Dear B,
It’s been over a year since you left me. I understand why you had to go, and I don’t blame you for leaving. We had eight great years together, even though we had our ups and downs. I know you told me to move on with my life and not dwell on the past, but I’m finding it harder and harder to do these days. I thought I would send a year-end letter to let you know how I am doing.
First of all, Angry Daddy and his friends were pissed off that a Black man had been living in their white house for the last eight years. You know it wasn’t any of my friends—they all loved you—but Angry Daddy and his friends are really, really old and are still sore over the cancellation of some of their favorite “How To…” documentaries, like The Honeymooners and All in the Family.
I keep trying to tell Angry Daddy that the Amazon Echo Dot is for ordering paper towels, like the kind you toss out to people with no power or water, and is not the magical remote control from the movie Pleasantville. He can’t just jump into a world before there was color, but he keeps trying anyway.
As soon as that “fake news” site began circulating that photo-shopped picture of your moving-in-day party compared to his, he went ballistic. Amazon keeps sending us cases of those black fuzzy dice you hang from the rear-view mirror because whenever he sees both pictures side-by-side, he keeps punching the Echo’s button and yelling “Blacks, die! Blacks, die!”
It’s really too bad, too, because we are almost out of money. Angry Daddy is trying to get the bank to extend our line of credit, but we have no collateral. If it were just us, I wouldn’t mind so much, but we have so many workers—gardeners, housekeepers, bookkeepers, rocket scientists (the kind that study rockets—not the filthy, lying kind that study icebergs) who rely on us for their income. They wouldn’t go hungry, though. We have lots of cake—in fact, it’s the most beautiful cake I’ve ever seen—so, I suppose they could eat that. Angry Daddy’s auntie Marie said that it had worked out very well for her.
It’s all of their other expenses that I worry about, like mortgages and insurance. Angry Daddy says that I don’t have enough faith in him—that he can practically guarantee that insurance won’t be an issue for anyone soon. Or did he say “option”? And his uncle—Ben or Tom or something—was just saying something the other day about people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, so that will probably work out okay for them in the end.
I know you tried to spruce the place up when you were here. The paint you used for the dining room is still there. I think it was called “A Color Almost Brown”, and you promised it would cover everything. I told you that it was simply too long to say, so I just nicknamed it “ACA” for short. Angry Daddy hates it, though. He says it looks like crap. At first he just tried to cover it up with his own paint, but it turns out that it looked more like crap than yours did and didn’t cover anything. So, he has decided he will just chip away at it until it is all gone, even though I keep telling him just to touch up the corners and leave it the way it is. He keeps trying though, but the crap underneath ACA is worse than what is there now.
You remember that nice Mexican family that lives just on the other side of the creek to the south? They always let their kids come over to help us pick fruit in the orchard but Angry Daddy says he hates them. In fact, he wants to put up a fence across our property line down there. But it turns out that Angry Daddy is not very good at building things. He keeps trying to build it, but he is having a hard time coming up with money to get the materials or even find someone to help him build it. I told him to get some of those Mexican day laborers hanging out in the Home Depot parking lot to help him, but he told me he didn’t think that was very funny.
I think some of the gardeners have been moving the statuary around the property. Some of the family members were concerned about the old, ugly gargoyles disappearing. I thought it was a definite improvement, but they seemed really angry about it. They came over for a picnic. I guess since it was summertime, everyone dressed in white. Angry Daddy didn’t mind, though. He said he appreciated their support. I think they were getting ready to put up a piñata or something because they tied a rope to a tree branch. They lit tiki torches and looked anxious to hit something with their sticks. Some of the bratty kids from down the street that dress all in black came by and started teasing them. The party broke up after that. One of the family members was so upset that he got into his car and drove away in a huff. I hope no one was hurt.
The weird Korean family that lives across the pond to the west of us has been giving Angry Daddy a hard time. We never see anyone come out of their place. In fact, they don’t even turn their lights on at night. But the Fat Daddy that lives there keeps screaming things at Angry Daddy, making him angrier. Fat Daddy keeps trying to shoot spitballs at Angry Daddy, but of course they just land in the pond. I don’t think Fat Daddy is any better at building things than Angry Daddy. Angry Daddy seems to want to fight him for some reason. We keep telling him to calm down. You never tried to fight Fat Daddy when you lived here, but I think that just makes Angry Daddy angrier when he thinks about it. I’m not sure what he’s trying to prove.
We had a couple of bad storms, which did quite a bit of damage. Angry Daddy has been out a couple of times to survey the damage, but really just lets the contractors you hired to fix the property do the work and then takes credit for it. I guess if things get fixed, no one cares in the end.
Angry Daddy got a weird plastic mannequin that he carries around with him. He’s dressed her up in high heels and expensive Italian clothes. He hasn’t gone so far as to begin talking to her or anything—it’s just kind of creepy to see her standing beside him. Someone said they actually saw Angry Daddy try to hold the plastic mannequin’s hand a couple of times, but come on—you can’t really hold hands with a mannequin!
Angry Daddy brought a bunch of pets with him, but I don’t think they do very much to help his mood. One of them is a little yellow songbird in a cage. I don’t think he feeds her enough, though. He really likes looking her, but she just keeps singing the same song over and over. We all thought it might help his mood, but she doesn’t seem to. He tells anyone and everyone how much he likes to look at her.
