Don't Disappoint (Ch. 9)

by Martin van Cooper

Jun 30, 2026

Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next seven weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

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According to the rules the monk and notorious fudger Gregor Mendel extracted from his peas, the likelihood of two parents with brown eyes producing a blue-eyed child (brown being the dominant and blue the recessive allele for eye color) is about one in one thousand, give or take. Now if you examine family photos in your neighbor’s house the next time you go fetch the kids from a play date or while waiting for him to tend grill at the next get together, you may notice evidence of the following fact: the actual occurrence of blue eyed boys being born to brown eyed mothers married to brown eyed men is several standard deviations away from the mean in the positive direction, which means, it has been estimated, that upwards of one out of four, or 25% of US American children were sired by someone other than the man they have known all their lives as Dad. About the time he crashed out of grad school and took the job teaching high school freshman Holden Caufield and the Prince of Danes, his close friend since kindergarten Frank Mustard finished his residency and fellowship in GI and went into private practice. As Jason was upsetting his career’s proverbial apple cart and cutting his earning potential by about 100k USD per year, ostensibly in search of some life-fulfilling reward from serving others or whatever, Frank joined a group outside of Strongsville, Ohio which was one of these towns that exploded with home developments in the late ‘80’s when their parents’ generation started reaping the rewards of several decades of post-war American hegemony and consuming their full meals of comfortable middle class life, with bachelor’s (or in many cases only high school) degrees, two-story homes, plus basements, 3 car garages, large green yards with no fences and no dandelions, newly constructed community centers, yearly vacations to Myrtle Beach or Palm Beach and then Vail in the winter, abundant middle brow fast-food at the metastasizing enterprises of Applebee’s and TGI Fridays, no crime, great schools with free sports and free music and art classes and guidance counselors and aggressive D.A.R.E. evangelism (and the now forgotten groups of M.A.D.D. and S.A.D.D., mothers and students against drunk driving, respectively, the latter later devolving into student athletes detest drugs and then, as harbinger of the evisceration of language into vacuous banality, into students against dangerous decisions, before being scrapped more or less altogether), along with free concerts in the park, Home Days at the end of summer (also free), Veterans’ and Memorial Day parades with fire trucks and the Boy Scouts and the high school band and a couple of well attended and non-born-again Protestant churches, plus a Roman and Greek Orthodox Catholic ones, good snow removal, grass cutting and sharp landscaping in public places during the spring and summer, police that were your parents’ age and clean cut and that would stop by the Dairy Queen and talk with your old man whom they went to high school with on hot August nights as the humidity lifted, the sun still painted the sky orange until 8:30 and all the kids got wistful about the last few days of summer. So, Mustard took a job here straight out of fellowship, starting salary for a GI surgeon of 475,000 American greenbacks per year. The group covered malpractice insurance, the lease on the building, all the kit, admin, billing, patient recruitment, EMR, hiring and firing and HR issues for nurses and PAs, so all Frank had to do was show up three days a week at 7:00am and perform appendectomies and resections and hernia repairs until 2:00pm. Basically cleaning up what the ‘80’s and ‘90’s did to our parents’ abdomens. At 475k per. His 7,000 square foot home on 10 acres of land with a dozen massive deciduous trees and even a small stream running across the back, built as part of a glut after the 2008 shit sandwich, was a three-story, 5 bedroom, 4 bathroom, 4 car garage-containing mausoleum that his wife and he bought for 585,000 using his signing bonus of 50k plus some bread from the old man for downpayment. For perspective, Jason’s house in Vanvleck cost $1,725,000 and is just shy of 2,000 square with a one car garage (where you keep all the shit that goes in a normal person’s house’s basement), single story, concrete patio outback that abuts a hillside. Six months into the private practice stint and Frank is thoroughly burned out, doing essentially the same procedures every day and no longer having the energy to chase nurses or the means to build a patient caseload to take on new conditions and hence to perform new and different procedures given the highly managed and slick business model of the practice group.

