TOMCATS
BOOK ONE
BY HONEY PALOMINO
PROLOGUE
Matilda Thorne lay on her bed watching a movie on a black and white television in the bedroom she shared with her mother. At twelve years old, with no friends or siblings to speak of, she’d learned to entertain herself with the few channels she managed to coax from the broken rabbit ears.
Sad and drunk, her mother usually left her to her own devices, giving up any pretense of a regular household around a quarter past four every afternoon, approximately thirty minutes after she picked Matilda up from school.
That’s when, come hell or high water, Mary Thorne placed the needle on her Loretta Lynn record and turned up the volume, right before reaching for her bottle of Southern Comfort. She would have been drunk from a steady stream of Coors for hours, though. She just waited till she’d gotten her daughter home safely from school before she broke into the bottle.
Half an hour later, she sang at the top of her lungs, her caterwauling pouring out of the windows of the dingy green trailer they lived in and floating into the windows of their neighbor’s equally dingy trailers at the Big Pines Trailer Park in deep East Texas.
“I was born a coal-miner’s daughterrrrrr,” Mary squealed.
Matilda turned the volume up on the television, eyeing the bedroom door and contemplating how much longer it would be before her Mama passed out.
“In a cabin, on a hill in Butcher Hollar…” She danced around the tiny living room, tripping on the shag rug and falling into the wall. Matilda’s baby picture fell to the ground, the frame splintering into pieces at her bare feet.
That didn’t stop her from singing though.
Or dancing.
Her hips swayed seductively, as she closed her eyes and danced with an imaginary lover.
“We were poor but we had love, that’s the one thing my Daddy made sure of…”
From the bedroom, Matilda rolled her eyes and jumped up from the bed, sliding the flimsy plywood folding door across the metal frame. It never closed completely, the gap a constant reminder that she didn’t live in a normal home, with normal doors…and certainly not normal parents.
The barrier did little to drown out the sound of her drunken mother, singing about a kind of love she’d never found and never would.
Matilda knew they were poor.
She also knew they most certainly did not have love.
What they had was something else entirely.
A tolerance.
A co-existence.
A waiting period, essentially, at least as far as Matilda was concerned.
In six short years, she’d be an adult and she could get out of there and get on with her life.
So far, she’d learned most everything she knew about the world from movies. They provided her with precious confirmation that her current existence was not a life sentence, that there was a whole different world out there, just waiting for her to grow up and reach out and claim it.
Like the movie she was currently watching — the title alone was enough to give her hope. The heroine in The Grass Is Always Greener quickly became one of Matilda’s most beloved characters. ‘Princess’ was her name, which impressed Matilda right away. A girl named ‘Princess', imagine that, she thought. She watched with the attentiveness of an eager student, drinking in every detail of Princess’s beaded wedding gown, her eyes dragging over the long train with envy. Drowning in marble and gilded mirrors, her mansion was the stuff dreams were made of.
Matilda’s dreams, that is.
Someday, she promised herself, someday. All of that will be mine…
This movie is like any other fairy tale, of course. She’d watched dozens of them. Most of them exactly the same…
The beautiful, young woman meets a rich, handsome man who promptly sweeps her off her feet, marrying her in a joyful ceremony with a set of devoted bridesmaids standing at her side. Later, in front of an adoring crowd, they’ll lovingly and playfully place slices of a towering layered cake made of buttercream flowers into each other’s mouths. Under a storm of flying rice, they’ll fade off into the sunset to their honeymoon in the French Alps or perhaps, The Seychelles, to the tune of clattering cans and a chorus of well-wishes.
Smiling and tan, they’ll return to a palatial French chateau high up on a hill, a grand marble staircase in the foyer spiraling up to an enormous bedroom that they never really show you in the films, but you can only assume will provide the lush backdrop to countless, blissful and of course, respectable, love-making sessions. Between only the two of them and nobody else until death do they part, of course.
This particular movie went on a little longer than some. The story continued after the wedding, the story unfolding as Princess blessed her hard-working, knight-in-a-tweed-suit-and-spectacles with a champion stable of mini-me’s that filled their home with life. And by life, I mean a stampede of little pattering feet and chocolate covered fingertips charmingly smeared on the refrigerator.
Matilda watched with the greenest envy a child of twelve could possess.
What made Princess better than her?
Other than a name, what kept Matilda from living that same dream?
Why had she been born into this life instead of that one? It wasn’t fair.
She memorized it all: the haughty lilt in Princess’s voice, the angle of her pinkie as she drank from her sparkling champagne glass, the way she held her chin up, her shoulders back, her chest pushed out like she was claiming everything she had coming to her with her bosom alone.
Matilda studied it all, practicing in the cracked mirror over her broken dresser. More than anything else, she was determined to get there, to be that girl with everything, with happiness, stability and not a care in the world.
Matilda’s heart swelled with purpose and hope.
She needed a life like that.
One that belonged to the living, vibrant and free…
Someday, she thought again. She didn’t know how it would happen, but she’d figure it out, she promised herself.
The fancy house was important, of course. But she knew that love and family were the only two things that really mattered, because she’d never had that. The absence was a wound that she desperately wanted to fill, an empty well inside of her that she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Glancing through the crack in the door, she saw her mother fall into a drunken heap onto the floor of their bathroom, where she’d sleep for the rest of the night. Matilda grabbed a blanket and placed it over her, picking up the bottle that lay dripping beside her.
She stirred and with blurry, distant eyes, looked up and smiled.
“Thank you, Tillie,” she slurred, her breath sickly sweet.
“Goodnight, Mama,” she said, gifting her with a slight smile. She turned off the record player and went back to her room.
Back in bed, Matilda raised the volume on the television, losing herself in her dreams, forgetting the misery surrounding her for a few more hours until she drifted off to sleep, one day closer to her own fairy-tale beginning.