Penelope Lemon

by Inman Majors

  “Slow down, Theo, I can’t understand you,” Penelope said, running her finger lightly over the abrasions that ran down both cheeks. They weren’t as bad as they looked from a distance.

  “I did it, Mom. I finally did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Took Alex down. Took him down hard.”

  “On the bus? Wow. I can’t believe it.”

  “No, not on the bus. I told you, you can get in big trouble for fighting on school property.”

  Theo, as he often did while telling a story, got sidetracked. He was now detailing instances—many of them sounding like urban legends—where kids were disciplined for bus infractions. He seemed to have forgotten the point to his story.

  “Theo, back to you and Alex.”

  “Oh yeah. So I told myself last night before I went to sleep that if he did anything today, I wasn’t going to just take it. I was going to let it rip like you said. He bugged me on the way to school, doing all the Fart Boy stuff, but I ignored him. Then on the way home, he sits right beside me and keeps flicking my ear. Like twenty times. And he kept saying wait till I see you at the pool and that kind of stuff.”

  Her son was the worst storyteller ever. She wanted to shout for him to get to the point but didn’t have the heart. He was awfully proud of himself.

  “So I made my decision. I didn’t say a word or do anything the whole time he’s flicking my ear, but you should have seen Alex’s face when I followed him off the bus. I thought the driver would notice and maybe ask why I was getting off at that stop, but he wasn’t paying attention. A bunch of kids get off there. So then I just walked up to Alex and tapped him on the shoulder and said, You’re not going to do anything to me at the pool. Or next year either. He pushed me, and then I tackled him into some people’s yard. I used both a reversal and a half nelson like we practiced. Anyway, I held his face down in the grass until he promised to leave me alone. A lot of the kids were cheering. That kind of surprised me. I was going to try a full nelson but he was already crying by then. You were right about bullies. They are babies. And then I walked home. It didn’t take that long. You want to play Mario Kart?”

  Penelope couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her only thought was: In your face, Karate James.

  “Theo, I am so proud of you,” she said, thinking not just of this but also of the sweet essay he’d written. “I can’t believe you this past week. What’s come over you?”

  “YOLO.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know YOLO? Then I am definitely SMH.”

  “Just tell me what it means.”

  “Truer words were never spoken. YOLO.”

  “Tell me, Theo.”

  “You only live once.”

  “YOLO? People say that? That’s even worse than smeh. Seriously. YOLO makes me weep for the future.”

  “LOL.”

  “Are you trying to get on my nerves so I’ll play you in Mario Kart? I can still take you down. Remember that. I haven’t taught you half the stuff I know.”

  Theo made the motion with his hands of someone yakking and repeated LOL several more times. Penelope rued the day she’d first said OMG just to irritate her son. She was getting paid back in spades now. She’d have to be more careful about teaching him all her messing-with tricks in the future. She didn’t want to be tortured—like a spider caught in its own web—by her own psychological ploys when Theo was a teen. That would be too much to take.

  “All right, one game before supper,” she said. “Just one, seriously. I pick the track. And after I kick your butt, I am going to LOL. Hard.”

  31

  Penelope lay on her bed in the basement, disbelieving the recent turn of her luck. Actually, she wasn’t too surprised. Her luck had always been streaky, with long runs, both good and bad. Still, this was all kinds of fortuitous and all kinds of awesome. She’d pay George back, one way or another. If he wouldn’t take cash once she got her financial house in order, she’d get him that Weber grill he’d been lusting over at Lowe’s for the last year and a half. She’d surprise him with it on the back patio. What a sweetie he was.

  Unbelievable as it would have seemed that morning, she could start looking for apartments right away. Maybe Rachel or Sandy would help if they weren’t posing for Norman Rockwell or lovemaking with their husbands beside picturesque mountain streams. Yes, certainly one of them would be free sometime over the weekend.

