Operation Dimwit Read online

  OPERATION DIMWIT

  Yellow Shoe Fiction

  Michael Griffith, Series Editor

  Also by Inman Majors

  Penelope Lemon: Game On!

  Love’s Winning Plays

  The Millionaires

  Wonderdog

  Swimming in Sky

  OPERATION DIMWIT

  A PENELOPE LEMON NOVEL

  Inman Majors

  LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS BATON ROUGE

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2020 by Inman Majors

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First printing

  DESIGNER: Michelle A. Neustrom

  TYPEFACE: Whitman

  PRINTER AND BINDER: Sheridan Books, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, circumstances, and events are the product of the author’s imagination, or are

  used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual occurrences, institutions,

  or individuals, living or dead, is coincidental.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Majors, Inman, author.

  Title: Operation dimwit : a Penelope Lemon novel / Inman Majors.

  Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2020] | Series: Yellow shoe fiction

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019040504 (print) | LCCN 2019040505 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7267-4 (cloth) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7316-9 (pdf) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7317-6 (epub)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Humorous fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3563.A3927 O64 2020 (print) | LCC PS3563.A3927 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040504

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040505

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability

  of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity

  of the Council on Library Resources.

  To Michael Griffith,

  King Moonracer on the Island of Misfit Writers

  Whatever is funny is subversive.

  —GEORGE ORWELL

  Operation Dimwit

  1

  It was Thursday afternoon after work and Penelope was stalking around her friend Sandy’s den, holding a refreshing glass of chardonnay in one hand and gesturing with the other. She was mimicking her son with his face in a cell phone searching for PlinkyMo characters. In her wanderings around the den, she was bumping into floor lamps, chairs, the couch and TV, sloshing a bit of the divine nectar here and there. She was demonstrating the extreme focus Theo exhibited while on the hunt for Plinkies.

  Her friends at the kitchen table found this amusing. They both had kids addicted to PlinkyMo, the latest gaming fad, and had been driven out of their minds by it. This is how their get-togethers generally got started—making sport of their children’s foibles, quirks, and assorted psychological vulnerabilities—before moving on to other topics. Penel­ope assumed they’d eventually get around to her ex-husband James. His obsessions and escapades were always comedic gold, and the audience before her was like bees to honey when the subject came up. She had a few decent-size nuggets to drop on them when the time was right.

  “I think you missed a spot,” Sandy said, pointing to an old recliner that her husband sat in on fall days to watch football. “Pour a little wine on that one and I think you’ll have watered the whole room.”

  Grinning, Penelope returned to the table. Her performance of entranced Theo had been nuanced and subdued, even down to his cute little frown of concentration as he bungled around the room. If some furniture had taken it on the chin in the process, well, that was the price of art.

  “Do you want me to clean up?” she asked. “I’ll get a rag out of the kitchen.”

  Sandy waved her off with a look of disgust. “Are you kidding? Slosh away. No telling what my kids have spilled on that furniture. It’s like one big petri dish in there.”

  Penelope nodded and filled her glass from the bottle on the counter. Her offer to clean up had been perfunctory to the max. That wasn’t how they rolled when the wine was flowing, no matter whose house it was. This was doubly true if one was the guest of honor, as she was today. Staring at the glimmering presents on the bookcase, she could almost forget the long months in her mother’s basement. Things were finally moving in the right direction, and this housewarming party was a celebration of that inarguable fact.

  “So I think James and Ms. Dunleavy, the teacher, are no more,”

  Penelope said, diving right into ex-husband dirt, though she’d planned to build a bit of suspense first. But why wait? When was there ever a wrong moment?

  This caused a minor uproar.

  “Good for her,” Rachel said. “Good for her. Hopefully she got out before James put a stopwatch to her showers.”

  “He wanted her to split the water bill, and that was all she wrote,” said Sandy.

  Penelope sat back at the table, smiling. It was true. James and water bills were a volatile combination. In fact, any utility invoice could work him into a froth. On the other hand, charges for his kayak, which went unpaddled in the garage, his archery arrows never fired, or his model volcano that resided so snugly in the hall closet all those years left him unfazed. He was a complicated man.

  “I feel better about the young minds of Hillsboro,” Sandy said, “just knowing that James and his crackpot ideas on whale calls and nursing babies won’t somehow make it onto Ms. Dunleavy’s curriculum.”

  “Whale calls?” said Rachel, smiling her falsely earnest cheerleader smile. “Are you two keeping secrets from me?”

  “You have to tell her,” Sandy said. “It’s time she knew.”

  Penelope took a long sip. The wine was even more delicious today than usual and that was saying something. There were days she thought she could marry Mr. Chardonnay.

  “When Theo was a baby,” Penelope said, grinning over her glass, “he used to make this really strange noise after he finished nursing that sounded like a whale call.”

  Her friends grinned and exchanged glances, which indicated that Penelope was coming through as usual in the story department. This was no surprise. She was totally clutch at cocktail hour.

