Avarice

Abstract

middle-aged ruin: When she looks at you, her vision goes right through your skin and internal organs and comes out on the other side. She mutters to herself, and she gives off a smell of rancid cooking oil. She’s unpresentable. If she tried to go shopping alone at the supermarket, the security people would escort her right back out, that’s how alarming she is. The simple explanation for her having taken up residence here is that she appeared at the downtown Minneapolis bus depot last week, having come from Tulsa, where she lived in destitution. She barely had money for bus fare. My son, Wesley, her ex-husband, had to take her in. We all did. However, the more honest explanation for her arrival is that Jesus sent her to me. Two weeks ago I was in the shower and felt a lump in my breast. I actually cried out in a M y former daughter-in-law is sitting in the next room eating cookies off a plate. Poor thing, she’s a freeloader and can’t manage her own life anywhere in the world. Therefore she’s here. She’s hiding out in this house, for now, believing that she’s a victim. Her name’s Corinne, and she could have been given any sort of name by her parents, but Corinne happens to be the name she got. It’s from the Greek, kore. It means “maiden.” When I was a girl, no one ever called me that—a maiden. The word is obsolete. Everyone else under this roof—my son and his second wife (my current daughter-in-law, Astrid) and my two grandchildren—probably wonders what Corinne is doing here. I suppose they’d like her to evaporate into what people call “thin” air. Corinne’s bipolar and a Avarice