Ms. James stepped up. She was a six-foot-two Amazon with a degree from Yale and a Ms. Olympia title.
“Now, Ms. James, some members of my family have been questioning my mental fitness, so I figured this cake might settle things. It’s a red velvet cake with beige buttercream icing. I used dowels to ensure the structure stayed nice and rigid. The testicles are chocolate cake baked in a hemisphere cake pan and covered with fondant and coconut shavings. They’re not just beautiful. They’re functional, too.”
Wilma hit a switch and whipped cream sprayed out the top of the cake and fell like snow on the crowd. Some of the family froze in horror, unable to pull their eyes away from the eruption. A few ran for the house to avoid getting stains on their clothes. The ones she’d always liked best stayed put and stuck out their tongues.
“Y’all seen enough or should I show you what else it can do?” Wilma lifted up the table skirt to reveal a motor underneath.
Struggling to keep a straight face, Ms. James spoke for the crowd. “I think we’ve seen more than enough, Ms. Cummings.”
“Then let me make something clear to my family, once and for all. I ain’t dead, I ain’t demented, and I want my goddamned picture back.”
Chapter 4
Buffy Halliday Goes to Europe!
Dawn Dugan had never been one for history. That was her husband’s area of expertise. Nathan had a whole room in the basement dedicated to the memorabilia he collected. Once a week, he hosted a group of men who shared his passion. He’d send Dawn down to his man cave to dust the frames and display cases before his friends came over. When they left, she’d gather up all the beer cans and dirty dishes. Nathan locked the door after she was done. He didn’t like anyone messing with his collection. He’d caught Dawn flipping through a book back before they got married. Judging by his reaction, you’d have thought she’d ripped out the pages and lit them on fire. He made sure it wasn’t a mistake she repeated.
History wasn’t her thing anyway. She didn’t see any point in reading about stuff that had happened long before she was born. She wanted to look forward, not back. That’s why she loved books that were written for young people with their lives still ahead of them. She’d been one of them a long time ago. But now she was thirty and her path had been chosen. She wasn’t always sure it was the one she’d have picked for herself. It had gotten off to a rocky start, with an unplanned pregnancy, but now she was on the straight and narrow. Nathan owned his own roofing business and made a good living. She stayed home and took care of Nathan and their thirteen-year-old son.
That son, Nate Dugan, was the light of her life. He’d been born with her black hair and dark eyes, so she’d named him after his father. They both knew it was like naming a house cat Tiger. You can call somebody whatever you want. It won’t change who they really are. And for the first twelve years of his life, that boy had been hers and hers alone. Small and shy, Nate had clung to her whenever his dad was around. It disgusted his father, but Dawn was grateful. She wasn’t sure she’d have made it through without him.
Then, in the space of one year, Nate had grown half a foot. By thirteen, he was five inches taller than his mother, with the end of his growth spurt nowhere in sight. His shoulders broadened and his frame filled out. Dawn still remembered the first time she saw his father hesitate before smacking him. She secretly cheered the day Nate caught his dad’s hand in midair.
For as long as they’d been together, Nathan had collected what he called strays—young men in need of direction. He’d lavished time on them, but he’d never shown any interest in Nate. Suddenly, he was dedicated to bringing his boy up right. They’d vanish into Nathan’s inner sanctum for hours at a time. Dawn was thrilled to see Nathan sharing his interests with their son. Nate, for his part, had never seemed happier. When the two of them talked at the dinner table, Dawn usually took care not to interrupt.
“Mr. Bartlett said the Reichstag fire was a false-flag operation,” Nate told his father one evening.
Dawn thought she might need to explain that Mr. Bartlett was Nate’s social studies teacher, but it seemed that Nathan already knew.
“Yes, ’cause that’s what they’ve trained teachers like Mr. Bartlett to think. The Jews bought up all the newspapers and publishers and Hollywood studios back in the day because they knew if you control the media, you control the message. Once you have all three of those, you can control people’s minds. That’s why it’s so important that we refuse to let our schools spread their propaganda.”
“Isn’t Mr. Stempel Jewish?” Dawn didn’t know why she asked. Everyone in town knew he was.
“What’s your point, Dawn?” Nathan had responded in the tone that told her to tread carefully.
“Nothing.” She kept her own voice bright as sunshine. “He was just always real nice to me. You remember Mr. Stempel, don’t you, Nate?”
After Dawn’s daddy died when she was seven, her mother had gone to work for Mr. Stempel at his clothing store downtown. For a year, the bus had dropped Dawn off at the shop every day after school. Only when she was older did she realize most employers wouldn’t have looked kindly on a little kid running around their place of business. But Mr. Stempel called Dawn the store’s spokesmodel and let her pass out flyers and help with the window displays. Never once had she felt unwelcome. Her mother had to quit after she married Dawn’s stepfather. Dawn couldn’t recall ever feeling wanted in her own home again.
When Nate was little, she’d stop in to see Mr. Stempel every few months. Her parents were both gone by then, and it felt good to have someone gush over her baby. After Mr. Stempel’s wife died, she took him two frozen casseroles and sat with him for a while in his living room.
Nathan was still glaring at her. “I’m waiting for the point.”
“All I’m saying is that Mr. Stempel doesn’t seem to control any media. Not that I can tell, anyways.” Humiliated, she turned back to her chicken. Sometimes she didn’t know when to stop.
“Your mother’s not a serious person,” she heard Nathan tell his son. “She doesn’t know much about anything.”
It stung because it was true. She wasn’t a serious person. When Nathan put on the TV, she’d find something else to do. Dawn just couldn’t handle the doom and gloom. It was too hard keeping track of everyone who was out to destroy America. Even when she tried, she couldn’t tell folks apart. She’d end up feeling bad for somebody sleeping out on the street, only to find out from Nathan that they’d been there by choice. It didn’t make anysense, but as Nathan always said, you could fill the Grand Canyon with all the shit Dawn didn’t understand.
The year Nate started kindergarten, Dawn thought about going back to school part-time. She’d given birth to her son second semester of her senior year and she’d been too busy after that to focus on learning. But once Nate was in school six hours a day, she figured she had time to get her GED and take a few classes at the community college. When she read through the course catalog, everything looked interesting. But Nathan didn’t think it was a good investment. So Dawn had gone to the library and checked out some books for free. The next morning, he’d returned them all without asking.
“You already got a job,” he told her when he got home that evening. “Why don’t you focus on doingthatright for once?”
Usually his word was law, but this time Dawn had pleaded with him. He always switched off the Wi-Fi in the morning when he left for work. Now that Nate was gone most of the day, once Dawn’s chores were finished, there was nothing for her to do but sit and stare at the walls.
“Fine,” he’d finally agreed. “You can check out books. But you pass them by me before you start reading. You have no idea what kind of damage the wrong books will do to a weak mind.”
Nathan was a serious person and there was nothing he took more seriously than books. He’d been a fierce supporter of the effort to rid the libraries of communist propaganda. He even helped Lula Dean draw up the list of books to be banned. But he couldn’t get rid of everything objectionable, and it took Dawn a while to get good at choosing books he wouldn’t take back. Pastel-colored covers, she discovered, barely got a glance. Loopy letters and illustrations of teenage girls usually—but not always—ensured a book was safe.
