The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (44 page)

“
Yes,” Angel said, pulling on Gloria’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Gloria allowed Angel to pull her all the way up the stairs to the bathroom where a bra and a pair of underwear were folded neatly on top of the robe lying on the sink. “Are you in a hurry, Angel?”

Angel nodded. “I’ll get you clothes ready.”

After a brief shower, Gloria walked into her room and saw several dressy outfits lying on the bed.

“
What are you doing?” Gloria asked.

“
Picking out your clothes,” Angel said.

“
We’re only going to the mall for a couple hours, Angel. I don’t have to dress up.”

Angel lifted two hangers holding a pair of black dress slacks and a white blouse. “Here.”

“
We aren’t going to church.” Gloria put on jeans and a sweatshirt.

“
Mama!”

And now she’s raising her voice to me?
“Let’s go. The next bus comes by in ten minutes, and I do not wish to miss it.”

Angel returned the hangers to the closet. “I wanted you to wear something different.”

“
Not to ride a city bus, little girl,” Gloria said. “I’m wearing sweats.”

“
Oh, all right.”

Angel continued to surprise Gloria for the rest of the afternoon. At Toys ‘R’ Us, she walked up and down every aisle, looking at every toy. In the puzzle section, she picked out a 3,000-piece puzzle of an ancient world map. And when Gloria suggested going to Barnes and Noble, Angel said she was too tired.

“
No,” Angel said. “Let’s just go home.”

“
What about McDonald’s?” Gloria asked.

“
I’m not hungry now,” Angel said. “Maybe later.”

“
Are you feeling all right, Angel?” Gloria asked.

“
Yep. Never felt better.”

Yep?
Gloria thought.
I am taking this child to the doctor.

31

“
Hello?”

“
Hello, Paul?” Marion asked.

“
Hello?”

“
This is Marion Minnick, Gloria Minnick’s mama.”

“
I cannot hear you very well.”

Marion ducked out of a hair dryer at First Impressions holding a borrowed cell phone. “Is this better?”

“
Very much so.”

Marion smiled at the ancient woman directly across from her under another dryer. “Gloria will be at home this evening.”

“
She has requested my presence?”

Not exactly.
“We will be serving dinner around seven. Will you join us?”
I’m being so formal today. We’re only having pizza on paper plates and some lemonade.

“
Oh yes. I will be there. Thank you so much for calling.”

“
Goodbye, Paul, and see you tonight at seven.”

Marion turned off the cell phone. “One more call?” she mouthed to a woman more ancient and wrinkled than she was.

“
Is it local?” the woman shouted.

Marion nodded at the loud, ancient, wrinkled woman.

“
Okay!” the woman shouted.

Marion pushed the numbers for Señor Pizza.

“
Señor Pizza, can you hold please?”

“
I guess.”
They’re busy at three-thirty?

Marion hummed along with “
Feliz Navidad
” for a few seconds.
Such a festive song, but why are they still playing it in January?

“
Señor Pizza, how can I help you?”

“
This is Marion Minnick. I’ve ordered from you before. Over on Melrose?”

“
Yes. One of Johnny’s girlfriends.”

I’m flattered, but Johnny’s much too young for me.
“I would like four large pepperoni pizzas, extra extra extra sauce please, delivered to my house at seven-fifteen sharp this evening.”

“
Four large pepperoni… seven-fifteen. Yes. They will be there.”

“
Oh, and tell Johnny he will want to deliver these pizzas on time for a really big tip.”

“
I will do that. Thank you.”

Marion handed the cell phone to the loud woman and ducked under her dryer.

Oh, the things we do to make our lives interesting.

32

Johnny couldn’t write, and not because he really couldn’t write. He couldn’t reach his computer keyboard from the bathroom where he had spent most of the past month with a severe case of diarrhea.

He had eaten crackers and sipped milk to soothe his stomach from Christmas Eve through New Year’s. His adoptive parents had sent a card wishing him “Seasons Greetings” and a $25 gift card to Red Lobster. He opened his only “present” with glee in about 1.4 seconds on Christmas morning. The “milky cracker diet” had eased his pain but hadn’t stopped the flow. As a result, Señor Pizza had inexplicably brisker business without deliveries, and when Johnny finally did return to work, Hector pouted.

“
Maybe I should pay you to stay away,” Hector said. “I make more money when you are sick!”

This made Johnny feel much better.

When his ancient toilet stopped up three weeks later on a cold January Sunday night, Johnny panicked. The plunger had no effect, and there were eight saltines and a cup of 2% milk begging release from his bowels.

Johnny made it to the BP gas station up the street in time that night, but the night manager there didn’t like Johnny very much, even though Johnny bought some overpriced whole milk from him the third time.

Early Monday morning, his plumbing empty, he had called the building supervisor’s emergency number and had explained his plight:

“
Hi, this is Johnny Holiday, you know, the tenant in number three who hasn’t missed an on-time payment in three years. Well, my toilet is backed up, and I need you to come fix it. Thanks.”

By Friday night, Johnny had left sixty-seven emergency messages with the building supervisor, the last extremely blunt:

“
My toilet has
died.
It is
deceased.
I have nowhere to relieve myself. The gases from the once-living toilet are seeping into the upper floors. The other tenants are threatening to move out or call the health department to shut this place down. Please come over and fix it today or else I will light a match!”

