Left for Garbage

about something else, a smell from the trunk. It was so bad even the guy who ran the tow company thought there was a body in there, which is exactly what my dad was thinking, and he should know since he’d been a cop once himself. But it turned out to be nothing, just rotted pizza that Denise had stupidly left in the trunk. Still, it was so bad that Dad had to drive the car home with his head out the window.
    My mom , who’s a nurse, thought it smelled like death too, and even after my dad showed her the old pizza box, she was still so upset that she searched the car. That’s when she found Denise’s purse and got Denise’s friend Theresa’s number out of it, and then she went and got that girl Theresa and basically forced her to tell her where Denise was. And then she went over there to force Denise to produce Deeley.
    If only Denise hadn’t screwed around with my mom at Aaron ’s and on the ride home, refusing to tell her where Deeley was, then my mom wouldn’t have been so hysterical that she ended up calling the police and reporting that not only was Deeley missing but that it smelled like a dead body in the trunk. I mean she didn’t mean it. She tried to say that later. It was just in the heat of the moment, you know. I mean, my mom, she thinks now what she smelled was a pizza and not a dead body, and for sure not Deeley. She was just really worked up, that’s all.
    Anyway , here’s where I come in. So my mom was driving Denise home, and yelling at her, and demanding Denise tell her where Deeley was, and Denise wouldn’t, and by then my mom is not only threatening to call the police, she’s actually driving around looking for an open substation, and in between this, she calls me up and she’s crying and saying you need to talk to your sister, you better talk to her, so I just threw on some shorts and drove as fast as I could to my folks’ house. I got there before my mom and Denise did, in fact. My dad was home, though, and he was standing in the garage by Denise’s car that he’d just driven home from the tow place that day, and the trunk was open. It really was a disgusting smell, I’ll admit that. I can see why my mom and dad freaked out so bad about it. I mean, I’m not a either a cop or a nurse, like them, but it did smell like a dead animal. Again, though, as my mom herself later pointed out, it had been a meat pizza.
    So there I am in the garage , all alone with this stinking car, my dad having gone back inside to stare at the TV, or the abyss, or whatever it is he was doing, and I’m just out there not knowing what is going on but knowing I need to be there for my mom and my sister, whatever it is. Mom showed up about five minutes later with Denise in the car, and when they got there, Denise just jumped out of the car, not saying a word to Mom or even me, and stormed off back to her bedroom. Then everything got almost comical because, naturally, Mom follows her into the house and threw open her bedroom door and stood there shouting and crying, demanding that Denise tell her where Deeley was, and when Denise ignored her and acted like she was deaf, Mom would shout at me, “You ask your sister what’s going on. You ask her where my granddaughter is!”
    But before I could even get a word out , Mom would lean around me and ask Denise again herself, and this lunacy went on for like ten minutes or so, until Mom was so worked up that she stormed off down the hall, shouting for my dad to intervene, as though he could have helped.
    Nor was that anything to get Denise talking , but then my mom runs back, Dad in tow, and by then she was screaming and she said she was calling 911 to report Deeley was missing, and that because of the smell in the trunk, she was probably dead too.
    That made Denise jump and me , too. First I tried to calm Mom down but she pulled away from me and headed toward the kitchen, still dragging Dad by the wrist, and a minute later, me and Denise could hear her on the phone and we realized she was done threatening and this was getting serious.
    That’s when Denise turned to me for the first time since they’d come back to the house a nd started telling me her story.
    T hat’s when I got scared, finally.
    Denise told me that she didn’t know where Deeley was because Manny, the nanny, hadn’t returned Deeley since sometime in early June.
    I pleaded with Denise to give me details, but I could see she wasn’t going to say much, when we could hear Mom screaming for the