Chapter 5
“M
argaret, you don't understand. He ghosted me,” Dinah shouts on her phone as I walk through the front door. Another one bites the dust. Her relationships usually only last a few weeks until the guy realizes she's, well, Dinah.
“His name is Cal. That's the villain's name in Titanic! That should have been the first red flag.” She grabs a doughnut from a half-empty bakery box and shoves the entire pastry into her mouth. When she swaps boiled eggs for sweets, there's trouble brewing.
I turn and walk straight into a tower of boxes that fall over and spill packets of medicine. As I clean them up, I take a closer look at the name.
Dinah pauses her conversation to march up behind me and see the mess I created.
“Why are there boxes of laxatives filling up the room?” I ask. Upon closer inspection, each box has a sticker with the address of the local retirement home. “You stole poop pills from your job? Why?”
“Because they make the old people shit all over the place, and guess who has to clean that up?”
She digs into a bowl of boiled eggs and munches on one like a predator.
That's basically what Dinah subsists on.
I've rarely seen her eat anything else. I'm vegetarian, so I don't mind.
She'll buy me some frozen vegetarian dinners, usually something like cheese enchiladas, so I'll pop those in the microwave for dinner.
Sometimes I'll just go straight to a jar of my favorite thing on earth: peanut butter.
It's delicious and it fills me up fast. I get an endorphin rush every time a spoonful hits my mouth.
After a few spoonfuls, I settle in my bedroom to do some assignments and then sleep. It's been a long day of vape explosions, tacky Mexican restaurants, and Clint encounters.
I hear somebody pull into the driveway, so I peek out i.
It's one of those giant police trucks. I'm so cooked. They know I'm the gnome-napper, and now they're going to handcuff me and use a crane to lift me into the back of their stupid truck. Did they get Felix, too?
Dinah bursts into my room, a diamond necklace dangling from the grip of her right hand.
“Wade! There's a cop here. Do me a favor? Can you just put this in your backpack while I go talk to him?”
She shoves the necklace into my hands, which sparkles like a cave treasure. Probably worth more than I'll make in twenty lifetimes.
“Where did you get this?” I ask.
“Never mind that, just take it for now!” she demands.
“Did you… did you steal this from the retirement home?”
“What do you take me for? A thief? Men give me gifts all the time.”
“If you stole this from one of the old people at work, that's super evil,” I insist.
“Wade, people there are so far gone that they'll flush a goddamn Rolex down the toilet,” she says, unbuttoning the top of her blouse. “Take the necklace and shut up. Don't say ANYTHING.”
The doorbell rings.
She heads out of the room, muttering the words “Here, piggy, piggy, piggy!” She's dated half the police department, and that ended as well as every other relationship she's had. Now Dinah hates cops with a fiery passion.
After I hide the necklace in my backpack, I follow her to the front door. She places a chocolate-glazed doughnut sideways in between the top of her breasts and opens the door.
The officer's stony face grows nervous when he sees Dinah. He's bald, with a huge mustache that hangs off the bottom of his cheeks, and with a long pair of front teeth. He almost looks like a walrus. His skin is pink and blotchy, irritated from the heat.
“Dinah Dornoff, as I live and breathe!” he says.
“Where have you been all this time, Charlie? I thought you were gonna take me out for a cocktail one of these days?” Dinah responds.
“Oh, was I?” He stares in confusion for a moment.
“I'm pulling your leg,” she says with a slap to his arm. He laughs uncomfortably and stops dead in the middle of looking at her chest.
“My dear, is that a doughnut in your bosom?”
“So you noticed! Want a bite, Officer?” She pinches both sides and dangles the pastry in his face. I can't tell if she's hypnotizing him or flirting with him.
“I'm fixin' to grab dinner at Cracker Barrel, but thank you,” he says, after a tortured pause that seemed like temptation. Dinah's smile fades. She tosses the doughnut into the yard and wipes off the chocolate glaze and sprinkles that stuck to her chest.
“Look, I don't know what they told you at work, but um…” Dinah says, then leans closer. “What did they tell you?”
“I was called over to a gentleman's residence not long ago. Calvin Greer. I reckon you know him?” He flicks a mosquito off the Chewbacca tattoo above his elbow and scratches the bite.
I slap my hand over my heart and exhale. The gnome bandits will not be caught tonight!
“No, I don't think I do,” Dinah says, her voice growing timid and cautious.
“Mr. Greer says you were dating each other for a few weeks.” Walrus Cop adjusts his badge nervously.
Dinah's got these scary eyes when she gets cornered. She flips her hair to her left side aggressively but forces a smile. “Maybe I recall meeting him once or twice. By the way, does ghosting someone qualify as dating?”
“He called us over because somebody slashed his car tires. He also found a rock in his living room that had been thrown through the window,” the officer says. Dinah's face drops.
“What about it? Crime is up now in the suburbs. There's a lawn-gnome thief still on the loose out there. Where have you been?”
“He believes you are the person who damaged his car and window on account of both of you recently breaking up and all,” he says. “Not just believes but, uh, has you on video.”
Dinah doesn't react except for a few blinks. Walrus Cop pulls out his phone and shows her. It takes ten seconds for her to start trembling and slap the phone away.
“That looks nothing like me! Do you think I have time for shenanigans? I'm a respectable woman. I work twelve-hour shifts at the old folks' home! I lost my sister in a tornado and I'm looking after her dumbass son full time! What else does the world want from me?”
She drops her face into her hands and bawls, bleating about how her life is so hard. Walrus Cop stands there like a big stump, looking over at me as if I have the instructions for how to handle my aunt.
“Dinah, honey, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to cause you no hurt. I'm only doing my job here,” Walrus Cop says. “Mr. Greer said he won't press charges, but you can't go back to his house ever again. That's all.”
Dinah's mewls get louder. “I'm being framed. It's not fair.”
She slams the door on him as he's about to say something else. “Fucking cops,” she grumbles. She lets out three nasally pig grunts and retreats to her rocking chair in the living room. I bring her a box of tissues.
“Cal, you slug,” she says, rocking back and forth while blowing her nose. The TV is playing a conspiracy theory documentary about how the cow flu vaccine supposedly causes women to grow penises and back hair.
“Maybe I should start writing to Rick again,” she says.
“Rick is a serial killer, and he's in prison,” I remind her.
“Whatever, Wade. Are you any better with that sick killer-clown-chainsaw-massacre shit you love to watch?” she snarls.
I go back to my room. Who am I to get in between a woman and the mass murderer she became pen pals with after seeing his mugshot on CNN and deciding he was too handsome to be guilty?
An hour later, when I'm still working on my assignment, Dinah bursts through my door.
“I'm going to make Cal so sorry that he dumped me,” she says.
“Please don't set his house on fire,” I beg her.
“I'm doing something even better. I'm starting a podcast! I'll be so famous, he'll come crawling back to me!”
“Like a Christmas podcast?”
“No. I'm about to rake the muck and dig into everything the government doesn't want the sheeple to know. Aliens, geoengineering, vaccines! I'll tell them everything they want to know but are too chicken to ask. And you'll be my social media manager!”
I burn red all over. I don't know much about what I'm going to do with my life, but I know for sure I'm not going to work for a conspiracy theory podcast.
“I have too many classes and projects this year. I can't commit. Sorry,” I say.
“You need a job because you owe me money. You can put this on your résumé so you look good on your application to clown college.”
There's no getting out of it.
“Now give me that necklace back. We're going shopping tomorrow,” she says, yanking the diamonds out of my hand. “Watch and learn, Wade. Throw me to the sharks, and I'll come back as Jaws!”