by Kristin Bair
Hours into the storm, the bombshell news anchor with ripe breasts barely contained by a blue seersucker jacket reports that highways have slowed to a crawl, and when she passes the baton to the weather team, glee drips from their faces like fat from a roasting pig. In New England, there’s nothing like a good nor’easter. For newbies, the blonde one explains in a driving, breathy voice that mimics the one she likely uses during sex: “Nor’easters are brilliant storms along the East Coast of the United States. With them come extremely heavy rain or snow, flooding, coastal erosion, and hurricane-force winds.” Her face is pinked up, and Agatha expects bubbles to shoot from her ass as she announces, “Get ready, people, this is just the beginning.”
By Tuesday evening, the “thank goodness this isn’t snow” post on the Moms page has garnered 439 likes, 67 amens, and something in the realm of 1,309 snowman emojis.
“It is true,” Agatha says to the tomato plant. “If this were snow, we’d be screwed.”
The shed debris gets soaked for the first time. The snowblower, ride-on mower, push mower, drills, saws, rakes, shovels, hoes, picks, and even the hatchet from hell all get drenched. Rain saturates the earth, and hundreds of nails, screws, and bolts sink into the mud. The mammoth, monogrammed tool chest Agatha gave Dax on their fifth anniversary tips over and its wheels spin in the gale-force wind. When Dax drops off the boys, he whines about the state of things. “Do you have any idea how much that snowblower cost?” he says. “The ride-on mower? It’s bad enough you destroyed the shed, but letting all these tools get ruined, too?”
Agatha gulps. In little more than two weeks’ time, the reason she destroyed the shed has escaped Dax’s memory, along with the fact that sales of her middle-grade series paid for most of these toys. She thinks about the police officer who sat with her just after the incident, the one who had never read Their Eyes Were Watching God, who’d never been stunned by the power of Janie Mae Crawford or her magnificent grapefruit hips, the one who’d believed Agatha was the destroyer and the shed the object of destruction, the one who’d seen the splintered wood but not the shards of her family, her marriage, and her heart piled up all around.
Agatha does not respond to Dax’s rant. Instead she snaps a photo of the shed debris in the rain and posts it to Infidelity: A Still Life. The wet red fender of the ride-on mower gleams brightly in the headlights of Dax’s car.
Dax pulls open the kitchen door. “I need to get a few more things.”
Agatha looks up at him from the porch swing. “From now on,” she says, “if you want to ‘get a few more things,’ you’ll need to make an appointment. You have thirty minutes. After that, I call the police.” She hopes he doesn’t test this pronouncement. She’s quite sure the police will care as much as the woodpecker.
Tap tap tippity-tap.
Listening to his footsteps heading up the front stairs to what used to be their bedroom, she notes that tiny bites have been taken from the underside of the still-green tomato. “Someone nibbled your low-hanging fruit,” she says.
Chipmunk?
Squirrel?
Groundhog?
Susan Sontag?
Agatha nods. Damn skunk.
Tap tap tippity-tap. Even in the torrential rain. Tap tap tippity-tap.
Agatha pulls her blanket close and listens to the boys greet their dad. Their cries are gleeful and loud. Louder than the rain. Louder than the woodpecker.
She looks beyond the remains of the shed to the street. The hill that climbs in front of their house is steeper than most in Wallingford. It’s one of the big reasons Dax fell for the house ten years before. That and the massive glacial boulders that dot the yard. “When you walk up Sutton Circle and see our house halfway up, you know you’re heading somewhere and you have to do a little work to get here. It’s a symbol for marriage and us,” he’d said when they’d decided to buy. She’d been holding newborn Dustin in her arms and they were all in love. Deeply in love. Forget Agatha’s fears. They could survive anything.
Anything, it turns out, except the dog walker.
