Diana Gordon’s life might as well have ended when that loser in the bathroom’s did. As she and her mother heal from their — Lawrence’s — Jigsaw attack, she can’t help but notice that daddy is gone even more than before. He starts coming home smelling like rot, like coins and decay rather than the flowery perfume of his coworkers that she’d grown so used to during her second bedtime, after Alison had put her down and her father had returned from his late shift to put her to sleep for real, she always was a daddy’s girl at heart. She complains about the smell, and Larry starts showering before he puts her to sleep but he doesn’t explain it, he gives her a hearty chuckle and a pat on her back and insists that getting old just makes you stinkier. Diana knows that her grandparents don’t stink like that, she knows her friends’ parents don’t, and she knows that whatever the smell is must be worse than Larry’s infidelity because this new rotten smell never, ever makes it back to mommy’s room.
Diana doesn’t mention it to Alison, she doesn’t mention it to the nice counselors and therapists that’ve become part of her life, most of the time she’s able to forget about the awful smell. When Alison and Lawrence sit her down to teach her the word “divorce”, Diana finds little time to worry about something so trivial as her dad stinking anymore. She moves into her grandmother’s house with Alison, they live out of a guest room and Diana sleeps funny because her mom starts working nights and grandma doesn’t quite know how to put her to sleep. By her 11th birthday, Diana and Alison live in their own place — it’s shitty, she knows it’s shitty because Alison says it every time Larry comes to get Diana for his week with her. “You’re a fucking oncologist and the mother of your child can barely afford her one bedroom rental, Lawrence, what kind of person does that make you!?” Is her favorite, Diana hears it weekly and mouths along with her mother’s crying, taps her feet along to the banging of her mother’s fists against her father’s car, then they’re driving away and Larry is apologizing, trying to explain how hard being an adult gets.
It’s living out of this shitty one bedroom rental where her mother sleeps on a pull out in the living room that she discovers — well, her friend discovers — a dead body. They love to play by the train tracks and this man must’ve loved to too but now two lower middle class white girls are picking flowers from their neighbor’s flower box and tossing them on him and saying a little prayer. Diana leaves quickly and says she’s grossed out and scared, in truth she’s just scared because that rotten smell is back, because that poor man who’s been sitting dead by the train tracks in the hot sun smells just like her daddy. She doesn’t want to return home, she wants to walk across town and pound on Lawrence’s door and make him explain but she can’t and he only dropped her off two days ago. She goes home anyway, her mom is asleep in the living room so she goes to her room quietly to cry while her anger simmers.
When Lawrence picks her up at the beginning of the next week, Diana isn’t sure how to express her feelings. She climbs into the back seat and sits there quietly, eyes burning into the back of Larry’s head as he tries to settle the tension between them. He’s bullshitting — his favorite thing to do, and a word she learned from her mother — about school and her friends when she decides to speak up, “I saw a dead body this week.” She starts with, watching Larry’s eyebrows raise in the rear view mirror. “Did you?” He asks, his throat sounding a little dry, “how’re… how’s that making you feel?” He tries to mimic the same sweet tone that her therapists use when they ask about Zep. “It smelled like you.” Diana deadpans in response, Larry chuckles dryly and feigns offense until he realizes she isn’t being silly, not teasing. “When you work in a hospital-“ “I thought you just ran tests on people and gave them results.” Diana isn’t even sure it’s true, she can see how a cancer doctor would end up responsible for dead bodies but Larry’s face twists up and tells Diana everything she needs to know. “Dad.” She murmurs when he doesn’t say anything, her eyes are getting wet and her heart is pounding but Larry just turns the radio up and doesn’t look back at her again until they’re home.
