Dig: Part 3

“We’ll talk when you get here,” I say. “I can’t live with Marla anymore. It’s not that she’s a bad person,” I whisper. “It’s just the antithesis of everything you ever taught me—living here. They’re not good for me.”

I can see Dad’s hackles go up and then smooth back down.

Roy looks disgruntled.

He has a tattoo on his left deltoid.

The audience yells an amalgam of “You never loved her!” or “You’re selfish!” and “You’re crazy!” or “Stop making people eat lamb!”

“You must be missing a lot of parties working here every weekend,” he says. He gets this look in his eye like he remembers raucous parties.

What’s wrong with me? Every time I see a girl I weigh her in my mind like flour.
Like she’s a commodity.

They’d notice her big front teeth and how she doesn’t wear makeup. They’d laugh at the bites on her arms—when I want to apply salve to them.

I helped him shave his head. I shaved mine, too, in solidarity.

“No way. I’m not leaving you. And anyway, if you die then I don’t get to spend time with you before you die? No Bruce Lee movies? No impromptu Bob Marley dance parties in the living room?”

You said we’d be minimalists. You said all that mattered was human connection.

I’m not a person. I’m a check box. You need to understand, this isn’t a childhood. This is a diorama.

It’s why I liked the Arby’s uniform. The day I brought it home Mom was mortified.

She looked at me in that way. Exasperated that I didn’t want loafers.

“Stop being coy.”
“Maybe you’re just like your mother,” I said.

Good word, unfold. Because that’s what she did. Like one of those magical origami shapes—one minute a crane with moving wings, then next a crumbled blob of paper that looked like it went through the washing machine.

The bottom of the handle and bell part covered in a big house-slave gingham dress with an apron on the very top of the handle above the caricature face, a red handkerchief tied up, you know the kind, from the old maple syrup bottles.

She has the troupe harnessed already and puts on the show. Her pop-pop looks a mix of enthralled and mortified.

Loretta answers, “I’m no shyster. This is the greatest...flea circus in the country.”

We drive through town, toward the mountain with the bizarre pagoda on it.

I try not to covet my best friend’s car. I do anyway.

He says, “So, I got a job at Lakeside. In the office, helping with scheduling and stuff.” Lakeside is a rehabilitation center—kinda like a nursing home.

I’m in the bathroom, rummaging through her makeup drawer.

I stop and look at Mom, and she seems elated about something.

He tries to flirt one more time, but Loretta puts her hand out like the choreographer taught her. “Save it for the next lady, okay, buddy?”

When you water a potato plant, the liquid seeps into the soil. Helps the spud grow underground. The leaves may love seeing the sun, but the tubers need the dark. They seem so different—so unrelated—but when the blight hits and the whole plant goes, then you know everything was related.

I’m guessing that Mike’s 100% white power tattoo isn’t the worst thing in the world because Mom never hyperventilated about that.

My mom called your mom the nomad of the family.

She told me it was an epidemic. Girls disappearing from malls. Used it to scare me.

This is my last Easter. I’m not going to make amends before I die.

Maybe you can buy civility wherever they sell humor.

Fact: If Marla and Gottfried would have loaned Matt a few thousand measly bucks, The Freak would not be wrapped in a dirt tortilla.

Greed trickles down in many forms. It made Harry a humanitarian who forgets the human he’s personally responsible for from time to time.

I stop thinking about Ian because I’m glad he isn’t here and having to live through an anthropology project. I try to do that for myself. I put on my anthropologist’s hat and look at my family.

The Freak is frying you her great-grandmother’s potato croquettes.

The Freak visited her parents a lot at first, but they never paid attention—which was surprising considering her mother is an artist and has paid numerous swindlers to read the lines on her palms.

His father always said that families were the same. Everything was connected, everything worked in synchronicity.

She walks to him and hugs him, and his arms grip real flesh—not some Scooby-Doo apparition.

The Freak has something to say. She says it to the men exhuming her from her dirt burrito.

She says it to the coroner. She says it to the funeral director. She says it to you.