Operation Dimwit Read online

  “Fitzwilliam is cooking dinner for me at his place,” Penelope said, loudly and provocatively, as her friends tried to appear busier than they were. It was obvious they still thought it was too early for her to be dating and that she’d be better off reading self-improvement books and learning to knit.

  A long silence ensued.

  “I have no idea what his place is going to be like. I thought about Google Mapping it, but that seemed kind of creepy.”

  Justin Timberlake came over the speakers, and Sandy reentered the room, clapping her hands and saying: “Presents! Presents for Penelope’s wonderful new home! Yay! Yay! No more basement. Hurray! Hurray!”

  Penelope smiled. “Are you guys refusing to talk about my first real date since the divorce? It kind of seems like a big deal to me.”

  An even more uncomfortable silence followed, with the friends looking neither at her nor at each other.

  “I’ll talk about him,” Rachel said. “But do you care if I call him the Admiral while we do? It just seems to fit an older gentleman in a

  sailor’s cap.”

  “I’m guessing you guys eat an early bird supper around four thirty,” said Sandy, sitting at the table and yanking the stubborn cork out with her teeth. “Then a nice stroll to feed the ducks at the park, followed by a few hands of pinochle. You’ll be home by sundown.”

  Penelope grinned but said no more. Now that the gifts were on the table, she felt less inclined to force a conversation no one else wanted to have. It was business time, and Sandy pushed a package her way. She grabbed it, shook it a little as one does for dramatic effect, then delicately peeled off the wrapping as her friends rained smiles upon her. It was a new coffeemaker. James had gotten theirs in the divorce. The next box contained four plush bath towels. This gift brought her to tears, as she’d been making due with her mom’s leftovers, ancient relics originally intended for tiny circus people. The towels were a godsend. As were the toaster oven, three bottles of bubble bath, and some darling oven mitts.

  “Wow,” Penelope said. “You all did too much.”

  She was rising to dole out hugs when Rachel put a hand on her shoulder. “Keep your seat, honey. We found one more little gift for you. And it might be the best one yet. It’s monogrammed and everything.” She looked at Sandy. “Is the coast clear?”

  Sandy went to the front door and took a peek, then to the bay window that looked out on the backyard. “I think so,” she said, “but let’s hustle. My kids always know the worst time to bust in.”

  Rachel nodded in a hurried, furtive way and reached behind her to the cabinet where Sandy kept her place mats, tablecloths, and things of that sort. She pulled out a thin package wrapped in brilliant gold paper. When placed on the table, it landed with a hollow thump and rolled toward Penelope. She picked up the gift by one end and held it straight up. She glanced at the expectant faces of her friends with what she knew was a quizzical look.

  “You’re going to like that one,” Rachel said, nodding and smiling.

  “Definitely,” said Sandy, leaning over the table for a closer look. “It’s just what your house needs right now.”

  On her way home, she kept looking in the rearview at the bounty in the backseat. She felt like she’d won a showcase on the old Wheel of Fortune. It was a ton of stuff she needed, and she couldn’t wait to get home and start finding places for everything.

  The exception was the last gift, which she found not as everyday utilitarian as the rest. Would it be ungrateful to throw it out? It was personalized, after all, though that was weird in its own way. Gag gifts weren’t supposed to be complicated. But was it even a gag? Her friends had been a little hard to read on that front.

  Considering the last, complicated present led to thoughts of Theo and the unpredictable searches he went on when looking for batteries for a Wii controller. When electronics went dead, he was truly a madman, rampaging through drawers and rifling closets in his quest for renewed gaming power.

  These indoor explorations reminded her that in two days’ time he would be making explorations of the outdoor variety at Camp Sycamore. It was his first ever summer camp and she worried that she’d been hasty in agreeing to let him go. What if they had feather pillows in the cabin and his asthma kicked in? There wasn’t an inhaler big enough to handle that scenario. He’d need a scuba tank of albuterol.

  She made a mental note to remind James about the inhaler and the foam pillow when he dropped Theo off after karate. Then she punched the gas. She had less than an hour to hide the very complicated gift. It wasn’t the sort of thing a nine-year-old boy would want on his mind when roasting wienies around the campfire.

