The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

we’ll be okay!”
    “Whoever has my
People
magazine,” my other sister said sharply, “I did not give you my permission to read it!”
    My father, in the midst of the chaos, had made it to the trailer door and was peeking out the window. We didn’t notice as he opened the door and stood there, watching.
    Cows. Lots and lots of cows. A herd of them surrounded the trailer as they moved through the campsite and on to the other side of the lake, bumping into our trailer as they clumsily made their way along. We, apparently, had camped in their pasture. It did smell like doody.
    My dad paid a guy with a Chevy truck thirty bucks and the
People
magazine to tow us out the next morning to the main road and to give my mom a cigarette.
    We all had nightmares for weeks.
    The next year, when he cranked up the trailer, my mom came out of the house, shot him a look, then lay down on her bed with her hand on her head.
    He sold it the following week.

A Morsel from
the Garden of Eden
    The basket had been passed, and there was no way out of it.
    It was my turn.
    Ever since my grandfather, Pop Pop, had gotten sick, my mother, two sisters, and an uncle all had our turns. We worked in shifts, and duty generally called us in once a week.
    I never knew what my assignment with Pop Pop was until I got to his and Nana’s house. It was like flipping a coin, though usually it consisted of one of three things: taking Pop Pop to the bank, to the bakery, or, the most feared of all the duties, to the grocery store.
    Pop Pop had been on medication to relieve some of the pain that the cancer had caused, which worked really well; in fact it worked so well that I briefly thought of “borrowing” some. In turn, this mother of all painkillers had made him slightly dizzy and more forgetful than usual, so his nurses assured us that it was in his best interest not to drive. Actually, they assured us that it was in the general population of Phoenix’s best interest that he not so much as commandeer a shopping cart on anything that could even slightly be considered pavement.
    So here and there, whenever he expressed a need to go somewhere, he would make Nana call one of us up and arrange to take him to his destination. He usually expressed his need by yelling that he had become “a caged animal” and that he felt he was an “inmate in his own home.” This, coupled with the fact that he’d insisted for fifty years that Nana never needed to learn how to drive, is how we began taking turns, although he did begin spreading the rumor that he was going to get himself an electric wheelchair so he could take himself to Safeway—which was three miles away and a quick hop over an interstate from his house.
    It was revealed that Pop Pop was ignoring his nurses’ advice and had been driving himself around the neighborhood to run his errands. We discovered this when my younger sister went to visit and saw that one of the posts supporting the green carport was now standing at a sixty-degree angle, in addition to the suspicion that one side of his car had been visibly sideswiped by something big and wooden and green. When confronted with the evidence, Pop Pop insisted with a huge grin that he was simply “reparking” his car and hadn’t even driven out into the street, although Nana stood behind him and continually rolled her eyes.
    In any case, taking Pop Pop to the grocery store was always the least desirable turn, especially since that’s where his area of expertise bloomed. He had been a grocer since the days of the Depression, and felt that he had learned a couple of things in his time, which he wanted to pass on to the next generation of grocers. This included sometimes verbally assaulting butchers, cashiers, bakers, and general managers, though he usually left the bag boys alone. Everyone in every store knew him by his name and knew him on sight—evident by the way they suddenly disappeared upon catching a glimpse of him shuffling down the aisles.
    When I