Chad

It was after her sons had read an ad in the Journal-Sentinal about a little old lady who was mugged in a decent section of Milwaukee that she received a strange gift for Christmas one year. Tall, gruff looking, and bulky, a life-size man with removable legs and sandy blond hair became an inhabitant of her every day. At first she thought they were crazy, she didn’t want the gift.

“What am I going to do with this thing? Sleep with it? Feed it?”

“Put it in your car, and stop complaining. You’ll thank us some day, when you realize that years have gone by without hoodlums bothering you or robbing you.”

She didn’t like it, not one bit. She was too young for this, they were too worried about her. She was a completely confident independent woman, and didn’t need a silly doll to take care of her. Eventually, they got to her, though, nagging her about how much the doll had cost them (split between 6 kids, actually not that much), nagging her because they loved her more than life itself, and didn’t want to see anything happen to her.

Eventually, she had his legs put into storage, put an old green polo shirt on him, brushed his beach-blonde hair to the side, and put a red baseball hat on him. She looked at him, thinking he resembled a chiseled, surfer-looking Ken, and all of a sudden he had a name. Chad. She put Chad in the front seat of her station wagon, strapped on his seatbelt, and there he lived, for the rest of their time together. At first she hated having him in the car with her, thought he was ridiculous, thought he made her look weak. As the seasons changed and the calendar pages turned, though, she began to find somewhere within him, within his cloth skin and stuffed biceps and plastic smile, a friend. His eyes, though staring straight ahead into the great abyss of the windshield, had a knowing sense about them. His hands, big and manly, seemed somehow ready to help her carry her groceries.

“Oh, you don’t have to get out of the car, Chad. I can get these myself,” she’d say. “He’s always trying to do good deeds, you see,” she explained, as her grandchildren watched from the backseat. Grandma was having conversations with a life-sized stuffed man in her car. Polite and baffled, they just raised their eyebrows and nodded silently.

“Sometimes he gets frisky and puts his hand on my knee while I’m driving and I have to slap him away!” Somehow, without doing or saying or being anything, Chad became a part of the family.

She didn’t like to think about how Chad met his demise, was snatched right up from under her, when she was at book group in downtown Milwaukee. She didn’t like to think about it one bit. So she didn’t.