How It All Goes Down
- In September of 1984, Dolores is working as an assistant manager at Buchbinder's (guess that brain tumor of hers cleared up) and Mr. Buchbinder has agreed to help pay Dolores's tuition for college.
- After her first English class, Dolores comes home and talks about all the crazies in her glass: the giant man, the punk-rock woman who paints her toenails black, the teacher who wants people to call him by his first name.
- That night, there's a giant crash, and Dolores thinks someone is attacking Roberta.
- The house is attacking her, though—the ceiling is falling in, and Dolores drags her out of the unsafe room.
- They can't afford the repairs, so they live with the gaping holes in the plaster and take a job delivering Chinese food for extra cash.
- In class, Dolores gets praised for having one of the best essays in the class (she wrote about painting Roberta's toenails) along with Thayer, the seven-foot tall man, who wrote about his son.
- The man, Thayer, asks Dolores out for coffee. She says no, but when she drives away, she sees that he hangs drywall for a living. (Hear that? Sounds like fate knocking.)
- On Christmas Eve, Roberta and Dolores make a Chinese food delivery to Mr. Pucci and Gary, who is all shriveled up from battling AIDS.
- She saves enough money to have Thayer fix the ceiling, at discount, and learns a lot about his family, like his son, who goes by his rap name, Chilly J, the worst rap name ever, unless you're a rapping penguin.
- Over the next few months, Dolores takes more courses, and continues socializing with Thayer and spending time with Mr. Pucci after Gary dies.
- Finally, Thayer can't take it anymore—he needs Dolores bad—so much so that he gets his son to do a rap with him at her door, like a really embarrassing father/son version of Say Anything.
- She agrees to go out with him.
- Still bad with time, Dolores shows up thirty minutes early, but the dinner is delicious, and she doesn't have any complaints about the late-night kiss, either.
- Dolores is a lot more honest with him than she was with Dante, and before you know it, they're on their third date—a.k.a. the makin' babies date.
- Dolores takes this literally, and asks Thayer to father her child. She doesn't want to marry him, or even really date him, she just wants his sperm to meet her egg.
- He's not wild about the idea. (Who would be?)