Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday. Debbie Graber

Padre Island earlier that year, and leaps into action.

      Janet Goodwin will later figure in a romantic subplot with Fred and Ms. Donna Fulsome, but I don’t want to give away too much just yet.

      This is exciting! How about the complication of Ralphie being whacked out on drugs and forced to act in an emergency? Here there will be a long description of how the Count Chocula T-shirt Ralphie is wearing stretches tightly over his large gut, and we can practically hear the swish swish his dung-colored corduroys are making as his thighs rub together as he races down the dark but tastefully appointed hallway.

      Delores should have known that corduroy is one of the least forgiving materials you can find on planet Earth. If Delores hadn’t been such a self-involved narcissist, then she would have been invited to play bridge with the other mothers in the neighborhood and thus would have known that bullies like Matt Kelly, who lived next door, specifically targeted boys dressed in Wrangler cords.

      Ralphie gets to Janet’s room all out of breath and finds Fred sitting on her bed, crying. Whoa! No one expected Fred to show up at this point! We thought Fred might be dead, but given that he is sitting on Janet’s bed, we can see for ourselves that he is alive, and apparently Ralphie’s earlier rant was just a hallucination or a delusion. Or was it?

      It turns out Fred is having an existential crisis of his own back home in Orland Park and thought he would drive up to Northanger Abbey to visit Ralphie on a whim.

      “It’s the middle of the night, Dad,” Ralphie says.

      “Is it?” Fred says.

      “Yes. The middle of the night,” Ralphie says.

      “Night. Ah, night,” says Fred, “the darkest part of the day.”

      The best dialogue is always pulled from real life, right? You can’t make this shit up.

      As you might notice, this is a very obscure conversation in which Fred and Ralphie talk about nothing, but there is a ton of subtext regarding Fred and Delores’s crumbling marriage and Ralphie’s self-destructive tendencies learned at the knee of his father. How else do you think boys learn about quaaludes? From their cheating, quaalude-popping dads of course!

      Here’s another book club question:

      “Ever heard of the ‘iceberg’? You’re in a book club—you must have read Hemingway. If not, why not?”

      Here’s another one:

      “Does hearing the song ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ make you wish that Lionel Richie was your father instead of your real father?”

      This inscrutable dialogue will be very important because Fred will tell Ralphie, in a not-very-easy-to-comprehend manner, that he is leaving Orland Park because Delores divorced him in a fit of pique. This too will all be explained in the series of florid chapters written from Delores’s florid point of view. The reader will find out that Delores took the bus to New York City to try her luck in the New York art scene, Andy Warhol and that shit, and over the course of the novel, she becomes a huge success in the folk art community. Too bad she now claims that she can no longer remember her fame and fortune, or, for that matter, her son’s name.

      This novel has something for everyone. It’s got black humor, dichotomies, metaphors, drug usage, suburban angst, semiautomatic weapons, corduroys, an iceberg, and lots, lots more.

      At this point, there is going to be a “meta” chapter about how the novel Northanger Abbey is a satire of gothic novels from the eighteenth century, like The Mysteries of Udolpho. This part of the book is going to pander to literary types who join book clubs to show off how smart they are because they were comp lit majors at Brown like forty years ago.

      In an ironic twist, instead of reading and discussing the book during the book club get-togethers, one of these literary types, let’s call her Mrs. Schnell, spends that time in the kitchen, attempting to seduce her best friend Delores’s son, Ralphie. Mrs. Schnell, while old as dirt, wears an intoxicating perfume that makes saying no to her sexual advances extremely difficult.

      This chapter will have surprising plot machinations, like when a confused Delores breezes into the kitchen and, thinking she’s in the bathroom, pulls down her pants and starts peeing on the linoleum, all while Ralphie is being fellated in front of the fridge. Again, churchy book club types beware!

      According to Mrs. Schnell, “meta” novels are hot right now and one has to try to stay current on literary trends, even if one has never heard of The Mysteries of Udolpho, let alone knows what a gothic novel is. Unless you’re a sixty-something retired high school English teacher who still gives a great blow job, you would probably have no idea. I sure didn’t! And I still don’t.

      Don’t let The Mysteries of Udolpho keep you from reading my book!

      Here’s another book club question:

      “If Delores claims that she pissed on the kitchen floor because she thought she was on the toilet, does she suffer from early onset Alzheimer’s or is she just a crazy bitch?”

      Another chapter is going to address how there is medical evidence that eating certain types of foods can help people with “brain diseases” remember important facts about their lives that they claim to have forgotten. I find that eating sardines makes my brain work better. Sure, the checkout people think I’m a little bit nutty for buying sardines ten tins at a time, but I have found that sardines, more than any type of food, give me the kind of creative energy I need to keep writing. I personally love sardines in tomato sauce, but I have been known, in a pinch, to eat the kind in olive oil. My favorite way to eat sardines is with saltines. I keep sardines and saltines in my cupboards at all times. But that’s my creative process—an interesting fact for the book clubs. You heard it here first, because once I become a famous novelist, sardines are going to be the new food favorite that everyone is going to want to eat. A sardine company might even pay me to become its celebrity sponsor.

      Another possible book club question:

      “Which do you like better: sardines in tomato sauce or sardines in olive oil?”

      Here’s another one:

      “Are you plagued by dreams where your mother serves you what is supposed to be her delicious vegetarian lasagna but it ends up morphing into a pile of sardines? What do you think that means?”

      It’s going to come out in a later chapter that Ralphie is going to end up fighting a lifelong addiction to Hershey’s Bars. Mrs. Schnell, the English teacher who oversaw the Key Club, never checked Ralphie’s candy-bar inventory. Ralphie began to hear strange, urgent voices in his head, telling him to eat all his Key Club bars, and after a while, people started calling him “fatty fat-fat” and “pig face” and “buffalo ass.”

      As an adult, it is going to be impossible for Ralphie not to pig out on Hershey’s Bars whenever he encounters them at the grocery store when he is picking up sardines.

      I hope that buffalo ass Matt Kelly is homeless somewhere, sleeping under the el tracks.

      I’ve just figured out how Fred could afford to send Ralphie to Northanger Abbey! Major plot twist: Fred will find out from an episode of Antiques Roadshow that a grandfather clock he inherited from his great-uncle Jason is worth a million dollars, and that’s how he and Delores will have the money to send Ralphie to Northanger Abbey. Done and done. Fuck Carl Sandburg High School.

       CON: Carl Sandburg High School throws totally lame twenty-year reunions that are not worth the fifty bucks borrowed from Delores’s Social Security check. No one even remembered me. Not even Matt Kelly.

      Here’s something I just wrote:

      “‘Hey, pig face! You have a fat ass!’ said Matt Kelly.

      [I just decided that Matt Kelly is going to be the name of a fictional student at Northanger Abbey.]

      “‘Is that the best you can do, scoundrel?’ Ralphie said, hoisting his three-foot bong over his head and smashing it on top of Matt Kelly’s