Still no one came.

Johnny had to develop a nodding acquaintance with three different BP managers. He had run out of Lysol and burned his only aromatic candle. He had learned that closing the bathroom door and stuffing towels under the crack couldn’t keep the stench from creeping into his bedroom, through his apartment, and out into the hallway to wrinkle the noses of his neighbor, the mail carrier, and the garbage collectors outside.

The man upstairs, however, continued to fart in the bathtub.

Johnny could stand the torture no longer and called Roto-Rooter on Saturday morning. He hoped he could deduct the cost of the repairs from his rent. He also hoped the bill would be less than one hundred dollars, the total amount of Johnny’s massive fortune after delivering only a third as often as before.
Please be … $50 or less.

As usual, Johnny was wrong.

The plumber—“Call me Jack!”—was a loud, wide man who sang country tunes as he worked. “Got a little Texas tea in your toilet, huh?” he asked.

Johnny nodded dully, his stomach gurgling, his eyes dry pieces of lead in his eye sockets.

“
Gonna have to snake it,” Jack said once his plunging efforts only splashed brown splotches of Texas tea onto the bathroom floor and walls. Jack cranked his snake for the next thirty minutes, but the toilet remained full. “Whatcha been flushin’, man mulch?”

There’s a new name for “crap.” Normally, I’d be writing that down. I think I’ll spare the literary world from hearing that phrase.
“I’ve had some diarrhea,” Johnny said.

“
Even a truckload of diarrhea don’t do this,” Jack said. “Sure there ain’t an extra large burrito stuck up in there?”

Johnny spent the next twenty minutes far away from Jack. He tried not to think about Mexican food, but it was no use.

Jack went back and forth to his truck several times. He carried in two more snakes, a fourteen-gallon Shop-Vac, a five-gallon bucket, a little stool, and finally a wax ring. “Gotta pop the top, see what hisses.”

I will never write about any of this,
Johnny thought, realizing there were some things writers should never put in books.
And if something hisses, and it’s burrito-shaped, I will move my entire apartment into the Vega.

“
Looky here, looky here,” Jack cried.

Johnny didn’t want to “looky” there, but he peeked in long enough to see a branch the width of Jack’s massive bicep sticking out of the hole in the floor. “I didn’t flush that.”

“
Of course you didn’t,” Jack said. “It’s a root.”

“
There aren’t any trees around here.”

Jack smiled. “You can cut ‘em all down up top, but the roots keep growin’ as long as they can find water, or in this case, toilet water. You must eat good, huh?”

I’ve been feeding an underground root with my man mulch. Lovely.
“Um, what’s the solution?” Johnny asked.

“
Well, I can jackhammer the whole enchilada out of there.”

Great. More Mexican food I can never eat again.

“
Or, I can just …” Jack grabbed the root with a gloved hand. “If I can just get a good holt of it …” He twisted the root and pulled up a piece as long as Johnny’s arm, the root erupting from the hole, oozing goo plummeting to the floor. Jack grinned and held it out to Johnny. “This has to be a record.” He pulled out a tape measure. “Yep. Twenty-seven inches. Want it for a souvenir? You could put it over the mantel.”

The toast Johnny had eaten for breakfast now begged for release. “Um, how much longer will you be?”

“
Be done here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” Jack said.

At least thirty-four shakes of a lamb’s tail later, Johnny heard the glorious sound of a flushing toilet. Jack came out of the bathroom carrying all his tools in one trip. “You might wanna put some root kill down the toilet for a few months.”

Johnny followed Jack out to his truck, the crisp cold air so much tastier than the furious fumes flowing from his apartment. “Um, what’s the damage?”

Jack closed the back of the truck. “Two-sixty.”

Holy man mulch!
Johnny cried in his head.
I can’t pay that! The pawnshop guy was nice, but I doubt I’d get all my money back if I returned the ring … which I’ll have to do anyway, but to pawn a once used, un-given engagement ring to pay for a toilet bill? It’s just not right!

Jack opened his door and got in, starting up the truck.

Johnny stood under his window. “Um, can I pay you in installments?”

Jack laughed. “You’re just a tenant, boy. I bill
them,
not you. And I’m gonna bill the
crap
out of them.” Jack laughed again. “Get it? The
crap
out of them!”

Johnny got it. “Ha ha,” he said lamely.

Johnny tried to smile as Jack and the root rolled away, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t had a good month, barely sleeping without nightmares jolting him awake, barely eating even when his stomach had settled down for minutes at a time. He had dragged tail during every shift, and customers hadn’t been full of the holiday spirit between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, tipping him even less than normal.
The Grinch didn’t steal Christmas,
Johnny thought.
Congress did.

He reentered the apartment and opened all the windows to air out the funk. Several cats in the alley beat a hasty retreat. He flushed the toilet several times just to make sure.
We are a simple race. We don’t care about what carries away our crap until it craps out.
After using an entire spray can of Lysol bathroom cleaner, he took a long shower, thought briefly of shaving off or at least shaping up his shaggy beard, decided not to, and put on the clothes he had worn to work the night before. He grabbed some coins from his bowl of change, careful not to pick up the ring.