“What Can’t Be Bought”: a review of Keith Pilapil Lesmeister’s Ask Me About the Money by Catherine Parnell

Ask Me About the Money: Stories
Keith Pilapil Lesmeister
Cornerstone Press
220 pages

Money is a knotty subject and it rules our lives in often painful, sometimes happy, and
mostly constant ways. The cover of Ask Me About the Money: Stories by Keith Pilapil
Lesmeister hints at the dimly lit journey we take when we live by dollars and cents, but Lesmeister’s stories go beyond the debits and credits; they pulse with family and relationships, identity, and Midwestern life. His is a voice to be reckoned with as he carefully paints lives often ignored.

Each story in the collection points to calamity, a social ill or an injustice – an unpaid debt, pornography, petty theft, unexpected death, racism. In “I’d Help if I Could,” Liz, accused of selling cigarettes to a minor, is forced to pay an exorbitant fine by a hard-ass sheriif. But she’s also been hit up by a man who turns out to take and sell pornographic images. She agrees for the sake of the money– and she becomes a stand-in for those who are repulsed by the porn industry. That’s the surface story; beneath it all is the tale of a woman in search of a parent, someone who will have her back. Liz seeks the feel of family, of belonging.

“Fargo” mines the depths of hope and hopelessness. Readers meet a “big, heavy Sioux named Mato” who “was superstitious about how he treated people – that it might affect his fate somehow.” That it does is a near religious experience. When the unnamed narrator says “I’ll never go back to Fargo,” readers feel the clutch of monotony and fear that drives people to drink, as joy leaks out of life.

But there’s love in this collection. In “Fish and Rice” a young boy defends Ava, his Filipino mother from the advances and transgressions of his father’s military buddy who’s come to stay for what turns out to be a time too long. Because of their history, the father tolerates Ronnie’s outrageous drinking, ignoring his family’s safety – all in the name of the camaraderie and the free labor Ronnie can give the family with desperately needed house renovations. About those, Jesse’s father says, he’d never have to do them because “I’d be wealthy enough to hire people to do it for me.” When things pitch out of control during Ronnie’s excruciating attack on Ava, Jesse is pummeled by the man – and the light of love shines right off the page. Money is nearly irrelevant; what Jesse gets can’t be bought anyway.

That’s the beauty of Ask Me About the Money: Stories. The narratives are top-level accounting, but to find the flow of the money you have to dig for the stories’ buried treasure.

Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in The Compulsive Reader, Reckon Review, Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.