  On her nightstand, The Stranger Within was beckoning. When she’d left off, Sebastian had just enticed Melinda into a quick trip to Vancouver in his private jet, which he piloted himself for his polo matches and international business affairs. Penelope wasn’t sure how this flight would turn sexual, but felt sure it would. From what she’d seen so far, Sebastian was the kind of man who could take full advantage of the autopilot.

  Before she dove into her book, however, there was that one loose end to take care of. She picked up her phone to do just that, then found herself, before she realized she was doing it, staring at James’s Facebook page. Good God. Her fingers were truly addicted. What did they hope to find? It was too early for James to post hanging-at-the-dojo shots. He would eventually, of course. And once that happened she might not be able to resist a peek, especially if she was drinking a little vino with Rachel and Sandy. How could she not? She owed herself that much.

  Still, until sufficient time had passed, she’d have to work on muscle memory to retrain her surfing fingers. She was through, once and for all, playing cyber-detective on her ex.

  She went now to her Divote account, where once again things had exploded, and not just with young guys. She was being candied from all directions. Ignoring all this stickiness, she searched for an opt-out button, but had no luck. She couldn’t even find contact information—an e-mail or a phone number—so she could reach another human about cancelling the subscription. After five minutes, she threw in the towel. It was unlikely her mother would get any money back anyway. She’d just remove the app from her phone and call it a day.

  Before she did that, she scrolled through her messages till she found the most recent one from BrettCorinthians2:2, sent only an hour before. The message was simple and to the point: Come on, just call. You know you want to.

  Feeling immediately pissed, she hit the respond button and typed: Brett, that shark in your dreams is going to bite your weenie off if you keep sending naked photos to people.

  She laughed at this, then erased it. She tried again: Brett, please tell Satan that if he really wanted me to lead you down the primrose path to SIN, he’d give you better advice than suggesting a DONG SHOT. Frankly, I thought that old goat would know me better than that by now. Do you think he’s losing a step?

  She erased this one too, feeling unclean for even typing the word dong, especially in all CAPS, which made it look even dongier. Finally, she wrote this: Brett, desperate, aggressive, and uncool is no way to get a date. The shark in your dream is probably trying to tell you something. Good luck discovering what that is, but in the meantime, stop bugging me. I’m not going to go out with you. Today, tomorrow, or ever. Seriously.

  It was less pithy than the others, but she was tired of messing with BrettCorinthians2:2. He’d occupied too much of her gray matter as it was.

  Okay, now it really was time to get acquainted with The Stranger Within. Sebastian would have the jet juiced up by now, and Melinda as well. Melinda, poor girl, couldn’t help herself. She knew Sebastian was no long-term deal, and knew as well that the trip to Vancouver would bring surprises—perhaps some of them dark—that she’d never before experienced. Why did this intrigue Melinda so? The dark surprises perhaps most of all? Who could have imagined that a small-town girl from Iowa would end up here, doing that, thirty thousand feet above terra firma?

  32

  Things were steaming up nicely in the cockpit when the phone rang. What the hey? Who could be calling at 10:30? Looking again, she realized she knew that number. But what was the HHR doing awake at this hour? T
here were weeds to be eaten in the morning, lands to be scaped.

  She answered with a hesitant Hello?

  “Penelope, I’m sorry to be calling so late. I had a four-wheeler bust an axle on the way back from jug-fishing on the river, and I’m just now getting back to my place. Jake Shifflet, the dumbass, forgot where we were supposed to meet up and went to the marina instead of the dam, so I had to swim out to this buoy until I could wave down a passing boat and catch a ride in. Don’t know how I’m going to get my four-wheeler out of there, but that’s a problem for another day. Anyway, I had a hell of a day fishing—got one cat that must run thirty-six, thirty-seven pounds.”

  Penelope could tell he’d forgotten the original purpose of his call, his short-term memory floating pleasantly above the river he’d just fished in a tidy one-hitter cloud.

  “Were you calling about anything else?”

  “Oh yeah. Got you. Sorry. Well, it’s done. That picture’s gone. Weasel tried the intellectual property angle on ’em first, but they had no idea what he was talking about. Then he went with the invasion-of-privacy thing, and they just laughed at him. That got him all worked up so he threatened to sue the ushanka right off em.”

