244

Warren

Within three days of Warren’s interment, Hope had eradicated almost every shred of evidence of his noxious presence in her life.

His clothing to the last repugnant sock had been hauled to the Good Will donation bin near Hy-Vee or chucked into the parking-lot dumpster. She’d gone to the bank and had his name taken off their accounts, ordered new checks bearing her name only, shredded the two boxes of unused checks that had survived his Royal Hind-ass, and filled the Rubbermaid bathroom basket with his pills, potions, lotions, salves, suppositories, and sundry grooming utensils, first dunking his triple-headed Norelco shaver into the toilet by its cord a few times for good measure.

The Viagra she pounded into powder with an upholstery hammer at the breakfast bar, tablet after tablet, all thirty-four of them, savoring the satisfying, saved-by-the-bell sensation that accompanied every blow.

But for all the catharsis Hope realized from this elaborately constructed deconstruction, there really was no getting even with Warren. He’d gotten through life unscathed by his own causticity; had lived his whole sixty-eight years as an irredeemable bastard oblivious to the loathing in his wake.

Bull-headed, bullshitting, wife-bullying Warren had held a worldview precisely like that of a rodeo Brahman. Because even if “ridden” the bull—as far as the bull is concerned—never loses. The cowboy always winds up on the turf, and the bull always leaves the arena the way Warren left this world: a smug, strutting, self-satisfied winner.

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280

Chuck

Charles Uriah Farley had been given his name by an asshole father and a mother asleep at the wheel. And by the time he was savvy enough to be in on the joke he’d been going as Chuck for far too long to circumvent the inevitable. He swore at one point, though, that he’d punch the next jerkoff to blurt Chuck you, Farley! like he’d invented the gag on the spot. But Chuck never made good on that vow, of course; just withdrew a bit further instead.

Shaped for introspection by a misshapen name, Chuck U. Farley acquired a predilection for performing such mental calisthenics as calculating how many pints of pee get pissed at Arrowhead Stadium during your average Kansas City Chiefs game. It intrigued him to think that an exact amount of pee gets pissed every time—not exactly the same amount, obviously, but an exact amount, at any rate, every time.

He liked the idea of unknowable finite numbers, you see. Numbers beyond all knowing, yet no less finite for not being known.

Another thing Chuck liked to do was imagine something bad and then counter it with something good. Priests buggering altar boys, for instance, countered with a goldfinch plucking thistle from his seed feeder. (It wasn’t qualitative he was after in this; only quantitative.) And it occurred to him one day, that just as with the pints of pee at Arrowhead Stadium there were finite numbers attached to all the malevolent things and all the benevolent things in the universe. Finite numbers beyond all knowing, but which, if tallied and compared, could settle the question once and for all of whether God is good or evil.

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225

Hope

She’d been the kind of breathtaking baby that stopped people short. A baby with a mesmerizing gaze who would engage your eyes as though regarding the core of your being—the very truth, as it were, of you. She’d been the kind of happy and happy-go-lucky child who could infuse everyone around her with a feeling of inexplicable and ineffable gladness.

And yet, in spite of the sparkling start, her life had evolved as a more or less steadfast march from bundle of joy to bundle of nerves; nerves relentlessly assaulted by a mean-drunk husband and an emotionally distant, possibly demented, son.

She had tended toward undercooked poultry and overcooked meat—yet charmingly so for all the assiduous effort she unflaggingly put into getting it right. But it had been Hope’s fate that no one would find these charming tendencies endearing, or rightly appreciate her facile mind or capacity for provocative thought. One such thought Hope’s facile mind had come to harbor was that her destiny had turned out to be that of a figurative and literal conduit for pointless perpetuation. Nothing more, nothing less.

There had not been, and would not be, a pot of gold at the end of her rainbow. No rainbow, as far as that went. Just a tangerine-colored Corelle plate of chicken-fried steak, buttered green beans, and mashed potatoes.

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296

Milena

When Milena saw the TV commercial for Mirena, an intrauterine contraceptive offering up to five years of pregnancy-thwarting hormone-delivery directly into her uterus, she thought of her mother’s Japanese-American friend, Mrs. Iwasa, who never could get the hang of Milena’s name, being herself thwarted by the letter L, and was always calling her “Mirena” instead. And no, maybe that wasn’t exactly in the nature of a fortuitous portent, but it was at least a provocative coincidence, and so she decided that, yes—yes, she would go ahead and ask her doctor, as the promotional message strenuously recommended, if Mirena was “right” for her, even though the tiny plastic implement bore a somewhat discomfiting resemblance to a miner’s pickax. A resemblance all the more menacing for its ability to dig into, and sometimes pierce, a woman’s uterine wall, as the commercial lightly, if not liltingly, cautioned.

It also cautioned Milena about back pain, headaches, nausea, irregular bleeding, ovarian cysts (but the good ones that usually disappear), a decrease in libidinous impulse, and the fact that if pregnancy should occur with Mirena in place, it could threaten Milena’s life. The commercial didn’t say anything about having to check the thing’s threads once a month, but no matter; Milena had pretty much stopped listening after hearing the potential blessings: no more having to take that pill (so busy!) and no more baby worries for five sweet years. Just set it and forget it, like her Showtime Rotisserie, and what a godsend that was!

So she asked her doctor to put one in, and he of course was only too happy to oblige, money being money. But Milena’s hear-no-evil indifference to Mirena’s less sanguine attributes made him think she might be as big a nut case as her boyfriend David.

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186

David

David had his own way of seeing things, and sometimes he couldn’t help wondering if his own way of seeing things was not a good deal more than quirky or eccentric or endearingly odd. In other words, he could not be certain he wasn’t a bona fide nut job. On the other hand, a good deal too many people lived their lives bereft of creative impulse, the way David saw it, and David drew more than a modicum of pride from his voluptuous ability to think outside the box.

And so, when he came home later than usual that night and found his mother face down in her chicken-fried steak, his initial response, after satisfying himself she was actually dead, was to dial 9-1-1. 

But then it occurred to him that he would probably never have another opportunity to break bread with a corpse, much less his mother’s corpse, and how singular it would be, in not just his frame of reference but in pretty much everyone else’s, to do just that. 

And wouldn’t you know it? 

His mom had gone and overcooked the goddamn meat again.

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