  “You laugh, but that’s what it sounded like. Kind of mournful and satisfied at the same time, like Shamu at the end of a show. He’d doze off like four seconds afterward, with a little baby smile on his face. Anyway, the first few times James heard it, he freaked out. He thought something was wrong with Theo.”

  “Yeah,” said Sandy, “nothing that putting him on a toddler leash in a few years wouldn’t cure.”

  “He never did that,” Penelope said, feeling duty bound to stick to the facts.

  “Yeah, but he talked about it.”

  This was true. Only an online quiz that determined that the Harry Potter character James most resembled was Dumbledore had saved Theo from being leashed like an uncoordinated dog. Dumbledore, said James, would never leash Harry, and neither would he tether young Theo.

  Like she would have let him.

  “Anyway,” said Penelope, looking pointedly at her friends to stop interrupting, “James got used to the sound. In fact, he decided to turn it into a scientific study. Every night he’d record Theo’s postnursing moans, and then he’d play those recordings alongside this set of whale call CDs he bought. Which cost like sixty bucks, by the way. So I’m out of my mind—like you always are when you’re nursing—and don’t remember all the details, other than a microphone hovering around my breasts and James using the word primordial a lot. He was sure there was some evolutionary link between Theo’s moan and whal
e calls. He was saying stuff like You know, our aquatic cousins nurse their young for even longer than humans do.”

  “James is an aquatic cousin himself,” Sandy said, and this caused something of a minor laughing jag. Eventually they calmed themselves and Penelope continued.

  “So one day I jokingly said we ought to call the song “Ode to Boobie”—

  which I thought was pretty funny. James didn’t. He got so upset. It was like he was an anthropologist and I was undermining the seriousness of his work. I said, Hey, it’s my boob he’s gnawing on. I can call it whatever I damn well please.”

  This line did the trick and the lid came completely off the party. They were in full swing now. You could always count on James. He was clutch at story time too.

  “By the way,” Sandy said once they’d calmed themselves, “how do you know that James and Ms. Dunleavy are Splitsville?”

  “Easy. He took down all the references to teachers on his Facebook page.”

  Her friends cut eyes at each other now, as they did when they thought she’d done something ill advised but oh-so-expected. It was their patented look.

  “I’m not checking his Facebook all the time like I was,” Penelope said, letting out a sigh. “Seriously, I’m not. And don’t act like it’s not normal, because it is. Everyone checks up on their ex now and then. It’s human nature.”

  The veracity of this pacified them. If they were divorced, they’d do the same and more. Sandy for sure. Sandy had restraining order written all over her. It dawned on Penelope what was going on, namely that her friends were so habituated to giving her advice that they didn’t know how to act when she had her life in order. A drama-free move from her mother’s basement and a regular paycheck had flummoxed them. They were now desperate for subjects on which to counsel her. She felt a little guilty for depriving them—for not having any problems that needed their immediate, expert opinion—so she threw out this bone as a kind of peace offering:

  “I think James is dating someone else.”

  This elicited the predicted howls of protest, as well as sympathetic murmurs for the single women in their community who were relegated to dating junior Dumbledores and amateur marine biologists.

  “Okay,” said Penelope, rubbing her hands together like a game show host when it’s time to start the first round. “Let’s see who can guess the occupation of James’s new mystery gal. I figured it out in one visit to his page, but I was married to him. Let’s see how well you know my ex.”

  Rachel and Sandy settled in now by taking a dose of chardonnay. They were competitive about who the true James expert was. Penelope felt a twinge of guilt—she’d visited his Facebook page three times during the week, not once—but that seemed an irrelevant detail at this point. The game was afoot.

  “First off,” said Penelope, “his status is now listed as single-ish.”

  “No it is not!” Sandy said, instantly irritated and frowning in her funny way. Nothing got her going like James and his Facebook-as-grand-riddle ways.

  “Of course it is,” said Rachel, shaking her head knowingly. “He’s fourteen and Snapchatting away with his middle school friends. Why wouldn’t he be single-ish?”

  “By the way,” Penelope said, “the first one to guess the occupation gets an orange Tic-Tac. The clues will all come from the Likes section. The first one is filed under Movies. The movie is Rocky.”

  “He’s dating a boxer,” Sandy blurted out.

  “No,” said Rachel, rushing in. “A judo partner from his dojo. And they will soon be wearing matching little judo robes.”

  “Damn it, that’s it,” said Sandy. “Plus you got to say dojo, which everyone knows is James’s favorite word.”

  “Sorry,” said Penelope, “but we don’t have a winner yet. The next clue comes from the Books section. The book is How to Train Your Dragon.”

  “He’s dating Hermione,” shouted Sandy, banging her fist on the table for emphasis. “His latest Internet quiz declared him Ron Weasley.”

  They laughed for a bit about this, though it made no sense. The clue had stumped them.

  “Rocky and How to Train Your Dragon,” Penelope said. “Do you have any guesses?”

  “She does something physical,” Rachel said. “She’s a badass of some sort.”

  “Maybe,” said Penelope, trying to tease it out as long as possible. She felt sure the next clue would clinch the deal. “Okay, here’s the last one. It’s a song from the eighties.”

