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“But if the relationships were so great and you were so happy, why did they end badly?”
She looked out the side window. “It was my fault,” she mumbled.
“What was?”
“The unhappy endings,” she said, this time a little more clearly. “They were my fault. All of them.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe it or don’t. Your choice. But it’s true.”
“Can I ask what’s so horribly wrong with you that you supposedly ruined every relationship you’ve ever been in?”
“You can ask,” she said. “But you’ll be sorry.”
“I won’t be sorry,” I said. “Come on. Spill it.”
CHAPTER 29
Clara
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who believed in happily ever after. She lived in a four-thousand-square-foot castle whose shelves were filled with Disney DVDs and Hallmark movies and paperbacks whose covers were ninety percent chest. The little girl was a lover of all things beaked and feathered, her stepdaddy was a wealthy landowner, and her mother was Fabio’s primary source of income.
One day, the little girl heard a strange rumbling sound coming from outside the castle, and she was so afraid she ran down the stairs to her mother’s side.
“Mummy!” she cried as she looked out the front window. “What is that big van in the driveway? Has it come to take me away?”
“Heavens, no, my little one,” said the girl’s mother with a jolly laugh. “None shall ever take you from my loving arms. What you see before you is not a van, my sweet, but a moving truck.”
“A moving truck?” said the little girl as she gazed upon the beastly machine. “What is this ‘moving truck’ of which you speak?”
“It’s a sixteen-hundred-square-foot container that shall haul thy stepfather’s shit to a land far, far away where he can live in peace and happiness with his new whore.”
“But Mother,” protested the little girl, “if Stepdaddy is departing never to return, why did he not tell me this morning when he departed for whatever the hell it is he does all day?”
“My sweet, naïve child,” said the mother, “thy stepfather could not tell you he was leaving, for he does not yet know.”
“But won’t Stepdaddy be surprised when he returns and finds that all his worthless crap, including the ridiculous collection of antlers he didn’t even hunt himself, has been spirited away by”—the little girl squinted, straining to read the words on the side of the truck—'Hunky College Movers?’”
“That he will,” said the girl’s mother. “But it shall be a mere trifling compared to the surprise Mommy’s lawyers have in store for him.”
At that moment, there came a loud pounding on the door. The girl looked out the window and was terrified at what she saw standing on the porch.
“Mother!” she cried. “Who is that extremely well-built twenty-year-old man knocking upon our door? And why does he not wear a shirt?”
“Do not fear, my darling,” said the mother. “It is only Mover Evan, come to help Mommy with something in the bedroom. Wait here and play with your pretty toys, and Mommy shall return in forty minutes to an hour.”
The mother unbuttoned the top button of her blouse and walked across the room to the front door.
“Mummy?” the girl said just as her mother grabbed the doorknob.
“Yes, my darling?”
“Will Mover Evan be my new stepdaddy?”
The mother laughed her jolly laugh. “Only if he owns the company, my dear.”
My mom did a lot of things right, but she wasn’t the world’s greatest role model when it came to men. I couldn’t say how many men had passed through her transom over the years (a transom is a window above a doorway, not a vagina, by the way), but Mom had given up on marriage—both real and trophy—by the time I was eleven.
