The Lemon Thief's Ex-Wife's Third Cousin

Chapter Six

It was annoying. Here he was certain he had not set foot in Misterlittleton since the age of twelve, but now he knew for certain that the Royal Theater we just passed on Misterkettle Road had used to be on the other side of the street and had been wider and painted a deep royal blue, not the periwinkle it boasted now. Then there was the Happenstance Candy Shop which used to be right next door to that movie house and was utterly gone now. For some reason this brought tears to his eyes although he had never been allowed to go into that candy shop, no matter how many times they'd passed by it as a family.

"My father had a thing about sweets," Hernan said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve as he followed the sleepy traffic nodding off at the maximum twenty kilometers per hour. "He thought they were a plot of some sort."

"A plot?"

"He had all these crazy conspiracy theories. My dad," Hernan sighed. "He was something of an idiot. He wasn't religious, not at all, but instead of believing in one big giant story, he believed in all these little stupid ones, like how many people it had taken to kill somebody famous, or even if that famous person had ever really died. Or about candy, how it was being foisted on the human race in order to prepare us for an invasion by sugar-loving aliens. Then they would suck on our artificially sweetened brain cells, or something like that."

"So you never had candy when you were a kid?" That might explain a lot, actually, about certain aspects of my friend's personality.

"Oh, my mom would sneak me a Twizzler or some gummy bears from time to time," he smiled, blowing up my nascent theory of his psychological evolution before it even got underway. "She used to hide them in my room, so I had this habit of making a thorough inspection whenever I got home from school. Every now and then I'd get lucky."

"Whatever happened to your dad?" I suddenly wanted to know, as it occurred to me that I'd heard a lot about that guy but never met him or even knew where he was.

"No idea," Hernan shook his head. "I haven't seen him since the wedding." I knew he was referring to his own wedding with Magdalena. It had apparently been a traumatic experience. This was just before I'd met him. As it happened, I'd known Magdalena first and we'd met through her. She was a foot doctor and I had bad feet. Most of what I knew about the wedding I had heard from her while she was pounding away at my soles with her heavy metal graston bars. She'd grind extra hard as she recounted the scene where Mr. Kaitel, as she always referred to his dad, as if the man never had a first name, had set about smashing all the glassware at their reception using a bright blue aluminum baseball bat he'd somehow thought to bring along for the occasion.

"He's probably up in the hills somewhere, preparing for the end of the world," Hernan said, chuckling. It was a good guess. His father also believed that our over-heated climate was not the mere accident of our misadventures with fossil fuels, but part of an intentional plot on the part of the mind-controlling brain-sucking sweet-toothed aliens to make the planet more comfortable for their hot blooded physical needs. Then there was more about the aliens' sensual predilections that nobody really wanted to hear about.

"Right over there," Hernan was pointing out the window at some corner grocery storefront, "that's where Molly and I decided to have a baby."

"Molly?" I asked. This was not a name I'd heard him mention before. As far as I knew, his first wife's name had been Izbetia. Hernan stopped the car in the middle of the road. Although there were a few cars behind us, no one honked while we sat there unmoving for several seconds until I gently reminded him we were still on the road and he started the car back up again. During that interval he had seemed to be in a sort of trance. Once we were on our way again, I asked once more about Molly.

"I never met her," he said.

"Now you're really confusing me," I said.

"I never met her," he repeated, "but somehow I know that we had a daughter and her name was Candy."

"That sure would have pissed off your dad," I muttered, and he laughed.

"That's probably why we did it," he said. "Molly hated my dad. Of course, she hated my mother, too. We hardly ever saw either of them after we got -"

Hernan stopped speaking in the middle of the sentence. He pulled the car over to the side of the road into a parking space marked for thirty minutes max.

"You're going to have to drive now," he said, as he opened to door and got out. I guessed it was only fair, seeing as he had driven this far and we only had a few blocks left to go, according to the dashboard. I could manage that much. I slid myself into the driver's seat as Hernan came around and piled into the passenger's. He stared out the window as I pulled the car out onto the road.

"So you're not going crazy, right?" I asked. "I mean, about this Molly and all, because I know for a fact you never had a daughter named Candy."

"I did and I didn't," Hernan said. "I know it never happened but I remember that conversation so well. We were walking along back there, me and her. She was short. Molly was. Really short, and had a mop of thick black hair on her head. It was all her idea. I was talking about something else entirely. I know, it was about Edgar. I was talking about Edgar and the book he was writing about pigs, and all of a sudden she told me she wanted to have a baby. At first I thought she meant she wanted us to get a baby pig, and I had a vision of the thing, all pink and snouty and wrapped up in a blanket and cuddling in my arms. Sure, I said, thinking it would be fun to have a baby pig, especially with what Edgar had been telling us about them just the night before when we had dinner at his house on Misteranibal Street. Wait!"

"Is that where we're going?" I asked. "To this Edgar's house?"

"No," Hernan replied. "His place was on the seven hundred block. It's weird, though. I can see it now. He had this brown leather chair that was so amazingly comfortable. I was afraid to sit in it because I worried I could never get up again, like the chair would hold me hostage."

He paused as we arrived at our destination. 44 Misteranibal Street was on our left, and it was an old brick house behind a chain link fence in a state of half-demolition.