  “‘Tainted Love’!” Rachel shouted.

  “‘Super Freak,’” said Sandy. “Oh wait, he’s not talking about himself. Still, I stick with ‘Super Freak.’”

  Penelope shook her head to both of these. “‘Let’s Get Physical,’ by Olivia Newton John.”

  “He’s dating a trainer at the fitness center,” Rachel said, smiling and nodding in a satisfied way to aggravate Sandy. “Case closed. Fork over the Tic-Tac.”

  “Rocky, ‘Let’s Get Physical,’ and How to Train Your Dragon,” Sandy said trying to make it all add up. “OMG. Is train a pun on trainer? Tell me it’s not. Because if it is, James has named his penis Dragon.”

  Penelope frowned at this. During their marriage James had often referred to his junior partner by a pet name. The frisky cowpoke was one she’d heard a lot. And during the Sopranos she’d grown accustomed to talk of the little gangster. But nothing as grand as Dragon. James thought highly of himself as a lovemaker, but this might be a stretch, even for him.

  “I think it’s just a play on words with train, trainer,” Penelope said. “But yeah, I think that’s what she does. You guys know I joined Fitness Plus last week? I think James has too. How weird will it be to see him down there?”

  “Not as weird as his new girlfriend leading your aerobics group,” Rachel said, looking at Sandy, who said, “Oh, yeah. That has awkward written all over it.”

  Penelope didn’t care for the sound of this. She’d yet to attend a class but was considering either Zumba or Dance Fusion, mainly because they were the most fun to say. Maybe her ex’s new lady was just a personal trainer. If that were the case, she’d be easy enough to avoid. Fitness Plus was huge.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” Sandy said. “But I just can’t think anymore about Dragon. I think I’m permanently scarred as it is. Why don’t you tell us what your crazy new boss is into now? I know she’s got something cooking.”

  “Nothing much,” Penelope said. “Still trying to get that permit from the city so we can move the trailer park somewhere else and get away from the whacker who comes to visit every day.”

  As intended, this got the conversation onto Dewitt—he was a favorite of the gals—and away from Missy. Penelope wasn’t sure why she felt uncomfortable talking about her boss with them, other than it felt a little like betraying one friend to another. Didn’t everyone have a quirky pal? And didn’t she fulfill that role for Sandy and Rachel? There was also the sisterhood of the single woman. At any rate, she felt no qualms about picking and choosing what she’d divulge about her employer at Rolling Acres Estates, the upscale manufactured home subdivision where she’d recently started working as a receptionist.

  Instead, she regaled the ladies with tales of Dewitt, who owned the land that Rolling Acres occupied. Missy and her father leased the property from him, then collected rent from their residents. Rolling Acres was one of forty mobile home communities that father/daughter

  ran throughout the Southeast. In short, Missy was a trailer park heiress, a duchess of the mobile home. Suitable land was scarce in Hillsboro, so they’d agreed to an unusual stipulation in the contract: Dewitt could use the office bathroom during working hours.

  The fact that Dewitt’s trailer had a functioning toilet of its own added intrigue to his visits. All signs pointed to a serial wanker, one who liked to do his business in ballpark range of actual women, as gross as that thought was. The women in this case being Missy and Penelope herself.

  One of Sandy’s kids came in now, complaining of hunger an
d heat exhaustion, but was quickly hustled out the door with a handful of Popsicles for himself and any other children who might think they were allowed in the house while the ladies were having wine time. While this bum’s rush was going on, it dawned on Penelope that her friends were studiously, earnestly, trying not to bring up the subject of her love life. Their avoidance of the topic couldn’t have been more obvious. This didn’t sit well. It smelled like one of those things they’d decided before she arrived.

  When the room was free of youngsters, Penelope blurted out: “So, I’ve got a date Saturday with my older gentleman friend.”

  “That’s nice,” said Sandy, smiling insincerely. “But let’s get back to your resident masturbator.”

  Penelope knew a subject being avoided when she saw one and said: “That’s it. Nothing else really to report. It’s been pretty quiet at work lately.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Sandy, failing to meet her eye. “Now, who’s ready to open some presents?”

  So saying, she cleared the plates and floral arrangement while Rachel moved the gifts from bookcase to table.

  “Our last date was okay,” said Penelope stubbornly. “I think we were both nervous. We’d written each other so much, it felt a little weird to talk face-to-face. I bet it’s a lot better this time though.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Rachel, arranging the presents biggest to smallest behind Penelope’s wineglass.

  “That’s great, sweetie,” said Sandy, going to the kitchen for a second bottle of wine.

  Her instincts had been right. They definitely didn’t want to talk about Fitzwilliam, the man she’d met on LoveSynch, her Internet dating service. She hadn’t told them much about that date, other than that when she arrived at Starbucks, he was already there and reading the London Times. She’d found his outfit—blue blazer, white pants, boating shoes, and a sailing cap on the table—pretty cute, but her friends had hooted considerably when she described it.