Free The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

news. It’s probably too much to hope that the senator will be forced to make an early landing somewhere due to bad weather.
    Victor shakes his head and leans back in his chair. The senator isn’t here yet; they’ll deal with her once she is. “We’re going to take a break soon so we can all eat, but one more question before that.”
    “Only one?”
    “Tell us about how you came to the Garden.”
    “That isn’t a question.”
    Eddison slaps his thigh impatiently, but it’s still Victor who speaks. “How did you come to the Garden?”
    “I was kidnapped.”
    Three teenage daughters and he can practically hear the unspoken “duh” at the end of it. “Inara.”
    “You’re really good at that.”
    “Please.”
    She sighs and brings her feet up onto the edge of the chair, wrapping her bandaged hands around her ankles.

    Evening Star was a pretty nice restaurant. Reservation only, unless it was a slow night, but the prices were high enough that most people wouldn’t just walk off the street for a meal. On normal nights, the waiters wore tuxedos and the waitresses black strapless gowns with stand-alone collars and cuffs like the tuxes. We even had black bow ties that were a bitch and a half to get right—we weren’t allowed clip-ons.
    Guilian knew how to cater to the stupidly rich, though, so you could actually rent out the entire restaurant for special occasions and put the waitstaff in costumes. There were a few basic rules—he drew the line at indecency—but within a fairly broad range of options, you could provide the costumes and we would wear them for the event, and then got to keep them. He always gave us warnings about the costumes so we could trade shifts if we didn’t think we could deal with it.
    Two weeks before my sixteenth birthday—or as far as the girls knew, my twenty-first—the restaurant got rented out by someone doing a fundraiser for one of the theatres. Their first show was going to be a production of Madame Butterfly , so we were dressed accordingly. Only girls were allowed to work this one, by request of the client, and we were all given black dresses that came high around a pair of huge wire and silk wings that stayed on with spirit gum and latex—fuck, what a process that was—and we all had to wear our hair completely up.
    We all agreed it was better than the shepherdess fetish costumes or the Civil War–themed wedding rehearsal dinner that stuck us all with hoopskirts that we’d finally converted to Christmas light chandeliers when we got sick of them taking up an entire corner of the apartment. Even if it meant getting to work hours early so we could put the damn wings on, the rest of it wasn’t that bad, and we could all use the dresses again. Trying to wait tables with large wings behind you was a clusterfuck, though, and by the time the main course had been served, and we could retreat to the kitchen during the fundraising presentation, most of us didn’t know whether to swear or laugh. A number of us were doing both.
    Rebekah, our lead hostess, sighed and sank down on a stool, propping her feet up on a sideways crate. Her pregnancy had finally made high heels impossible, and had also spared her from having to bear the indignity of wings. “This thing needs to come out of me now,” she groaned.
    I squeezed behind the stool as best I could with the wings and started massaging her tight shoulders and back.
    Hope peeked out through a gap in the swinging doorway. “Anyone else think the guy in charge is totally fuckable for an old man?”
    “He’s not that old, and watch your mouth,” Whitney retorted. There were certain words Guilian preferred we didn’t use at work, even in the kitchens, and fuck was one of them.
    “Well, his son looks older than me, so he is an old man.”
    “Then ogle the son.”
    “No, thanks. He’s hot, but there’s something wrong with him.”
    “He isn’t looking at you?”
    “He’s looking a lot, at a bunch of us. He’s just wrong.