Agatha can’t remember when Willow Bean started using Sutton Circle as her daily route, but she knows that for at least a year, maybe two, GDOG had been the subject of her and Dax’s daily shtick. “There she is again,” one of them said nearly every morning. “Woof! Woof!” Then they’d call out the breed of pup she was walking.
“Dalmation!”
“Pug!”
“Mastiff!”
It became a game of who could name the breed first. Sometimes Agatha won. Sometimes Dax. Occasionally the boys took the prize, but they worked as a team and cheated using Google. All of them failed whenever GDOG walked the Shih Tzu. Dax always yelled, “Pomeranian!” The boys tried out various possibilities, including Afghan, Yorkshire terrier, and poodle. And that little furball always made Agatha think about a kumquat-eating Havanese that had lived next door to her growing up. In fact, that had been her name, or maybe her nickname, Kumquat.
In all those days/weeks/months, the dog walker never slowed, spoke, or waved. She never showed any sign of even noticing the Arch family, let alone Dax. She just walked up the hill and down the hill, earbuds in place, doing her job, firming up those hips.
Agatha hates this history. This story that will become romantic lore for Dax and Willow Bean.
Chihuahua up the hill.
Labradoodle down the hill.
Bernese up the hill.
Scraggly mutt down the hill.
Ridgeback up.
Beagle down.
Surly shepherd up.
Surly shepherd down. (That one needed a lot of exercise.)
Pitbull up.
Chocolate Lab down.
Dachshund up.
Shaggy something down.
Muddy mutt up.
Australian shepherd down.
Boxer up.
Maltese down.
She wonders how in the world she was able to name so many dog breeds over the days/weeks/months but miss the slow seduction of her husband. The rhythm of those grapefruit hips drawing him in.
Dax up.
Dax down.
Dax up.
Dax down.
Dax up.
* * *
Even on the morning of the shed incident, Dax had looked up when the dog walker passed and said, “Corgi,” winning the game once again. Then he’d bent his head to the sports section of the paper.
* * *
The rain stops by noon on Wednesday and bullet-force winds clear the clouds from the sky. By midnight the moon is so hot and shimmery that when Agatha spots Kerry Sheridan making her way through their yards, Kerry is shining like a star that has fallen to Earth. Who would have thought Captain Complainer could look so beautiful? Mary Cassatt could have painted her. García Márquez could have written about her. But when Agatha realizes that the beautifully illuminated Kerry Sheridan is crossing their yards toward the remains of the shed carrying a bag the size of her own body, she cries out, hobbles down from the porch, bends into the wind, and sets off after Kerry. No one is clearing that debris. Not the We Haul It All gents, not Dax, not Agatha, and certainly not Kerry Sheridan.
“Kerry!” she hollers. “Kerry Sheridan, stop right there!” She’s loud, but her voice is toted away by the gale. Nearly horizontal, Agatha pulls her mega-flashlight from her spy pants and zaps Kerry with its beam. Kerry freezes, swings a look back at Agatha, and pushes on.
Agatha pulls a bullhorn from her pants and lifts it to her mouth. She pauses and glances at the boys’ bedroom windows. Dark. No sign of movement. Thank goodness they’re heavy sleepers. “Kerry Sheridan!” she shouts. Her voice cuts through the roar of wind.
Kerry stops and turns to face Agatha. She cups her hand to her ear, shrugs, and feigns innocence.
Agatha trods closer. “Kerry, what are you doing?” she yells into the bullhorn.
“What do you think I’m doing? I am cleaning up this mess.”
“No, no, you’re not. This is my yard, Ker
ry. Your yard ends over there.” She gestures with the bullhorn.
“This is not a yard, Agatha, unless you’re calling it a scrapyard. It’s an eyesore. A hideous eyesore. A hideous eyesore that I have to look at from my living room. Your hideous eyesore.”
“The key word in that sentence is your, Kerry. No matter what you call this area,” Agatha waves her arms, “it is mine. Mine, mine, mine! You can’t touch it without my permission and you do not have my permission.”
