by Rod Vickery

Created on: March 22, 2009

Talbert's Genealogy
Chapter 2
With Veteran's Day festivities safely tucked away for another year and his right pinkie under control, Talbert returned to his temporary, part-time job at Harris and Forthright Accounting Services where he crunched numbers for wealthy clients. To ensure continuation of his unemployment checks, the company paid him under the table.

In the trade, he was known as a reliable whiz, a moniker he earned by skirting IRS tax audits for some of Orange County's most notable business personalities, including Donald Bent, a real estate magnate and Republican Party stalwart. Though Talbert questioned his career choice, he seldom discussed work misgivings with anyone outside his immediate family.

Except Hilda Whitney, a massage therapist who each Thursday crunched Talbert's atrophied shoulders when Mildred wasn't up to the task. He trusted Hilda because on the one occasion she accidentally touched his johnson, she ignored the resulting projection with an aplomb normally accorded operatic tenors who miss notes but continue singing unperturbed to a bewildered and appallingly uninformed audience. Talbert never cheated on his wife, but the temptation presented itself whenever he was encased in the artistry of Hilda's massaging hands.

He loved Mildred, an affection that had only multiplied in intensity since she had resolved to remove her moustache. A few dark, spider leg-like hairs above her upper lip seldom distracted Talbert, but when in full bloom during stressful times Mildred's moustache reminded him of his late Aunt Jessica who touted the benefits of what she called parallel masculinity. A woman with hair growth in all the wrong places, she claimed, "made for a balance of the masculine and feminine traits."

His Aunt Jessica idolized the American suffragettes who, at the turn of the last century, demanded separate but equal votes for women. Talbert recalled fondly the first time he heard her mention the suffragettes.

It occurred on Thanksgiving Day, 1964, the year his mother undercooked the family turkey. Everyone of note was present, he remembered, including his half brother, Pork, who years later disappeared during a safari in Tanzania. Talbert's father dismissed any notion of foul play, suggesting the "poor bastard drank himself silly and got run over by a rogue elephant." After that, Pork was never again mentioned in the Pressler household, but his father's reference to drink alerted an impressionable Talbert to his family's propensity for the

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