Please Ignore Vera Dietz(47)
Author: A.S. King

“We have to talk,” he said.

“Please, Charlie. Go away.”

“I’m in trouble.”

I looked into his eyes. He looked in trouble.

“Why should I care?”

“Will you take a walk with me?”

“No.”

He stopped as I continued to the house. Dad was there, so I felt safe.

“Just to the oak?”

“Go home, Charlie.”

“Vera, I’m serious. I need your help.”

“I’m serious, too, Charlie.”

We looked at each other.

“Jenny’s crazy. She’s going to hurt the animals,” he said.

“Your problem. Not mine.” I said that, but my heart twisted at the thought of it. Who hurts animals?

“She is,” he said.

“Just go home, Charlie. Leave me alone.”

“Can’t you call one of your dog people and warn them?”

“Can’t you?” I asked.

We stared at each other for a few seconds, silently, and I walked toward the front door.

“She’s going to kill me,” he said, dead serious.

“Your problem,” I answered, rolling my inner eyes. Yeah, sure. She’s going to kill you, Charlie. Right.

“But I thought you were my friend,” he said, his voice quivering.

I thought about May Day, when he hit me. “I was your friend, Charlie. But I’m not anymore.”

“When did you turn into such a bitch?” he screamed.

Dad opened the front door right then.

Charlie was still jittering next to the car as I walked past Dad and into the house. Dad stayed at the door until Charlie walked back into the woods, muttering to himself.

While I took a shower to wash the smell of grease and pepperoni out of my hair and skin, I had awful daydreams. I thought about Charlie coming back with one of his dad’s guns and shooting us up. Or himself. I thought about what kind of trouble he might be in and hoped it wasn’t too bad. Then I remembered that he was an ass**le now. I’d probably been right to doubt him. Jenny and Bill Corso and Gretchen the squirrel-brained were probably all waiting in the woods, sad I hadn’t fallen for their lies.

And seriously—the story about Jenny Flick hurting animals? What a sorry piece of bait that was. I wondered if it took all four of them to think it up. Morons.

Dad made dinner. Fettuccine Alfredo.

“What did Charlie want?”

I wanted to tell him everything. But Dietzes don’t do drama.

“Nothing important,” I answered. “Nice pasta.”

“Thanks. I found the recipe in the paper.”

I hadn’t talked to Dad about what was happening with Charlie since Valentine’s Day. He hadn’t asked, either, and that was fine.

We sat at the breakfast bar, me facing the sliding doors, him facing me. I stared at the fading light, which was fading earlier these days.

I looked at the calendar on the fridge.

“Less than a week left,” I said.

“Yeah. I went to the mall today to get some staples and the place was packed.”

“Ugh. Shopping.”

Dad laughed.

“Everything is overpriced crap.”

“You make me proud, Veer,” Dad said.

I did make him proud. I had become his mini-me—a parsimonious, self-sufficient Vulcan who pretended everything was great when it really wasn’t.

A BRIEF WORD FROM KEN DIETZ (VERA’S PROUD DAD)

Cindy Sindy always said I saved myself like I saved money. Said I was emotionally thrifty. She used to tell me how bad it stank to go nowhere all day, and when I suggested that she take Vera with her, she said, “I can’t take Vera to the places I want to go.”

I never asked, but it occurred to me the night she left that she might have meant the grocery store, or the movies, or the hairdresser’s, or just in the car by herself for a drive to nowhere special. Time alone. She meant she wanted a break. She wasn’t even twenty yet. The least I could have done was give her a break after knocking her up and marrying her so young.

To say it was a shotgun wedding would not be inaccurate. Her father owned several shotguns, and he did refer to them twice the night we went to his place to tell them the bad news. Cindy Sindy told me she wanted to keep the baby, so before any mention of shotguns, I’d already prepared to marry her.

“You think the paychecks you get from the gas station can support a wife and baby?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much do you get a week?”

“One ninety-eight.”

Her mother stopped crying for a second to say, “One ninety-eight? An hour?”

“A week, Janet,” her father said, and then turned back to me. “Just how do you suppose you’re gonna raise my grandchild on less than eight hundred bucks a month? Where you gonna rent a place for that kind of shitty money?”

“We’ll move into my mother’s house,” I said.

After considerable silence and visible relief that we didn’t choose them to leech off, he said, “And how did she take the news?”

“She’s as shocked as you, but okay with it.”

Mrs. Lutz cried louder. Mr. Lutz said, “I bet she is.”

But I hadn’t told my mother yet.

For three months, Cindy Sindy and I lived out of my bedroom, her sleeping a lot and puking occasionally, me drinking beer and watching bad sitcoms on the black-and-white mini TV I found in the attic. One Sunday morning, I woke up to loud noise right next to my aching head. I opened my eyes to find my mother in our room, cigarette hanging from her mouth, emptying my dresser drawers into black garbage bags.

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

“Notice what?” I asked, slipping on a pair of boxers under the covers. Cindy Sindy rolled over, groaned, hugged a pillow to her chest, and kept sleeping.

“That you knocked up a teenager and moved her into my house?”

“Her name is Cindy.”

“Her name is statutory rape, Kenny.” She went back to emptying my stuff into a bag until I grabbed it from her.

“We’re getting married. Her parents are fine with it.”

She stared at me the way she had a million times before—like I was nothing but a regret.

“Then you can live with them.”

I had to go to work in the afternoon, and when I got back to the house, she not only had all my stuff in the backyard, but there was a for sale sign by the mailbox.

After a week in the Lutzes’ basement, we found an apartment in town for $350 a month. It was infested with roaches and lacked air-conditioning. That’s where we lived when Vera was born. Two months after that, we got married. A month or so after that, Cindy Sindy took the strip job at the club because I was drinking our rent. Five months after that, I quit drinking.