Stigmatic
1. The shop’s closed this week.
2. Since it’s being gutted.
3. So we can expand and renovate.
[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]
In less than a week Carlos has changed the map. He —I mean, we—have bought up all the property on the block. The dress shop, the dry cleaner’s, and the nail salon.
Two days of negotiating with the store owners, a twenty
minute conversation with the town supervisor, and off we trotted, Carlos in
suit and tie—his waist-length hair cut above his jawline!—and me in a sweater vest and chinos, to sit in a stuffy office
above a pet food store: Carlos and I, Fletcher
and Franklin Brazil, our bodybuilding, identical twin lawyers (who are also
representing the store owners, and the banks), Matt Kessler, the dry cleaner,
Shari Murtaugh, of Amelia’s Dress Shop, and Sylvia Sloane of Sylvia’s Custom
Nail Wraps. We passed thirty-six documents around the table and signed our
names on hundreds of dotted lines. And
still, every two seconds Franklin or Fletcher would jump up and point at one of
us. “Sign here. Sign here. Sign here.” Everything in triplicate.
I would have thought, This can not be happening; I am not signing my life away. I am not borrowing two million dollars!
Except—it took all my concentration just to breathe, or rather, not to breathe. Fletcher and Franklin seemed locked in competition as to which one was more awash in cologne. Carlos’s hair gel lay greenish and thick on his slick new ’do. Sylvia Sloane shuddered and chomped on butterscotch candies. And Matt Kessler radiated the smell of cleaning fluid so powerfully you could almost see it the toxic blue rays glowing from his head. Also swirling in the unventilated air were the eternal residues of cigarettes and alcohol as well as fresh horrible gusts of drilled-away tooth matter and amalgam from the dentist’s office across the hall.
Of course I could also smell myself—the smell of anxiety worse than anxiety, the smell of me borrowing two million dollars and tying my fate to Carlos’s forever!
He kept hissing at me, “Would you relax?”
Meanwhile, Shari Murtaugh, the pixyish woman in her sixties sitting on the other side of me, was showing me a little picture of the Virgin, even as the paper-signing continued apace. She slid closer, resting her fingertips on my shoulder. “I haven’t been to one of your meetings yet,” she whispered, “but, if I didn’t have it on the Highest Authority how saintly you are, I would never sell you my dress shop. Never.”
I started to say thank you, except was “thank you” the right response? Instead I sat dumbfounded with the holy picture in my palm. Was it a gift? Or was I supposed to have handed it back a minute ago already?
Seeing my confusion, Shari nodded at me brightly. “Go ahead, Father.”
Father? “Oh no. No. Um. . . Malcolm. Malcolm is fine.”
There was this terrible air of expectancy and embarrassment. Because I still didn’t know: Was I supposed to kiss the picture? Press it to my forehead? Or, forehead, chest, left shoulder, right? (Up until puberty I was an unquestioning Catholic.)
“Go ahead,” Shari Murtaugh said. “Put Her in your pocket. When She bleeds it doesn’t stain or even get wet, really.”
I must have looked stricken. I may have let out a gasp.
“It’s guaranteed authentic,” she said, “from that shrine in New Jersey.”
“Yes. . . ” I managed to smile weakly, lift my butt from the chair, and slide the holy card inside my back pocket.
And I noticed Carlos heave with relief. Like: Phew! Close one.
(Click here to read the next episode)