  2

  The next morning at work Penelope paid a few Rolling Acres bills then made a phone call to the recycling place to confirm that the new pickup day was Friday. Afterward, as often happened at the end of the week, she found herself with little to do, and her thoughts drifted to Theo. Wasn’t two weeks an awfully long time for a nine-year-old to be

  away from home? Of course, the camp was in North Carolina, so that made everything awesome, according to James. He was a staunch Tarheel, a proud Tarheel, a Tarheel from head to toe, and he was determined that his deprived Virginia son would know every plaintive lyric to “Carolina in My Mind” before the next school bell rang.

  She realized she was working herself into a solid case of parental anxiety, partly to distract herself from what Dewitt was doing in the office bathroom ten feet away.

  Maybe a new ringtone would distract her. As kickass as it was, “Crazy Train” was getting stale. She needed a song that said Single and Independent and Not a mom for two weeks. She was looking at no parental duties for the longest stretch in more than nine years. Talk about footloose and fancy-free. What tune encompassed all that?

  Definitely not “Footloose.” That song bit the big one, even if the movie was pretty good. She needed a song that still rocked Ozzy hard.

  While she looked for that perfect tune, she was not—repeat, not—imagining Dewitt’s grimy Yosemite Sam baseball cap or what lotions, farm animals, or WD-40 he might now be pulling out of his coveralls to assist him in his daily round of rustic self-abuse.

  Wait, yes she was. She definitely was. She couldn’t not imagine it. The silence from the bathroom was deafening. How could he be doing what she was sure he was doing, yet make no sound?

  She didn’t know. What she did know was that she was spending too much time thinking about Dewitt and his silent closet of doom. To pep herself up, she reached into her top drawer for lip gloss. The gloss was flavored like lemon bubblegum and had medically proven therapeutic benefits. With just two quick swipes, the world seemed a friendlier, more benign place.

  But where was it? Her desk was neat and there were only a few decent hiding places for a tricky tube of gloss—behind the stapler and in the deep mystery corners where mischievous paper clips often went to roam. She rifled this way and that, moving the same stapler three times and running her finger up and down both corners. She was licking her lips at the thought of the shiny sweetness to come, but the gloss was nowhere to be found. Deciding to be thorough in her search, she dumped the whole of her purse onto the desk and was searching madly when her boss was hurled through the door by what could only be a massive catapult in the parking lot.

  “Well, we’re screwed for sure,” Missy said, circling round Penelope’s

  desk as if riding a superfast conveyer belt and unable to get off. “Seriously. Totally screwed. So we finally get the okay from the idiot mayor for our move, and now it turns out we can’t get out of our contract with Dimwit for another year and a half. How that clown has a better lawyer than I do is beyond me, but apparently he does.”

  During all this, Penelope had been motioning toward the bathroom to warn Missy that the subject of her diatribe was on the premises, but Missy paid no heed. Desperate, Penelope snagged a legal pad from the desk and wrote:

  Dewitt is here.

  She thrust the pad and pe
n into Missy’s midsection during one of her circumnavigations of the desk. Without pausing in her orbit, Missy stabbed at the pad a few times then handed it back to Penelope:

  Penelope replied:

  Have you seen my lip gloss?

  Missy stopped now and sat down on the desk, scowling.

  Penelope:

  I’m missing a pair of socks I had in the drawer

  when I was planning on working out last week.

  The two women were staring intently at each other when the toilet flushed and Dimwit exited. He passed by them at the desk with a formal nod of Yosemite Sam then exited the modular office trailer. That he was humming “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” seemed symbolic and right.

  They watched him through the back window as he made his way to the haunted trailer on the hill, past the handwritten sign at the pitted gravel driveway that said, “Forget the Dog, Beware the Owner!” Then past the Confederate flag that hung limply from one forgotten bird feeder and the Don’t Tread on Me sign affixed to another.