  “The what?”

  “The ushanka. Those furry hats Russians wear.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Penelope, come on. All these outfits are run by the Russian mafia. Everybody knows that. Weasel was just calling them on their Russian bullshit.”

  The HHR took a break here to blaze a fresh fattie. She could tell it was a joint instead of one of his multitude of pipes because he had to flick the lighter a number of times before she heard the inhale and cough. Actually, it was probably a roach left over from his day of jug-fishing on the river. Penelope paused to consider how she knew so much about the particulars of the HHR’s cannabis habit. With a gun to her head or a perjury charge in the balance, she’d be forced to admit that back in the day she’d gotten reasonably acquainted with most of his smoking apparatus. And most of his leaf blowers too. It seemed like a thousand years ago.

  “Hold on,” she said. “Weasel was talking to someone who runs Paybacks Are Heaven on the phone? How in the world did he get their number?”

  “Are you kidding?” said the HHR as if it was as obvious as the nose on her face. “He pays for one of those services where you can look up anything on anybody. I mean anything: arrests, bankruptcies, restraining orders, liens on your house. All that crap. Getting a little phone number is nothing for that service he’s got. It probably took him like three seconds.”

  The HHR paused here to let that sink in, accustomed, one would guess, to a fair amount of oohing and aahhing around the hookah-hazed coffee table over this nugget of information. When none was forthcoming, he continued:

  “Anyway, this guy was laughing at Weasel when he threatened to sue, just laughing right in his face. So Weasel all of a sudden starts crying, I mean really blubbering. You wouldn’t believe how quick he changed personas. That Russian didn’t know what hit him. Weasel starts going on about how in reality you were his ex-wife first love, and that he didn’t know how to handle the situation so he pretended to be a lawyer when in fact he was a simple soybean farmer from Alabama. And he came up with this genius bit about you being not just his ex-wife and first love but also deceased, and that some creep had stolen the photo in a burglary of his secret lockbox where he kept all his prized possessions. And he kept talking about how you were the only gal he’d ever loved and how nice you were and that your son was your spitting image, right down to the long legs you display in the photo in question. I wouldn’t have guessed it from a porn mogul, much less a Russian mafia capo, but he ended up feeling sorry for Weasel and said he’d take it off. His exact words when he hung up were: Your wife sleeps with the angels.”

  Penelope couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It seemed too good to be true.

  “Weasel started fake-crying?” she asked. “Just like that?”

  “No, he was really crying. He was so into the role, especially when he switched to that widower dude with the perfect hot dead wife. You know he’s one of those method actors. I was there. I got a little teary myself.”

  “So it’s gone?”

  “Well, a few folks might have downloaded the image before we could get it off. I mean you can’t blame them. You’re throwing some serious flame. But maybe not. That Russian dude took care of business almost as soon as he got off the phone. Weasel really did a number on him. Poor guy didn’t know what hit him.”

  “I can’t believe Weasel pulled it off,” she said. “What a relief. I’ll call him tomorrow to thank him.”

  The HHR now cleared his throat, always a prelude to a serious thought or question. She braced herself.

  “I know it’s inappropriate to ask, and I figure you’ll say no, and that’s fine, but I was wondering how you’d feel if you knew that this ole ex-husband of yours downloaded that picture himself right before Weasel got it taken down for good?”

  “What do you mean how would I feel?”

  “I mean would you think I was a weirdo if I kept it, just for old times’ sake? I promise I won’t show it to anyone else. I never have in all these years. It’s just a little something to remind me of a really good time in my life. But if you object, I’ll delete it. You have my word.”

  Penelope pondered this for a full thirty seconds. It was an unusual request, but then again, did she really care? She’d known the HHR since she was eighteen. And she’d be lying if she said that she didn’t think fondly—on occasion—of those days when she was footloose and fancy-free.

  “No, it’s okay. You can keep it. I don’t mind.”

  “I thank you, Penelope, I really do.”

