true. Annabelle used to get mad at me when we were still living together, just the two of us. She got mad at me when she needed to feed me and wanted to spend the cash on drugs, and she used to get really pissed when I asked for new shoes or textbooks for school. But every time she tried to coax me into helping her out, she didn’t even say what she wanted me to do, I just had a gut feeling it wasn’t right, I shook my head violently and said that I’ll have to ask Nana if it’s something worth doing. That’d shut her up right there. She knew my grandmother would never let these kind of things happen to me.
“I wanted to save you, but then something weird happened, Dolly. You turned into someone I never expected you’d be, especially with your kind of upbringing. A good girl, who doesn’t fuck around, who is interested in dancing and dreams about going to a good college. You looked at me respectfully, but never tried to get too close. Not a gold digger, and not someone who cares about my money too much. I started noticing you, and it was terribly inconvenient, both for my mind and my cock. I wanted to fight it, I didn’t want to be the guy who fucks his step-daughter, it’s bad for business this kind of reputation, but then I realized that you were never actually my daughter. You refused to accept me as your father and I…I never really looked at you fatherly either.”
I chuckle sadly. It was the truth. Shifting my weight from one foot to the other, I ask, “So what made you finally let go?”
“You,” he responds quietly, squatting down and rearranging the flowers on Kathleen’s grave. Without asking him I know for a fact that he’s the one who put them there. And maybe even every week, or every month. It makes me love him even more.
Fuck, love him.
I love this man.
The realization hits me hard, like a punch to the gut, and I gasp for air.
“I knew when you entered my club that it was a sign. A sign that you’re mine. A sign that you always were. When those idiots hit on you and you raised your eyes to the second floor and saw me, it was fate. Corny as shit but it was. Because you were looking for something else, someone to save you from those assholes. You found what you were looking for.” He smiles, but not happily, at the grave. When he stands up, I notice that he’s holding one of the pink flowers in his hand. He hands it to me.
“This will never happen to you.”
“I know,” I whisper. We stand in front of one another for a long minute before he says:
“What do you wanna do?”
I lift my eyes, and know that even though I don’t say it, he sees it, “I want to make you happy.”
“I meant right now,” he smirks.
I nod, and repeat myself.
“Make you happy. That’s what I wanna do. Now. Tomorrow. Anytime.”
A week passes by. I still think about the graveyard incident, but Graham and I don’t talk about it anymore. I go to school every day and it’s weird not having Shawn around. He got out of the hospital three days ago, but said he still hasn’t fully recovered from the minor car accident he was involved in. Just to make sure the story is legit, Graham smashed Shawn’s Jaguar into a tree on the outskirts of Princeton. Since Shawn was drunk and coked up when he tried to get into my pants, and traces of both alcohol and cocaine were found in his blood stream, this made total sense to the hospital staff and his parents.I’m not sad for him. I just hope Graham is right and Shawn will never try doing this to another girl ever again.