A word of backstory is necessary here: while in fellowship, Frank and Candace, Candy, were trying fairly seriously to reproduce themselves, for about a year and a half via the conventional means and then, both being scientifically minded (Candy a mechanical engineer) and fairly type A, through a series of specialist visits to examine their respective gonadal health. There was some lighthearted discussion at some point about Frank being a seed that won’t germinate, between Frank and Candy and between Mustard and Jason. There’s a name for this that won’t come to me. Followed by changes in diet, a teetotal stint, changes in exercise. Followed by hormonal treatments for her, in vitro tries before finally surrogacy was broached before fate saw fit to allow one of the oocytes retrieved from her fallopian tubes and injected with his sperm in a Eppendorf tube, which he retrieved, the sperm, following another painful week long sober stint and with the aid of some truly avant-garde domination porn on his phone, which he found was necessary to execute the procedure in the bleach smelling chamber allotted him for this purpose in the fertility clinic, and the egg, the fertilized egg, was stuck in Candy’s uterine wall and grew for 30 weeks, 209 days to be exact, before it wanted out and then spent two weeks in an incubator that reminded Mustard of research he did on chicken angiogenesis during undergrad. There were some not totally obvious but also somehow impossible to miss physical development issues with his daughter that didn’t exactly make her deformed or hard to look at, but that caused you to look away after a few seconds feeling things didn’t come out exactly right, like someone had assembled one of those really detailed, super involved Lego kits of a village or an F15 or a fire truck without the instructions, resulting in a couple extra pieces being included and a couple pieces left over at the end just being kicked under the bed. It looked like what it was supposed to look like, but not like the picture on the front of the box. His daughter was 3.52 pounds at birth and was 8 weeks premature and had no hair and arms the thickness of a number 2 pencil. And his daughter wasn’t, clinically speaking, mentally slow, but she was physically slow and didn’t talk until her third birthday and didn’t eat much other than hot dogs and American cheese and apple sauce and had a sort of mean streak through her, even as a toddler. Candy took indefinite leave from her job (she and Frank didn’t really need the 275,000 per she brought in) and spent her days first with their daughter, feeding her, reading to her, watching her watch TV, taking her to the park and then when she started preschool and then kindergarten, Candy spent her days having compulsive sexual intercourse with one after another trainer from her gym, and then patrons from the gym, and then patrons at the coffee shop next to the gym until one Tuesday morning she was fellating a 19 year-old trainer, a recent high school graduate and former heavyweight varsity wrestler named Dwayne in his car outside the gym in the gym’s parking lot and the manager, who had been caught up in the Candy maelstrom himself a few weeks back saw them, and fired Dwayne on some shaky, hypocritical fraternizing-with-clients grounds, and then other male trainers caught wind of the dust up and steered clear of Candy, causing her to seek out another gym.

While Frank was repelled by her body, Candy became obsessively in touch with it, intensely physical as though all her senses had been subsumed to tactile, like the way the newly tattooed recognize new ownership of their bodies and become enamored with the large canvas that, unbeknownst to them, they had been carrying around with them their whole life and are possessed suddenly with the compulsion to fill it up. So, she had to find new outlets for this curious, unexpectedly awakened need for rough sex with strangers which it turns out is not as easy to find as puerile fantasies would lead you to believe. When confronted with a request to truly dominate a woman, most men wilted into attempts at clever flirtation and then embarrassed retreat or bullshit apologies meant to save face and not look like a pussy or real apologies that the world had treated her so bad that she had to be in this kind of spot where she could only see her self worth through a man degrading her, or some such thing. Or else she would find some truly psychotic bastard that would damn near choke her out (there was more than one of these) or in the case of one dentist she met at tennis, hit her so hard with his belt while entering her from behind that she needed two stitches in her lower back, just to the left of her L4. She did keep a tally, although couldn’t be sure of all the names and faces.