  There was another pause here where it seemed like the HHR had something else to say. Again she heard the lighter, again inhalation and hoarse coughing. She could tell he was working toward some state of mind. Eventually, his thoughts congealed and he was ready to speak.

  “Hey, I’ve been reading up a lot on this, and I’m pretty intrigued. I’m wondering if you’ve ever heard of something called Bitcoin . . .”

  “I have to go,” Penelope said. “I’ve got work tomorrow.”

  There was a long exhale and then a clearing of throat. He would have to call Weasel or Jake Shifflet or some other of his fellow stoners on this Bitcoin thing.

  “All right, Penelope, I’ll talk to you later on.”

  “Okay. Thanks for taking care of that.”

  “Had to be done. It was my fault to begin with. If I’d known about it beforehand, I would have taken care of it without you asking.”

  And thus saying, the HHR hung up.

  Penelope lay there, staring disbelievingly at the phone, feeling pretty darn good. Forces were at work beyond her control or depth of understanding. The universe was trying to tell her something. She thought maybe she should check her LoveSynch page after all.

  There wasn’t the bounty of contacts from interested men that she’d encountered the last time she’d visited the site, only one computer blend and two flirts. She’d been blanked on the Eiffel Tower front, which she found a touch disappointing. On the other hand, she had received a message from one Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley by way of Derbyshire.

  My Dearest TheosMom75,

  I feel perhaps that I have moved too swiftly in regards to my suggestion that we consider meeting face to face. I had hoped it would be construed as a modest proposal (please forgive the pun—I’m congenitally incapable of passing one up, even when I know they should often earn the punster a Swift kick in the arse), but if you found it too hasty or forward, I do beg of you a thousand pardons. I am more than happy to continue our correspondence via the LoveSynch message board, though one of these days I hope to write a real letter, on real paper, with my real Montblanc fountain pen. (Yes, I am one of those Luddites who still write long letters. Not to worry, however, on the ecological front—I am a fervent recycler, though
I have been accused—but never convicted—of keeping every single letter I have received in the course of my life.)

  Please write back whenever time affords and the muse is caressing you with literary favors. No, strike that! The muse can be most unpredictable. Please write back even if your muse is away on a well-earned sojourn. Any words from you at all would be appreciated.

  With sincerest wishes for a reply,

  FD

  Penelope took a moment to reflect on this and then put her phone away. She was tired and could hear the expensive hum of Sebastian’s jet calling her name. It was time for the return trip from Vancouver.

  33

  A good portion of the day had been spent listening to Missy analyze why Dimwit’s visits now lasted five minutes longer than before. She’d sat beside Penelope at the computer, passing notes and miming—via grimace and gesticulation—a number of scenarios she imagined happening behind the closed bathroom door, all of them improbable if not physically impossible. But Penelope hadn’t reciprocated. With few exceptions, the less you thought about bad stuff, the less bad it got. It was Psychology 101. So as far she was concerned, what happened in Dimwit’s lavatory—no matter how morbid or pagan or Confederate-themed it might be—should remain there, and not sully the beautiful, bountiful, and independent summer that was currently taking shape in her mind.

  It was Thursday, and James, in a surprise move, had taken the day off to celebrate the start of summer with Theo. He’d even offered to take him to baseball practice that evening. Penelope knew he was minding his Ps and Qs after her discovery of the Ms. Dunleavy affair, but felt no need to look gift horses in the mouth. A free afternoon was a free afternoon.

  She was now en route to Sandy’s house, in her softly purring car, with Van Halen cranking on the stereo, mentally tallying her financial ledger. She would receive her first paycheck from Rolling Acres Estates on Friday. And she had discovered, via online banking, that she still had $27 of wiggle room left on her credit card. She felt positively flush. Not only that, but George had filled up her car on the way home from the mechanic. Life was good—so good that she’d stopped at the 7-Eleven for the first time in forever without needing gas. It still felt unnatural to be driving without lights on the dash taunting her, but she hoped to get used to the feeling. Man, she wouldn’t miss those yellow assholes.