Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA

Chapter One Addy hits the wall . . . Addy Lipton has been nurturing a wild desire for a good twenty-two months to drive her 1988 dark blue Toyota Corolla right through the closed garage door of the lovely two-story white brick and cedar home she shares with a man she vaguely remembers marrying a very long time ago. The Toyota has not been inside of the garage since 1992, and the last time she opened the kitchen door leading into the garage and stepped inside of what she now calls The Kingdom of Krap was just days before her milestone fiftieth birthday and very close to two years ago. Addy had opened the door to set a bottle of wine in the cool garage so it would chill before her sister showed up to help her celebrate. She placed it next to the bag of dog food left over from Barney the black lab (who had passed without a doubt into doggie heaven in 2001), and then dared to look into the bowels of the garage where she had not bothered to gaze for a very long time. "What the hell," she said out loud as she raised her eyes and wondered if she had suddenly been transported to a used- appliance store. The garage, totally her husband Lucky's disgusting domain, was filled to high tide with partially dismantled refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, microwaves, and various other machines that must have been something workable at one time when they could actually be plugged in and turned on. "Lucky, Lucky, Lucky," she said through a jaw that was as tight as a rusted dishwasher bolt, scanning past the machines and having a moment. A moment of desperation, wonderment, tepid fury, and astonishment at what not only her assumed half of the garage but also her entire life in halves and quarters and eighths and sixteenths had become. "A garage stuffed with crap that my husband will use with his goofyass friends, not to fix, but to spread across each other's lawns like teenagers," Addy told herself, turning slightly in the kitchen doorway to see two piles of old bowling balls, a stack of wire coat hangers, a lawnmower that she knew for a fact did not mow, and the back end of a 1951 Chevy that Lucky had been working on since he found its decaying hulk sticking out of his uncle's old shed and dragged it home when their son was a baby. Nineteen years. The car had not moved, or turned over, or gravitated to the local antique car parade, in nineteen years. Addy reached over and picked up the wine bottle. She told herself that she would not now wait for her sister, that she would open the bottle immediately and drink it warm. Warm like everything else in her life. Nothing hot or cold or spicy but every damn thing seeming to sit right in the middle as if waiting for something, someone, anything to push it off to one side. Later, after that bottle was empty and her sister HelenHell, as she was aptly nicknamedstole her away for a birthday dinner where Lucky managed to show up on time, after she was back home, Addy could not stop thinking about the damn garage, which as a birthday gift to herself she began calling The Kingdom of Krap. And the garage drove her crazy with wondering. Wondering what else might be stored behind ragged cardboard boxes and the assorted stacks of junk Lucky and his ridiculous friends scavenged from behind stores and each other's garbage piles. Wondering how a section of the house and her life had gotten so out of control. Wondering what would happen if Lucky spent half as much time with her as he did with his obsessive collecting and make-believe restoration projects. Wondering why she was somehow content to sit and simply observe as her marriage seemed to drift off to a place where she could barely see the outlines of what it used to be. Wondering what happened to the sensitive, romantic, often wildRadish, Kris is the author of 'Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA', published 2008 under ISBN 9780739327692 and ISBN 0739327690.