Chapter III
Waiting To Be
That night I sit at home and watch a huge TV screen that lets Lohan prance around in larger-than-life glory. I can’t decide if my daughter would like her or not. In the first ten minutes I realise this is a bias biography that is trying to portray her as a villain. Does my daughter like her tabloid appearance with the partying, the drugs, and the reckless driving? Or is she a good girl who has never been foiled by temptation and the media? The only way to know is to meet them face-to-face. So all you get are these images that someone else doles out for you, as though they are the experts. I bet the people they are interviewing on this biography never even met her.
I’m saying all this to the dog who sits besides me while scratching his head. His eyes are droopy and his muzzle greyed. I know he shouldn’t be allowed on the couch, but he can’t really sit up straight anymore, so I can’t pet him while he sits on the floor. I say:
“Of course, I could be wrong and maybe she is a drunken brat-”
Fart.
I wave my hand in the air and the cat comes along and lays on the arm of the couch. As she turns over and stretches her lacklustre coat of orange, brown, and white floats off of her in clumps. In the last few years she’d developed a shedding problem. It sticks to my furniture that the maid will complain about tomorrow morning. I rub my hand along her belly and it comes out like a boiled egg that has rolled under the couch you never clean beneath.
The doorbell rings and on my way I check the answering machine, it says there is nothing, but I press the playback button just in case. When I open the door the fed-ex guy is walking away across the lawn. I call him back and he asks if I have permission from Mr. DiMarco to take a package.
I tell him that I am Mr. DiMarco.
The guy looks at me and asks, “Ain’t you a butler or somethin’?”
He hands me a package I know will be papers, and I stop dead. “Do you hear the phone ringing?” Before he can even consider I bolt to the phone, picking it up saying “Hello, hello?”
When I go back the man is gone.      
The pets are still on the couch, unmoved from the visitor. The dog farts again.
“Aw, boy-”
I have to say boy, and cat, and dog, because they aren’t my pets. I bought the dog, a chocolate Labrador, from a pet store I strolled past by on accident. He was playful and lively and I brought him home for my daughter. She was two by this time, and I’m a firm believer that every child needs a pet.
But then I thought, what if she doesn’t like puppies? So when the puppy was a year old I went back to the pet store and found a kitten. This time I got the smallest Calico kitten of the litter, so young she was still white without her patches. I didn’t know she’d develop a shedding problem. But what if she doesn’t like kittens either? She could like ferrets, hamsters, horses, birds-anything is within my reach, even if she wanted a golden haired tamarin. So I have people on stand-by for when my daughter wants to come home and she can have any thing she likes. The kitten and the puppy are waiting to be named, or else be sent to live with the maid.