Free Butterfly Sunday by David Hill

bring his family back. His was the sort of vulnerability and despair on which Averill thrived. Averill would get hold of someone like Blue and convince him he had God’s answer. All a sinner had to do was write him a check or paint the church or bring Averill a cord of wood. Presto! Wrong was right, down was up, and Blue was going to drive his reunited family to heaven in a sky blue pink Cadillac convertible. She had bruised him. He got up to leave.

    “I don’t reckon this rain will kill me.…”

    “Didn’t mean to sting you, Blue.”

    “Nah …”

    But she had stung him. People weren’t much interested in what was real if it got in between them and what they wanted. Everybody had his or her own shield of lies to hold up against life. That was how they protected themselves from it and each other.

    “Sorry I was so little help.”

    “Don’t be silly.”

    Blue was the silly one. He felt sorry himself, so he felt he deserved her empathy. He was condescending to her views. He’d failed to extort her pity with his watery good looks and sighs. Now he was miffed, now he was going to leave her to the warm, suffocating solitude.

    “Don’t try to make the Book of Isaiah out of it, Blue.”

    “I best be going.”

    “It’s not such a spiritual matter, really.”

    “I reckon not. Well then …”

    “She just doesn’t want you.”

    That silenced his fancy farewells.

    “You don’t have what she wants, Blue.”

    The volcano inside of her was going to blow. It was already sending up blasts of boiling air. It was unstoppable now and it was going to consume them both. She was no longer merely in this situation, she was observing it from a distance. Blue didn’t even suspect the gathering liquid fury.

    “Maybe Lucy didn’t think you were enough reason to throw her life away.”

    “Throw her life away? On me!?”

    “Yeah.”

    “No. It was always going to be Lucy and me, from way back in high school.”

    “Well, Blue, I guess she graduated.”

    The only thing that kept his anger in check was the shock that came with it.

    “I could have had a hundred girls, but I chose her.”

    “You knocked her up.”

    “She had a choice.”

    “With you pressuring her?”

    The look on his face told her that she was right. She just knew she had to be right. Maybe it hadn’t taken much. Maybe Lucy just wasn’t a girl who would go and have an abortion without suffering for it.

    “What do you know about it?”

    “I know how you knights in shining armor think.”

    “Do tell.”

    “Making a baby makes you a manly man.”

    “Horse shit.”

    “Horses’ asses! You trapped her. She stood it as long as she could and then she went and found a man who treated her like she had two legs instead of four.”

    He was one more suit of armor that had turned out to be hollow on the inside. He reminded her a lot of Tyler Crockett. He didn’t understand himself at all. He was scared to death, terrified because Lucy had shattered his idea of who he was. When it came to women, he was still a kid.

    “Say, Blue, on what basis was Lucy obligated to stay with you?”

    “On the basis of loving and needing me.”

    Leona eyed him, stunned by his sincerity. He didn’t have a clue.

    “Like she did when you were both seventeen?”

    “What do you know?”

    “I know about seventeen. I know about giving in to him in order to keep him.”

    “Do you know about her telling me she felt God inside of her our first time?” Blue turned beet red with embarrassment. Leona was suddenly very uncomfortable. Blue looked at her a long time, sizing her up.

    She was lovely. That was obvious a mile away. Put a hundred women in a room and the one you’d see was Leona. She was a willowy beauty with thick chestnut hair, a long, oval face and almond-shaped eyes that shifted from emerald to jade green in the sunlight. She had high, round, raspberry cheeks sprinkled with brown sugar freckles. The rest of her made him think of some