Please Ignore Vera Dietz(25)
Author: A.S. King

I asked him, on a hot Wednesday in July while we all ate ice pops, “Did you know I’ve dreamed of working in your store since I was five?”

He laughed. “Since you were five?”

“Yep.”

“That was probably back when we only had one unit. Remember that, Elle?” Mrs. Parker, the volunteer manager, nodded. “How old are you now?” he asked.

“Fourteen.”

“Come back to me when you’re seventeen and I might make your dreams come true,” he said, winking.

Mrs. Parker told me that he always hired seniors the summer before their last year in school. She hinted that if I kept volunteering, I’d have a better chance and he’d “remember my face.” Of course, Dad probably wouldn’t allow me to volunteer if there were paying jobs around, but it was nice to daydream.

No matter what I did in summer while I lived under his roof, I knew that when I could, I wanted to work with animals, whether Dad liked it or not. Humans just couldn’t love unconditionally like animals could. Humans were too complicated. Mrs. Parker had the perfect bumper sticker on the back of her ugly Subaru hatchback. THE MORE I KNOW PEOPLE, THE MORE I LOVE MY DOG. When I told her how much I liked it, she got me one, too, and when I showed it to Charlie, he plastered it on the door of the tree house before I could tell him not to. I mean, wasn’t it stupid to have that on the door when neither one of us had a dog? Plus, the tree house had always been more his than mine, and that summer, though I still considered Charlie my best friend in the whole world, I kind of wanted to have a bit of individuality or something. I wanted the bumper sticker for myself.

We both would turn fifteen that fall. He was starting to grow fluff on his chest. I was starting to feel attracted to him more than I ever had before, and I felt totally lame about it. There was no way, now that we were going to go to high school, that I was going to have a real crush on Charlie Kahn—especially if I wanted to slip through high school quietly, with no one noticing I was an ex-stripper’s daughter.

Plus, one day in August, I went out to the tree house when he wasn’t there and I found a few  p**n o magazines sticking out from under his bedside milk crate. From then on, I couldn’t picture Charlie sitting there contemplating the spirit of the Great Hunter. I couldn’t see him drawing plans for his next octagonal addition or a crazy idea for how to make his own solar panels. From then on, I saw him more like a real boy, and not a superhero.

I had promised myself to avoid my mother’s destiny by staying boy-free until after college, and I knew that once I went looking, I’d need a man like Dad—dependable and respectful toward women, and not into  p**n  or weird rich old guys who bought teenage kids’ underwear. But promises aside, Charlie Kahn was still the most exciting boy I had ever met, and part of me (the part we learned about in biology class) wanted nothing more than to run off with him the minute I could, and leave Mount Pitts behind us where it belonged.

PART THREE

MONDAY, JANUARY 2ND—NIGHT OFF

The phone makes that beeping noise once it’s off the hook for too long and I can hear it from the sliding door, where I’m standing, watching Dad pick up winter debris. I feel an urge to escape, but then I remember that my car is still at Pagoda Pizza. And really—is there any realistic way to escape how much I hate my mother right now? (Which Zen guy said, “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself”?)

Dad sees me and raises his chin to acknowledge me. My need to escape inflates exponentially and the beeping on the phone is getting annoying, so I walk over and hang it up. But I want to know what happened to James last night, so I pick it up again and call Pagoda Pizza, and Marie answers.

“Hey, Marie—it’s Vera.”

She laughs a bit. “Hey, Vera. You okay? Your dad said you’re sick.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Is James there?”

“Yeah. Hold on. He’s in the back.”

I hear her yell for him and I feel relieved. He didn’t go to jail or lose his job. Everything is fine.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey. What happened to you last night?”

“They let me go with a warning. I only had two beers. You working tomorrow?”

“I think so. I have to convince my dad to drive me over there to pick up the car.”

There’s a brief, awkward silence as I realize that this is our first phone call. For some reason, this causes me to realize our age difference again. I remember what my mother just said to me. I wonder if James thinks I’m making a joke out of myself.

“I had a great time last night,” he says.

“Me too.”

“I hope we can do it again soon.”

“Me too,” I say.

Dad’s still outside, finishing his lawn cleanup, so I go upstairs. Thirty minutes later, after a hot shower and a quick run through half my vocabulary words for the week (incandescent, contumacious, ingratiate, chawbacon, and banausic), I find my father on the white den couch, reading the New Yorker.

“Dad?”

“One second.”

I go to the kitchen and fix myself a plate of cheese and fruit. This is a novelty. Another snack, time to study, an extra shower. It’s like I’m a normal kid or something. The view from our breakfast bar is dead forest. It reminds me of Charlie, so I usually eat facing away from the window, but today I want to think about Charlie. I look out to where he showed me his first buck and I remember his smile and the way he’d look up through his unkempt bangs, how he’d look at me that flirtatious way, and how I’d ignore it. I pop a grape into my mouth and think about how maybe the whole thing was my fault. Maybe if I hadn’t been so hell-bent on not becoming my parents, I could have saved Charlie. Maybe I would have been his girlfriend. Maybe we could have gotten married and been happy, regardless of who our parents were and what they did to each other.

We have a bird feeder out there that every squirrel in the forest is trying to infiltrate, which drives Dad crazy. Now, there’s a red-headed woodpecker making the thing swing, and cardinals dot the forest scrub with red coats, waiting until the bigger birds have their fill.

Dad sits down across from me and folds his hands together. “We need to talk,” he says.

I nod and chew on my mouthful of cheese.

“I talked to your manager today and she told me that you and James have been working together for months.”

“So?”

“Is that how long this has been going on?”