Kerry yells something back but the wind sweeps it away. She leans down, picks up a bucket, waves it at Agatha, then stuffs it into the bag. Next she grabs a gardening glove. A screwdriver.
“Put those things down, Kerry! Put it all back!” Agatha pushes deeper into the grass and hobbles toward the debris. When she gets close, she climbs onto an overturned wheelbarrow and leaps onto Kerry’s back. She wraps her arms around her neck.
Kerry tips sideways and falls to the ground. “Agatha! Agatha Arch? What are you doing? Get off me!” she yells.
“Not until you put all that stuff back.”
The two roll this way and that in the tangled grass until they slam into Dax’s gigantic toolbox.
“Ow!” Kerry struggles to her knees, rubs her head, drops the bag, and surrenders. She crawls toward home, disappearing into the protective ring of forsythia bushes.
Agatha stays on her back and watches clouds whip across the moon. “A soufflé of clouds,” she whispers.
The wind is brutal. In any other year, she would have raced inside and written about this altercation. In any other year, this altercation wouldn’t have taken place.
“Write hard and clear about what hurts,” Hemingway once said. Easy for him to say. He was a man. A man among men. A hairy, chase-the-bulls, scratch-the-balls kind of man. But still. Agatha stands and dumps the bits and pieces of shed debris out of Kerry’s bag back into the hideous mess.
* * *
An hour later, she sits on the bottom step of the stairs leading up to her office. Bear sits on the second stair, bolstering her brave. She Googles “voodoo dolls” on her phone, and while this particular search turns up nothing productive, she discovers that Etsy offers a few options for “reflection dolls,” dolls created in the “likenesses of your loved (or not so loved) ones.” Close enough. Agatha can make it work.
“Attach a clear photo of each desired model when ordering,” the instructions read. Dax would be easy enough, she had so many photos of him, too many photos of him, Dax standing, Dax sitting, Dax bending, Dax climbing, Dax smiling, Dax frowning, Dax laughing, Dax pretending to be a bear, and so on, but a photo of GDOG? That would take some work.
The red door taunts her from above, so close but yet so far. Bear nods appreciatively from his perch.
“Look at us,” she says to him. “Two steps up. Progress.”
Chapter Ten
Every story has a beginning. A genesis. An Adam and Eve. An apple. A sneaky serpent. Therefore it must have been so for Dax and Willow Bean. Right? A glance. A whisper. A breath. A dropped leash. A slipped collar. A dog treat.
But maybe there is something even before that. Maybe every story begins before the beginning.
With a shadow, a twitch, a fractured something.
“Maybe,” Agatha thinks, “this is where I should begin with the Interloper.”
She moans.
A moan of lamentations.
She writes that down.
Then she opens The Book of Saint Albans, first edition, 1486. It is a treatise on “hawking, hunting, and heraldry,” written, supposedly, by a nun and sportswoman. Agatha appreciates the supposedly and the mystery of authorship that has taunted scholars for centuries. The Olde English is a tangle of squiggles and whorls, but she unravels the collective nouns that call to her: a slewthe of beerys [a sleuth of bears]; a sege of herons [a siege of herons]; a synguler of boores [a singular of boors]; a multiplieng of husbondis [a multiplying of husbands].
This one stops her. The last thing she wants is a multiplying of husbands. One husband is/was more than enough.
A noonpacyens of wyves [an impatience of wives]. This one makes her laugh.
She likes this mysterious, ballsy author-nun and adds her to her imagined zephyr of friends.
* * *
Agatha’s agent blitzes her on Twitter. “Hey Beautiful,” she writes, using thirteen of her allotted 140 characters to woo. “You still out there? Looking forward to new ms.”
Crap.
Crap.
Shit.
Crap.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Been kidnapped,” Agatha types furiously. “Send $$$.”
This will hold her agent for a bit. She loves funny stuff.
