Please Ignore Vera Dietz (Page 2)
Please Ignore Vera Dietz(2)
Author: A.S. King
I think the number one thing to remember about my dad is that no matter the ailment, he will suggest working as a possible cure.
THREE AND A HALF MONTHS LATER—A THURSDAY IN DECEMBER
I turned eighteen in October and I went from pizza maker to pizza deliverer. I also went from twenty hours a week to forty, on top of my schoolwork. Though the only classes worth studying for are Modern Social Thought and Vocabulary. MST is easy homework—every day we discuss a different newspaper article. Vocab is ten words a week (with bonus points for additional words students find in their everyday reading), using each in a sentence.
Here’s me using parsimonious in a sentence.
My parsimonious father doesn’t understand that a senior in high school shouldn’t have a full-time job. He doesn’t listen when I explain that working as a pizza delivery girl from four until midnight every school night isn’t very good for my grades. Instead, my parsimonious father launches into a ten-minute-long lecture about how working for a living is hard and kids today don’t get it because they’re given allowances they don’t earn.
Seemingly, this is character-building.
Apparently, most kids would be thankful.
Allegedly, I’m the only kid in my school who isn’t “spoiled by our culture of entitlement.”
This was supposed to keep my mind off Charlie dying—which hasn’t worked so far. It’s only made it worse. The more I work, the more he follows me. The more he follows me, the more he nags me to clear his name. The more he nags me, the more I hate him for leaving me with this mess. Or for leaving me, period.
I’m at the traffic light outside school and I slip the red Pagoda Pizza shirt over my head. I don’t care if it messes up my hair, because I need to look a mix of crazy, disheveled, and apathetic to maintain the balancing act of getting good tips and not getting robbed. I reach under my seat and feel around for the cold glass, and when I find it, I slide it between my legs and twist the metal cap off. Two gulps of vodka later, my eyes are watering and my throat automatically grumbles “Ahhhhh” to get rid of the burning. Don’t judge. I’m not getting drunk. I’m coping.
I pop three pieces of Winterfresh gum into my mouth, slip the bottle back under my seat, and turn left into the Pagoda Pizza delivery parking lot.
My boss at Pagoda is a really cool biker lady with crooked yellow teeth, named Marie. We have two other managers. Nathan (Nate) is a six-foot-five black guy with square 1980s glasses, and Steve is in his forties, drives a Porsche, and lives with his mom. One of the other drivers told me that he’s loaded and he only works here for fun, but I don’t believe what the other drivers say. Most of the time, they’re stoned. They tell me, when we’re mopping the floor or washing the dishes after closing, that when they’re high, they can’t look at Marie because her teeth freak them out.
Marie is running the store tonight, and when I get in, she smiles at me, like a bagful of broken, sun-aged piano keys, and hands me my change envelope and my Pagoda Phone for the night. Nate is cashing out his day-shift receipts on the computer behind the stainless-steel toppings island. “Yo, Vera! What’s shakin’?”
“Hey, Nate.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you look fine in that uniform?” he asks. He asks this at least twice a week. It’s his idea of endearing small talk.
“Only you,” I say.
“It’s like you were destined to be a pizza delivery technician,” he adds, then slams the cash drawer shut and struts into the back room with me, where he slaps a deposit bag onto the old desk in the office and removes his hokey MC Hammer leather coat from the hook on the back of the door.
“Destiny’s bullshit,” I answer. I should know. I’ve spent my whole life avoiding mine.
YOU’RE WONDERING WHERE MY MOTHER IS
My mother left us when I was twelve. She found a man who was not as parsimonious as my father and they moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, which is two thousand five hundred miles away. She doesn’t visit. She doesn’t call. She sends me a card on my birthday with fifty dollars in it, which my father nags me about until I finally go to the bank and deposit it. And so, for all six years she’s been gone, I have $337 to show for having a mother.
Dad says that thirty-seven bucks is good interest. He doesn’t see the irony in that. He doesn’t see the word interest as anything not connected to money because he’s an accountant and to him, everything is a number.
I think $37 and no mother and no visits or phone calls is shitty interest.
She had me when she was seventeen. I guess I should feel lucky that she stuck around the twelve lousy years she did. I guess I should feel lucky she didn’t give me up for adoption or abort me at the clinic behind the bowling alley that no one thinks we know about.
She and Dad grew up together, next-door neighbors. Just like Charlie and me. “I followed my heart,” he claims. Some good that did him. Now he’s stuck with me and three bookcases full of self-help Zen bullshit, has no friends, and maintains an amazing ability to blow off anything that’s remotely important.
When I turned thirteen, Dad told me the truth about Mom.
“I’m sure this will never come up, but in case it does, I want you to know the truth.”
Make a note. When a conversation starts out like this, brace yourself.
“When you were just a little baby, your mother took a job over at Joe’s.”
Of course, this meant nothing to me. I was thirteen. I had no clue that Joe’s was a bring-your-own-beer strip joint where women danced around half na**d getting dollar bills stuffed into their panties.
“What’s Joe’s?”
With no shame or recognition of how badly I could take this, my father said, “A strip club.”
I knew what that was.
“Mom was a—a stripper?”
He nodded.
“And people know this?”
“Just people who were around back then—whoever knew her.” He struggled a bit then, seeing how disgusted I was. “It was only for a few months, Vera. She wanted her freedom back after dropping out of school, getting kicked out of her house, and having—uh—a baby so young. I was still drinking then. She wanted something that she never got back,” he said. The words came out garbled and stuttery. “She—she—uh—wanted something she never found until she ran off with Marty, I guess.”
Marty had been Mom and Dad’s podiatrist.
Dad and I used to sit in the waiting room and play twenty questions during Mom’s longer-than-normal appointments for verrucas.