We all feel sorry for her—stuck in her little cage. I think Angry Daddy feels sorry for her, too. He got her a hound dog to keep her company, but we all want Angry Daddy to get rid of him. I think Angry Daddy thought the hound dog was going to be some type of faithful companion for him, also. All it does so far is dig through the garbage, poop in the garden, and hump the china.
Angry Daddy also has an annoying little big-eared monkey he brought with him. He tried to get rid of it once, but it just won’t go away. Some guys around here like to chill out and relax—just smoking and listening to the Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd. They aren’t hurting anyone, but apparently this drives the little monkey nuts. It flies into a rage, chittering at them and flinging its poo. No one knows why, but we all think the little monkey might chill out a bit if it smoked with them a little more.
Maybe Angry Daddy just doesn’t have a way with animals. For example, you remember that snapping turtle that wanders around, not really doing much of anything? It’s the one that has the Blue-Banded Tit that sits on its back. Well, that old turtle has always wandered around snapping at nothing and not really doing much else. The Blue-Banded Tit flutters around, too, but it has never done anything more than have a really annoying chirp. Ever since Angry Daddy has moved in, that old turtle has been going around biting people in the ass! We think somehow the Tit on its back is egging him on, because it flaps its wings and chirps and chirps, riding around on the back of that old snapping turtle. Even Angry Daddy is saying they both need to go.
That old turtle and that Blue-Banded Tit found a big pile of crap that has been sitting around for years. They actually began to roll it around and around. They eventually found a hill and rolled that big pile of crap down the hill and it landed on the workers below. The workers jumped around and yelled about it, but I think those two actually enjoyed it. I know Angry Daddy and his friends were standing around when it happened and just laughed and slapped each other on the back. Some of them even lit up cigars to celebrate. I thought it was sort of cruel, but it doesn’t seem like there was much of anything those workers downhill from that crap could do about it.
One of Angry Daddy’s other pets is almost indescribable. From a distance, you might mistake her for the plastic mannequin he carries around with him, but when you get up close—well, I can only describe it as an old harpy. I always thought harpies were mythological creatures, but here she is. Maybe it’s like that movie The Last Unicorn, where people didn’t know that the harpy was real because they had paid a schilling to get into the carnival, but she terrifies me. The old thing flies around terrorizing children and college girls.
I think one of Angry Daddy’s pets got sick recently. He had this old, yellow parrot that he brought with him. Most of the feathers had fallen out and the wrinkled skin underneath was truly horrifying. However, she was well-trained. She repeats everything that Angry Daddy says. You can yell at her, shake her around, present alternative facts to her, but she always parrots what he says no matter what. She was infuriating, but kind of entertaining at the same time. I think he put her cage somewhere in the basement to let her die in peace.
Some guy in a suit has been wandering around lately. Angry Daddy says to just ignore him and he will go away, but he has been coming back every day, checking under rocks and behind the bushes for something. I thought we couldn’t keep good help before, but ever since he’s been coming around, the staff seems to change weekly. I think he secretly makes Angry Daddy nervous. He must be some type of exterminator, because every time he turns over a rock, he finds a trail of leeches and maggots. It makes my skin crawl to be surrounded by so many slimy worms, but it doesn’t seem to faze Angry Daddy. If the man is an exterminator, I hope he does something soon, because the trail of blood suckers seems to be leading up to the house.
Shirtless Grandpa checks in with Angry Daddy all the time to see how things are going. I guess Angry Daddy probably just calls him “Shirtless Daddy”. He seems concerned about the creeping insects, too, because I hear Angry Daddy telling Shirtless Grandpa that all the bugs are still in place. I thought we owned this piece of land outright, but Angry Daddy keeps thanking Shirtless Grandpa for the big white house he’s in now and keeps assuring him that the check is in the mail.
It must be expensive to keep up the rent on a place like this. I saw a lemonade stand out front the other day. Well, I thought it was a lemonade stand. I was really parched and when I went over there, all they were selling were $40 baseball caps—and a fabric dunce cap with eyeholes came with it for free. I didn’t buy one. I saw online that other people were making room in their collections to buy one, though. They were burning the baseball caps they bought just a few months ago.
We had a shabby, homeless, alcoholic guy hanging around for a while who kept trying to get into Angry Daddy’s office. Angry Daddy finally ran him off, but they are still arguing with each other. Or they are friends. Or they are frenemies. No one can quite figure it out.
I know that you had hoped that Powerful Pantsuit Mommy was here instead of Angry Daddy (I did, too). I understand that she was on her way, chugging along full steam, but her train hit an unexpected snowbank at the last minute and derailed. She wrote to let me know she was okay, but wasn’t coming back to live in this house again.
Nine years ago you asked me to have hope, and I did. I still do. I have hope that we can finally get rid of the leech and maggot infestation. I have hope that Fat Daddy won’t set us on fire or Angry Daddy won’t set him on fire. I have hope that our gardeners and maids and contractors can pay for their medication. I have hope for clean air and water. I have hope that my cousins visiting from across the creek to the south of us can stay instead of having to go back. I have hope for a $12 per year health care plan like Angry Daddy promised.
I just wanted to write and say that we are still here and miss you. I have to go now—Angry Daddy needs the bandwidth for Twitter.
Love, A
