Our daughter hates us. She is nineteen. She dropped out of high school but has never moved out. She is fat and ugly. My genes are responsible for that. She says she is stupid because of her mother. Alas, there is truth to that as well. Her life’s work, then, is to pay us back for our crime against nature. She does this by detailing our heinous faults to anyone who will listen.

We run a small luncheonette to catch the coat hanger and casket factories in town. Brenda waits tables. Her diatribe against us notwithstanding, she is a decent waitress. She tells the patrons that we use mercury-laced tuna, bootlegged canned chicken and lettuce from Mexico where migrant workers pee on it. She claims several people have died eating here, but my wife and I have an “in” with the coroner so it is covered up. No one pays attention to her. In fact she is a form of entertainment. They ask her follow-up questions just to see where her tale of horror will lead.

She wants to have sex with midgets. She surfs the internet for specialized web sites devoted to little people. She wants to become pregnant. Our grandchildren will be midgets or dwarves, the terms used interchangeably. When my wife and I are asked by friends how the family is we will have to show them the baby midget pictures. Once they reach a certain age Brenda says she will run away and leave us to raise them.

She once told us that she would like to commit suicide in a very public place, somewhere where she could list all her grievances and then do the deed. Maybe a nationally syndicated TV show. Or perhaps HBO would be up for a Pay Per View situation. But now she feels that would be too simple. By executing her “one and done” we’d be getting off too easy. It’s now her opinion that she needs to stay alive, like the blinded Oedipus wandering the countryside, a living moral lesson that people as dumb and ugly as her mother and I had no right to procreate in the first place.

We have offered to move. The house and business would be hers. That almost sent her over the edge. She’d follow us to any community we settled in. Even if we got a motor home and traveled to a different city every night, she’d find a way to let people know. So we stay.

Since we’re both close to sixty, Brenda thinks she might commit us to a nursing home in a few years. She looks for news stories of places where patient abuse occurs, cuts articles out and leaves them for us to read at breakfast. Or maybe she’ll care for us herself. She mentioned reading in a World War II book that the Germans discovered 860 calories per day were the right amount to have people starve but still be somewhat productive.

She’s fascinated by television shows that have detectives relying on forensic evidence to solve crimes. Somewhere out there, when the time is right, is the perfect way to do us in without being caught.

She started this behavior when she was in the ninth grade. We were called in to the guidance office to discuss her failing grades. In front of her assembled audience she let it all hang out. She never went back to school but wrote letters to the superintendent saying that we needed to be arrested because she wasn’t sixteen. They granted her a waiver and the next year we were off the hook.

Sometimes she brings men home. At seventeen she introduced us to a vagrant who was over fifty. She let him stay in her room, screamed her passion to the high heavens before he ran away, robbing us blind in the process.

The casket factory is about to close, moving to Arkansas where labor is cheaper. When that happens we’ll lose a good percentage of our business. I tell my wife we should call Brenda’s bluff, pack up what we need and go. Change names and appearances if we have too. Linda says, like it or not, she’s still our baby, and we have to work through this rough patch. The other day I saw in the paper that Earl Reese’s daughter got engaged to someone who seals driveways for a living. Mentally Carla’s VCR display has been blinking 12:00 for years. I shouldn’t be saying this but, compared to Brenda, Carla Reese is a prize winning poster girl for butt ugly. The photo of her fiancée puts him in the gargoyle category. It was all I could do to stop from calling Carla and warning her about what could happen if they had kids. I didn’t do it, but I might give Earl a heads up. He and I go way back. It’s the least I can do.