Free Strange but True by John Searles Page B

Like to Rip a New Asshole list, or P.I.L.T.R.A.N.A., for short. (Philip isn’t the only one in this family with inside jokes.) Charlene’s possible victims include that surly checkout girl at the specialty-food store in Radnor who once refused to let her use a debit card because her purchase was fifty cents short of the twenty-dollar minimum, even though Charlene had shopped there for years; that high-strung carpenter who messed up the light switch in the garage then never returned her calls to come and fix it; that bitch on the phone at the cable company who wouldn’t credit her bill despite the fact that the repairman was a no-show for three appointments; and then the repairman himself, who finally did show, only to leave without fixing the reception when Charlene went into another room to answer the telephone.
    And the list doesn’t stop with people she knows either.
    Some days, Charlene loses herself in thought for hours at a time just thinking of all the celebrities she’d like to tell off as well. There’s that greedy Martha Stewart, that big-mouthed Dr. Laura Schlessinger, that pervert Howard Stern, that fake-saint know-it-all Dr. Phil… And still there are others who she wouldn’t even waste her breath telling off but who she thinks could benefit from a good old-fashioned bitch slapping: Michael Jackson, Björk, the Osbourne family (with the exception of Sharon, who Charlene has a soft spot for because of her battle with colon cancer), George and Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld. And in case anyone thinks she is partisan in her hatred, they needn’t worry because Charlene considers herself an equal-opportunity bitch slapper and would happily give Bill, Hillary, Tipper, and Al a smack or two as well.
    At the very top of this list are the three people Charlene despises most in the world: Richard, Holly, and Pilia. Richard, her ex-husband, because he up and left her after Ronnie died. (Yes, Charlene knows she became impossible to live with in the aftermath, but what the hell did he expect?) Holly, who met Richard at a medical convention in Vegas, where she was working as a third-rate stand-up comedian with an apparent habit of hopping into bed with married men. And Pilia, the Polish ice princess of a librarian, who used to act so smug, with her Lana Turner sweaters stretched over her giant breasts. Ever since Pilia stepped foot in the library some seven years before, she had been after Charlene’s position as head librarian—and now she has it. Someday, Charlene thinks as she stares up at that spider in the skylight and grinds her jaw, someday, I’ll storm into that library, march right up to the front desk, and stick a pin in those mammoth tits of hers.
    Last night.
    In the middle of this daily regimen of hatred, the memory of the previous evening comes flooding back through the haze of sleeping pills: that girl with the scarred face and missing teeth returning to their lives again like an apparition, only to deliver such preposterous news.
    This baby inside me belongs to him .
    The mere echo of those words sends a wave of nausea sloshing through her stomach. Charlene moves her clammy mouth around and spits into the wastebasket beside her nightstand, which is overflowing with empty SnackWell’s packages, Doritos bags, and other ghosts of junk food binges past. When the nausea passes, she lifts her worn-out body from the bed and goes to the bathroom. She pops open the T for Tuesday compartment of her plastic pillbox, drops two blood-pressure, one cholesterol, and an anxiety pill into her mouth, then puts her lips beneath the faucet for a gulp of water. The mirror is too scary to deal with this morning, so she turns and walks down the hall. On the way, she passes what she thinks of, quite literally, as the closed doors of her life—both her sons’ bedrooms and her ex-husband’s study. Then she passes the lopsided constellation of dusty pictures along