  They observed him in silence, a begrimed goblin en route to his lair, walking with a lively bounce to the step. The bathroom adventure seemed just what the doctor ordered, for at his trailer door he leaped in the air like a merry leprechaun and clicked his boots together at his side. It was a joyous leap, a roguish clicking of heels. The human world had been successfully breached again, the pot of gold safe as ever.

  The contemplative silence in the office lasted for several moments after Dewitt’s trailer door closed behind him. Eventually Missy spoke: “Did that clodhopper freak just click his heels together? Or did someone roofie me at lunch?”

  “He clicked,” Penelope said. “I was wondering if you saw it too.”

  They stayed as they were, Penelope in her chair, Missy leaning against the desk, staring up at the mysterious dwelling on the hill, so rusted and run-down and out of place above the tidy lots of Rolling Acres, which sat like a nursery of cherubic innocents below.

  This was the longest Penelope had ever witnessed her boss go without speaking or moving and she feared a minor case of shock. She was reaching for the bottle beside her to fling water in Missy’s face, which is what they always did in movies, when Missy spoke: “Dimwit’s stealing our shit.”

  “You think?”

  “I know,” said Missy, popping off the desk and racing to her office. She returned with the main drawer of her office desk. This she dumped on the floor at Penelope’s feet.

  “I had two canisters of lipstick, those hose, and half a pack of Dentyne,” Missy said, her skinny tan legs pacing around the junk on the floor. “All mysteriously disappeared in the last two weeks. You tell me what happened to them.”

  Her employer was glaring at Penelope as if she might be the culprit and Penelope couldn’t help but smile. How could anyone be this intense? It was mesmerizing.

  “Okay,” said Missy, poking through the contents of the drawer with the toe of a Neiman Marcus. “What else are you missing? And what kind of socks were they?”

  “You know,” said Penelope, “those little ankle ones like you wear with tennis shoes. They were pale yellow.”

  “Oh, those are cute socks. I’d bet a million dollars Dimwit wears them on his hand in the bathroom like an erotic puppet. Ooh, what if he drew a face on it that looked like you?”

  At this, Missy began talking to her hand in a weird backwoods accent meant to be Dimwit’s. Actually, she employed two voices. The hand, which would presumably be encased in Penelope’s adorable little yellow sock, spoke in the voice of an ingenue, both frightened and intrigued by Dimwit:

  Missy as Dimwit, talking to her hand: You got a purty mouth.

  Hand/sock: I like your hat. But I’m shy.

  Missy/Dimwit: I got puppies in my pockets.

  Hand/sock: Oh, I love puppies!

  Missy/Dimwit and hand/sock now met over the clutter at Missy’s feet. The chemical attraction was clear when they began to make out. The ingenue sock—all wily veteran now—was going at Missy/Dimwit’s

  neck, shoulders, and breasts. Penelope thought the sock was perhaps moving too fast, but Dimwit/Missy moaned in ecstasy. The sock was just making its way to points south of the border, murmuring Oh Dimwit, oh Dimwit, when Penelope put a stop to the pantomime before her: “You are grossing me out.”

  Missy cackled her high, hoarse, coughing laugh. “You think that’s gross? Wait till I tell you what he’s doing with your lip gloss.”

  Penelope found this thought unappealing and decided to get back on point.

  “I was thinking about how his routine has recently changed,” she said. “Lately he comes when I’ve been out of the office for a while. He used to always pop in right after lunch. I thought he just wanted to do his thing when one of us was here. But lately, whenever I get back from an errand, the bathroom is already occupied.”

  “When did he come today?”

  “Right after the UPS guy.”

  Missy renewed her pacing, hand to chin in the classic detective-pondering-clues pose. “Does he always sneak in when you’re doling out the UPS deliveries?”

  “UPS comes at different times each day. Sometimes it takes me ten minutes to hand out the packages, other times half an hour. Twice I’ve come back from lunch and he was here. Oh, and on Monday, it was after I had to run over to my mom’s to give Theo his inhaler.”

  Missy frowned thoughtfully at this. “So. It’s been established that he no longer has to have us in the office while doing his hoedown with grubby Dimwit Junior?”

  “I think so.”