* * *
“In a past life,” Agatha tells Shrinky-Dink, “I’m pretty sure I was one of those beggars used as bait in the Roman Colosseum.”
“Really?” Shrinky-Dink never shows much interest in Agatha’s past life banter. Not the “I once was a worm” story she often shares when big fears pop up or the “I was one of Joan of Arc’s minions” tale she told a million times before Bear replaced Joan as her guiding light.
“Yep. When the lion shot up through the trap door in the floor from one of those underground tunnels, I lasted all of ten seconds before it caught, smothered, and shredded me to bloody bits while the Emperor and his Senators cheered and jeered.”
“You remember this?”
“Vaguely.”
“And this experience in what, AD 100, solidified your fate almost two thousand years later?”
Agatha growls like a lion and nods.
“You’re afraid of beans today because you were devoured by a lion in the Roman Colosseum in a past life?”
“It’s possible.”
“Agatha, technically anything is possible, but not likely. Do you see the difference? Any other thoughts on why you fear so many things?”
“I was born this way.”
“Too easy. What else do you have?”
“When I was three years old, I got my head stuck between the bars in a fence at a mall. This was before they all started using that safety glass. Have I told you about this?”
“No, and this is a real story, not a past life story?”
“Real as you and I sitting right here, right now. I was trying to see the Build-a-Bear store on the first floor and I stuck my head through the fence. When I went to pull back and follow my parents, I couldn’t. I was stuck. A guard had to pull the bars open a bit in order to release my head.”
“That must have been scary.”
Agatha smiled. Finally, a bit of respect. “It was. For years I dreamed my parents left me there, head stuck out over the open space, looking down longingly at the Build-a-Bear store. Every once in a while, a mysterious hand would reach in from behind and stick a cheese doodle into my mouth.”
Shrinky-Dink nods and leans a little closer. She likes dreams.
“And when I was six,” Agatha says, “my dad insisted I learn to swim. ‘I’m done with this nonsense,’ he said, referring to my insistence on staying in the shallow end, then tossed me into the deep end of the pool and walked away. I couldn’t even doggie paddle. The lifeguard saved me.”
“At six you couldn’t doggie paddle?”
“No, I was afraid of the water.”
“Even before your dad tossed you in and left you?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Agatha raises her eyebrows. “Aaaaand, we’re back to the lion in the Colosseum.”
Shrinky-Dink ignores her. “What else?”
“Well, you already know about the flies and Dracula.”
Shrinky-Dink nods. “Keep digging.”
Agatha turns and swings her legs onto the sofa, then lies down with her head on a pillow. Even though she can’t see Shrinky-Dink now, she knows she’s giving a private cheer. Agatha never lies down. Much too vulnerable a position.
“When I was seven, my parents moved us to a n
ew town and a new school. It was torture. I hid in a bathroom on the second floor for the first three weeks.”
“Did anyone look for you?”
“No one remembered I was supposed to be there. My new teacher assumed they’d moved me to another class.”
“Who finally figured it out?”
“A janitor found me and called down to the office.”
“What else?”
Agatha is on a roll. “When I was eight, my mom’s best friend died. She was one of the best people in my little world and she just out-of-the-blue died. No one had ever died in my life before.”
“What was her name?”
“Susie. She was funny and didn’t distinguish between adults and kids. She just talked to us all in the same way. I liked that.”
“What happened?”
“One morning before school, my mom was sobbing in her favorite chair. Crying and crying like I’d never seen her cry. I asked her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me. She just waved me off to the bus stop.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes. I worried all day. At dinner that night, my dad put a piece of meat loaf on my plate and said, ‘Susie died this morning.’ That was it. ‘Susie died this morning.’ No explanation. No hugs. No books about death and what it means. No discussion of heaven and hell. Just a slab of meat loaf I was expected to finish. You know, the whole clean your plate thing. A few days later we went to the funeral home and my mom made me look at dead Susie in her coffin. I didn’t have a clue what ‘dead’ was.”