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Back Lurkers Save as PDF
Chapters (20)
  1. I.
  2. – 1 –
  3. – 2 –
  4. – 3 –
  5. II.
  6. – 4 –
  7. – 5 –
  8. – 6 –
  9. III.
  10. – 7 –
  11. – 8 –
  12. – 9 –
  13. – 10 –
  14. – 11 –
  15. – 12 –
  16. IV.
  17. – 13 –
  18. – 14 –
  19. – 15 –
  20. Acknowledgments

Yeah, tell her to eat shit and die, she thought. “Tell her, thank you.”

“Very good. I shall do that very thing.”

As soon as she’d driven a block from the funeral home, she crushed Mr. Evans’s pamphlet into a ball and flung it out the window as far as she could. She hoped it would land in the mobile home park called Club Paradise.

“Sayonara, sucker!”

It landed in the middle of the street.

When she got back to San Francisco, Mary-Sue found a stack of mail waiting at her door. There was a condolence card from her landlord, Mr. Antonio, a letter from her father’s accountant, and a bulging envelope from FCVN, Friends of the Children of Viet Nam. It was the last piece of mail that she tore open first, and with greatest optimism.

– 5 –

– 5 –

KATE IRELAND

Mary-Sue grabbed the pale blue dress with the smocking across the chest. Size three. For ages two to three. She pulled out a size four and compared the two side by side. Size four was only a little bigger, longer mainly, but this could make all the difference.

Kate, as she’d already named the daughter she hadn’t yet met, was three years old and due to arrive the following day. Mary-Sue had no idea what she looked like, whether she would be small for her age, like the Third World orphans she’d seen on TV, or sized more like her Kmart counterparts. She took both dresses, and a large stuffed panda to remind Kate of her Oriental heritage.

The trial-and-error nature of family life terrified Mary-Sue. Her Des Moines clan had enjoyed every chance of success. In a more scientific universe, they might have been a control group—handsome Daddy, pretty Mom, teenage daughter and cute little Junior, tucked away in a sprawling ranch house next to a bluegrass fairway. Yet the Ireland family experiment had failed—in strengthening community, in fostering stability, in producing happiness. When she was young, she assumed that blood bound everything, but as she got older, she came to realize that blood bound nothing. Family was a coincidence of birth—it was no more than spilled soda. She figured she could do no worse on her own, creating a nuclear-nuclear unit with its variables lowered from four members to two, and the odds for failure reduced by half.