  “And it’s further established that he is now materializing at all hours of the working day?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one consistency is that he only comes when both of us are out of the office, even briefly?”

  “Yes.”

  Missy pounded her tiny fist on the desk and said: “Then that troll is spying on us from his gloom factory on the hill!”

  Penelope considered for a moment: “He’d have to be watching all the time. Because sometimes I pop out, then pop right back in, and he’s already here.”

  “He’s spying night and day,” Missy said, stalking around the office. “With a telescope trained right at the window like a hickass Galileo.”

  Penelope grimaced, but Missy held out a hand to stem any threat of rebuttal.

  “Here’s the thing, homegirl. It’s all systems go now with the city. That place behind the old Food Lion is ours. I just have to get out of my current contract. And if I can catch that little pud thumper stealing from us, I’m out. We have a morals clause or an extenuating circumstance or something like that. This is just the ticket we’re looking for. I can feel it in my bones. We just have to catch the thief in the act.”

  So saying, Missy did several rotations around Penelope’s desk, her tan brow furrowed for all it was worth. Her skinny little brain was getting quite the workout, and she’d need a snack soon.

  “By Jove, I’ve got it,” Missy said, snapping her fingers.

  Penelope didn’t like the sound of that snap, nor the by Jove, which felt way too Sherlock Holmes for her liking. Sure, Dimwit weirded her out, and yes, that lip gloss was both delicious and luminescent. Her lips had never looked or tasted better. But was it worth being dragged into a scheme of Missy’s hatching?

  She thought not. And was ready to give voice to her concerns when Missy said: “I know exactly what we’ll do.”

  3

  Before Missy could dive into her foolproof plan, there came a knock. It was Carl Junior, the only person within Rolling Acres who didn’t take the sign on the door—Open, Come In—at face value.

  Missy hollered, “Please do come in, Carl Junior.”

  The maintenance man entered the cool of the office and removed his Virginia Tech Hokies baseball cap, checked that his work boots weren’t tracking in dirt, then softly eased the door closed behind him.

  “Good morning, Carl Junior,” Penelope said, smiling.

  “Mornin’, Miss Penelo
pe. Mornin’, Miss Missy.”

  Penelope smiled broadly at this, anticipating what was coming. She’d seen this routine a dozen times and it never failed to entertain.

  “Carl Junior,” said Missy, turning to the door, where the ruggedly handsome older man had made no further entry than his original two feet across the threshold. Just enough to shut the door behind him and allow no further escape of the costly cool air. “I thought we’d agreed that the term Miss Missy is ridiculous. It makes me sound like a character on a Saturday morning show for slow children. Please just call me Missy.”

  Carl Jr. offered a sheepish smile and said: “All right, I’ll try.”

  He ran a large calloused hand across his sweating brow and fiddled for a second with a Band-Aid on his head. He’d just come from weed-eating the curbs on Elm Tree Lane and Penelope knew the air-conditioning felt good. She also knew that he never spoke in the presence of his boss unless asked a direct question. That question came now: “Everything all right out there, Carl Junior? Are you staying hydrated? I don’t want you overdoing it. This isn’t the Biltmore Estate, you know. A weed here or there won’t kill anyone. This place already looks like a country club. No need to overdo it.”

  “I drink half a thermos of water every day, so I ain’t going to fall out on you. Not anytime soon at least, Lord willing.”

  “Carl Junior, that thermos of yours is tiny. Half of it is like two cups of water. You need to drink more than that.”

  “Don’t need more. Just drink when I’m thirsty.”

  This went on a few more rounds, as was customary, Penelope smiling all the way through. The maintenance man was one of the few people that Missy spoke to affectionately, and their interactions were always riveting. It was like watching a lion tamer sooth the beast without even trying. This trait obviously ran in the family. Her first husband, the huge huge redneck (HHR), was Carl Jr.’s nephew, and he shared this ability to relax those in his company, and not just because of the primo weed that grew on his back forty. It was this feeling of being casually hypnotized—more than the sex or anything else—that had compelled Penelope into her early redneck marriage at nineteen. But that was another story.