statistically speaking.”
So Shannon rented a U-Haul trailer and bought out the pumpkin stand.
“Your daughter has a heart of gold,” Eugene said.
Young men speak in cliches; old men live them. “Why not give the girl all your money and let her keep the pumpkins to sell to someone else?” I asked. “Lord knows we don’t need more than one pumpkin.”
“Categorical impoverishment disdains charity,” Eugene said. Shannon wasn’t speaking to me. She does that whenever I won’t cooperate.
“I’ve found people you think won’t accept charity generally will when you word it right.”
Eugene sent me a look like I’m simple and he’s not. “These pumpkin sellers are endemic of the old Appalachian value system which ascribes nobility to poverty, but only in the context of the self-contained family unit, much like John Boy and the Waltons. Charity is viewed as debasement.”
Gus snorted and spoke to Shannon. “Does he talk that way in bed?” I left before Shannon answered.
At first I thought the waitress looked like the woman who walked her cat on a leash, then I realized she was the woman who walked her cat on a leash.
When she brought my blintzes, I asked, “Why walk a tied-up cat?”
She looked at me suspiciously, which is nothing new. Waitresses often look at me suspiciously. “Have you been spying on me?”
“I saw your cat yesterday and wondered why you walk her on a leash.”
“You ever try walking a cat without a leash?”
“My cat Alice went outside on her own.”
The waitress put her hand in her uniform pocket, then took it out again. She touched her ear and blinked quickly. “I can’t risk that with Judy.”
I looked at her name tag. “You’re Judy.”
She continued to move her hands nervously. I could tell this was a touchy subject. “Mr. Angusen named Judy after me. Mr. Angusen was my husband, before he caught the emphysema and said he’d rather die than quit Kent cigarettes. He was so crazy about our kitten that he named her after me.”
“My friend Maurey named a horse after her father.”
“Judy is all that’s left. I can’t risk losing her too.”
Made sense to me. “I used to be emotionally dependent on a cat. You reach a point where something outside yourself has to hold you together because you can’t do it on your own anymore, and a pet is the only choice.”
The waitress had sad eyes I hadn’t noticed the day before when I was busy fingering Linda Ronstadt. “What happened to your cat?” she asked.
“Alice got old and died.”
“How did you handle losing her?”
“I got married.”
I would never have married Wanda if Alice had lived. Alice was my cat who stuck with me while a score of women didn’t. Alice didn’t care for my women. She made a habit of peeing on panties left on the bedroom floor. I’m convinced several of my one-night stands would have lasted several more nights if the women involved had awoken to dry underwear. Alice was eighteen when her kidneys started to fail, and, for seven months, I injected her twice a day with fifty cc’s of electrolyte fluid. At the end I hand fed her ice for a week as she died. I doubt if I’ll ever get so close to an animal or person again. Intimacy on that deep a level takes too much out of you. After I lost Alice, I wallowed in fuck-and-suck avoidance for a month until Wanda came along, and, in a gush of relief that someone might actually take me for the long run, six weeks after I met Wanda I married her.
Then, ten days less than a year later—game four of the ’83 World Series—Wanda scrammed. She calculated the timing to inflict the highest amount of pain possible; of that I am certain. No woman just happens to leave her husband during the World Series.
My first marriage—the one we don’t talk about at family gatherings—lasted eight weeks. I was twenty-five, Leigh was thirty-seven and had just been divorced by her husband of fifteen years, who dumped her for Tammy Faye Bakker’s publicist. He left Leigh with a shattered personality, which I helped her glue back together piece by piece until she was whole enough to leave me for an underwater welder.
She said hurting me “balanced the books.” I asked her why she married me in the first place and she said, “To prove to myself someone still wanted me.”
Lydia publishes feminist literature, Maurey runs the ranch, I write Young Adult sports fiction, but what keeps all our noses above water is golf carts, an irony not lost on anyone, except possibly Lydia. In some circles I’m known as the golf cart czar. Actually, only one circle, but the people in it pull a lot of weight at country clubs across America. The Callahan family used to be known as carbon paper czars. Caspar Callahan Carbon Paper once stood as a veritable giant in the world of record keeping. But then Caspar died and a couple months later I happened to be in the Wachovia Bank wrangling the red tape it takes to get yourself into a dead relative’s safe deposit box, when the Xerox van delivered a 2400 series copier to the back door.
You’ve never seen such ecstatic secretaries. No more hassles with lining up three sheets of paper. No more smudgy fingers.
I sold out lickety-split. Take that, Minnesota Mining. Absorb another competitor, I’ll just drive down to Atlanta to a baseball game. The San Francisco Giants were playing the Braves—Juan Marichal against Phil Niekro. Willie McCovey led off the eighth by drilling a Niekro screwball through Chief Nokahoma’s tipi—a stand-up triple. Lum Harris chewed and spit and waved in a left-handed reliever.
That’s when the family fortune zipped into the modern era. A big healthy girl in a Braves cap and hot pants rolled through the bullpen in a motorized baseball on wheels, picked up Hoyt Wilhelm, and whisked him, silently, electrically, to the mound. I knew right then, in mid-Cracker Jack bite, that I had to own a motorized baseball.
So, I sank the carbon paper profits into golf carts.
To be honest, which God knows is what I’m striving for here, I didn’t immediately recognize the motorized baseball as a plastic shell mounted on a golf cart. I hated golf then—although not as much as I hate golf now—and I simply didn’t think in terms of market.
Golf isn’t really a sport. It’s fancy pants networking; rich white guys in spiffy outfits, cruising the lawn in one of my carts, comparing financial tidbits and sexual exploitation fantasies. Golf is for doctors and bankers and all those career guys who, being a writer, I consider myself superior to.
We owned one of each Callahan Magic Cart Company model. The garage was so packed that sometimes I had to park my 240Z in the driveway, back when I had a 240Z. Shannon organized cart polo matches over at the junior high football field. Cart polo is an outgrowth of cart croquet. Both games use beach balls, golf carts, and croquet mallets. Cart polo is a lot of fun—you can drink and play simultaneously—and I wish it would catch on with the college kids so I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about making a fortune off a non-sport I find disgusting, boring, and morally offensive.
“You didn’t have to come in,” Shirley said. “Everything’s flowing smooth as peaches, so we don’t have any use for you.”
“I thought it was time I stop moping around the house and get back to work.”
“Moping around the house is what you did best before you married the Queen, and practically all you did while she ruled the roost. I fail to fathom what this ‘get back’ to work refers to.”
Shirley is my bookkeeper and one of the three women who each thinks she runs the Callahan empire. I have Gaylene in production and Ambrosia in sales. All three have copped a the-owner-is-harebrained attitude toward me, forgetting I’m the one who created this nifty system of delegated authority. I hired them all years ago at salaries
