Mr. Pacifaker’s House
Both gave her contradictory advice.
By the time she was eighteen, Garnet Manon had had it with Mr. Pacifaker’s warnings against them boys. She figured he might as well warn her against being trampled to death by a woolly mammoth. She no longer pretended that he was any other kind of fairy than what he was. She no longer believed in benevolent spells.
“Look at me,” she said, slouched in the cab of his pickup. “Just you look at me, and tell me what the hell kind of boy would want anything to do with me. I’m ugly, Mr. Pacifaker. I’m as ugly as your house and your yard and your horse put together.”
Mr. Pacifaker, leaning half-in, half-out of the cab, winced and shook his head. “You’re seeing all wrong, girl.”
“Ha!” she said angrily. “Me and all the rest of the world. Them boys laugh at me. They make fun of me. They say, ‘You’re so beautiful, Garnet Manon. I love you, Garnet Manon.’ They want me to believe it, so they can laugh at me even more. I’m a joke, Mr. Pacifaker, not an object of desire.”
“Didn’t I tell you to stay away from them boys?” Mr. Pacifaker shouted. “Didn’t I tell you they only wanted one thing? And here you ignore me completely and let them just deflower you like that.”
“Nobody’s deflowered me, Mr. Pacifaker!” Garnet Manon screamed. “Nobody wants to deflower me! Don’t you understand anything?”
“They done it to you,” Mr. Pacifaker muttered, shaking his head.
Garnet Manon shrieked in frustration and punched open the passenger door. “You know what, Mr. Pacifaker? I finally got you figured out. And you know what I conclude about you? I conclude that all your life, you’ve waited from them boys to come along, to talk sweet to you, to seduce you and deflower you. But you know what? They never have, and they never will. And that’s why you won’t leave me alone about it. If you can hope for me, you can hope for yourself, too. But the truth is, you and I are every bit as ugly as we look, and every bit as ridiculous, and every bit as lonely. The only difference between us, aside from gender, is that you’re going to die a virgin a lot sooner than I am, and that’s the damned truth.”
Mr. Pacifaker’s body seemed to sag and shrink. His face aged before her eyes, as his own eyes filled with tears. He breathed hard for a long moment, and then he said, “Garnet Manon, I don’t care if you seen it. It don’t care if you know it. But did you really have to say it?”
Garnet Manon never went to see him again. They never made up. And so, when Mr. Pacifaker died, Garnet Manon was surprised to find out that he’d left her the house, horse, and yard in his will, witnessed, signed, and legal.
His lawyer brought her the deed and the front door key. Representatives from the First Presbyterian Church came hot on the lawyer’s heels, offering a low sum they figured an eighteen-year-old would be dumb enough to take.
Garnet Manon said she’d think about it.
“You can’t live there,” her mother said. “That house is, by all accounts, full of filth and rats.”
“I don’t want to live there,” said Garnet Manon.
“Just think, if you sold it to the Presbyterians, you’d be able to go to college,” said her mother.
“I don’t want to go to college,” said Garnet Manon.
“Then what do you want?” her mother demanded.