After one year without visiting her bed, during which time she had one form or another of intercourse with 147 men, Frank and Candy got drunk one night when their daughter was at the grandparents and had uncoordinated but, by his estimation, respectably varied and not brief sex in the kitchen and then again in the bedroom on a Friday in December. It was February when Candy told him she was pregnant and gave birth in July to an 8 pound 14 ounce baby girl, with blue eyes to match her mom’s and with, for all outward appearances, every single Lego in exactly the right place.

Ok now let’s come back to the present, or the near past at least, when Frank has bought a new huge house and is almost a year in at a new group and Kelly is 5 and Krissy is 3 and already reading and Frank invites Jason to stop by for a barbeque when he’s in town visiting his mom. It’s when Frank sends Jason into the spare bedroom that he discovers the AR-15, under a sheet in a large gym bag in the closet, trigger locked and no clip and after dinner, when the kids are in bed and Candy has gone to her mother’s house and after 6 or 8 Glen Livets that Frank tells Jason how he found out about Candy might be sleeping around and that he’s weighing his options and that he doesn’t want to confront her until everything is in place and he can pull off a smooth exit with the kids. He felt a pang of relief that stung for a few days but that then was slightly intoxicating, like some short acting hallucinogen, at the realization that she was starting to look around. Reminisce about previous lovers. Maybe even stray given a few more months of inattention and then he would have her, she would be in the wrong and he could end the thing in an ejaculation of sanctimonious rage. But then he found out what was really going on. The word for a seed that won’t germinate: dormant. Some seeds require temperatures in excess of 1000F to germinate, basically a forest fire. They only grow when everything else is dead. The attorney has basically gotten things buttoned up, Frank’s saying, he’s even got deposition from the dentist about the outrageous carnal debasement he subjected Candy to at her request, plus stuff from the wrestler and a half dozen other men saying some things that he never would have thought he would hear about his wife, including about how some of this stuff took place in his house, like transpired in Frank’s own house, with his daughter in the nursery watching TV. It was a little less than a month and it should be buttoned up, Frank is saying. And I have to tell you this: the intern, or legal analyst or paralegal whatever, she showed up wearing combat boots. I’m not fucking kidding you. Combat boots and a red, white and black plaid skirt and a tight black tank top over junior high tits and told me her name was Nethkoolang, which conjured images of trendy urban cigarette brands or athletic gear or some kind of anime. Or renewable energy. And I’m like is this a test or something whether I try to fuck this chick? But she seems good, she did most of the leg work and the attorney signs off on it.

She has no clue it is coming, he said, Candy, and it was the only way, because God only knows. Under your own roof. He was thinking of moving out of Ohio with the kids and just saying fuck it all, and giving it a go in, hell, California, or Texas everyone is moving to now, Austin, and what did Jason think. What no one would have predicted was that Frank’s wife Candy would pick up the children from school at 3:00pm the following Wednesday, four days after they sat drinking scotch on his back porch looking at the leaves which had begun to turn on the gargantuan maples and oaks, and proceed, Candy did, to remove the trigger lock from the AR and load a full magazine and execute both her children as they sat at the kitchen table, apparently, the coroner noted, with neither having the time to react based on something called a spray pattern and Frank read the coroner’s report which could not distinguish who was shot first but stated that the weapon was fired at very close range, probably within 10 feet and although he never saw the photographs from the kitchen, suffice it to say that the destruction done to hard and soft tissue in a child’s body at that close range, particularly on exit of the projectile, was vast and conclusive. Parthenogenesis is the development of an egg into an organism without fertilization.

But the final act Candy had in store for her husband he would in fact discover with his own eyes: the AR-15 operates also in fully automatic mode if modified with what is called a bump stock. In this way, constant pressure between the trigger stop and the weapon’s butt is transferred, through the recoil after each shot, to fire the weapon again. You basically just use the force of the weapon’s discharge to fire itself again, way way faster than you could ever pull the trigger.

Jason hung up after listening to Frank go on for an hour and there was a text from her.

<It’s complicated>

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