Jorie’s bedroom door is shut, but it pops open when Laine turns the handle.
“Jor, I just wanted to say that I’m proud of your history report,” Laine says quietly.
Arms crossed in the pose of an Egyptian mummy, Jorie lies perfectly still, pretending to be asleep, ski-slope nose pointed due north. Laine lets her pretend, goes to the den, and stares at a chart she has opened on a laptop without processing the information.
The dog outside barks, and Laine screams, startled. Then she screams again for no real reason.
The garage door opens and closes and Laine hears Connor’s feet on the stairs. She sets down her book and waits. “How’s your hand?” she asks flatly when he comes into the bedroom.
“It needed stitches.” Something between a laugh and a sigh comes out of his nose. “But I waited too long for them to stitch it, so it will probably get infected.”
“Did they at least clean it?”
“Yeah, and they gave me antibiotics.”
She nods; he nods. He’s at the foot of the bed, so close, and she feels that thing that she’s always felt, but she also feels removed from him, has no idea what it is he will say next.
“I came back to get some stuff.” He looks at the ground. “I talked to my brother; Mona’s got Ryan with her for spring break and Kathy’s in London for business, so I thought I’d go see him. I haven’t been out there in ages.”
“What about the girls—”
“Everything’s cool, I called Tiffany, and she can stay with them after school until you get back. She can sleep over if you need her to.”
“How long are you going for?” Laine asks, stomach loose and hollow.
“A week, ten days.” He shrugs, looks beyond her out the window to the pool, which will stay covered for months. “Jack must be really lonely, he even suggested I bring the girls out for the weekend. They haven’t been to Chicago in a long time, it might be fun for them.”
“Maybe,” she says.
“You’re right though,” Connor says. “I think maybe we need to not be together for a few days. See how things look from the other side, you know?”
Laine hears herself agreeing, hears herself saying she feels the same way.
“My flight’s pretty early in the morning, but I’ll take the dog back to the shelter before I go.” He smiles, and Laine looks up. “You knew I was lying about the fence.”
“Yeah, you’re a terrible liar,” Laine says. “I can do it on my way to work. I fed her and everything, so she’s fine in the yard for now.”
Connor says he can do it, but Laine insists until he agrees. So he packs a duffel bag with jeans and shirts, underwear and socks, tells her he’ll get a room at a hotel by the airport, that he’ll call the girls when he gets to Chicago. Then he’s gone, carried off by the sounds of harnessed metal.
The next day Laine takes the morning off and drives Mouse II to the vet’s office, where the vet tells an incomprehensible joke, and Laine chuckles politely. She spends more than four hundred dollars on shots and flea medication, only to be told that Mouse II has an enlarged heart and will probably only live for a year or two.
“Your family was pretty upset when Mouse died,” the vet says, suddenly serious. “You might want to consider that before you bring another dying animal into your home.”
Laine nods and tells the vet she’ll think about it. But on the drive home, the dog lays its front paws and head on Laine’s lap, and she knows that keeping her won’t be the problem. That part won’t be hard at all; it’s easy to love something when you know it’s only for a finite amount of time.
It’s after noon by the time she gets in, so she calls her office and tells them she’ll work from home, to call her there if they need anything. The dog sits on the floor by her desk, and she rubs its ugly head while she waits for the screen to turn blue and Windows to kick in.
At some point Laine realizes she’s crying, because the dog is on its feet barking at her. She’s never talked down to children or animals before, but she speaks to the dog in a voice that sounds smushed, the kind people reserve for small, submissive things.
“I think you’re the reason I’m going to get divorced. Do you know that?” She bunches the extra skin on the top of Mouse II’s head. “You’re the reason I’m getting divorced, yes you are. Yes you are.”
Hearing the front door open and close, Laine wipes her eyes with the back of her sleeve, tries to inhale the gunk leaking from her nose. The girls look at her hesitantly when they see her on the living room floor with Mouse II. The dog barks a friendly bark, wags her tail.
“It’s okay.” Laine cringes at her own voice, which sounds full of tears and snot and worries. “I took Mouse Two to the vet, and she’s healthy. You can play with her if you want.”
Keelie gingerly sets down her pink backpack, walks toward Laine and the dog as if the carpet were made of lily pads.
“Go ahead,” Laine says, and Keelie reaches a hesitant hand to the dog, who licks it, barks and wags. Keelie likewise giggles and wags. “It’s all right, Jor—”
“This is so like you!” Jorie screams. The dog barks, and Keelie freezes. “You’re all nice to the dog now that you made Daddy go away. You’re always mean to Daddy—”
“Did Daddy tell you that?”
“I’m not stupid.” Jorie throws her backpack on the floor, runs up the stairs, slams (and no doubt locks) the door. The dog barks again, and Keelie looks at Laine with a quivering lower lip—in a minute she’ll be crying. Laine takes a deep breath and tries to smile at her younger daughter.
“So how was school, swee—” she gets out before Keelie starts to howl.
That night Mouse II sleeps in Laine’s bed, head on Connor’s pillow, warm dog breath on her neck. The dog follows her around the next morning as she makes sure the girls are up and getting ready for school. In the kitchen while Laine makes oatmeal, Keelie plays with Mouse II, but Jorie can’t seem to decide what a pro-Connor position on the dog would be. She scowls and doesn’t speak directly to Laine, going so far as to ask Keelie to ask Laine for orange juice.
At her office in the high-rise on Market Street, Laine finds herself online, looking for experimental procedures to cure the dog. Steve Humboldt knocks on her office door when she’s on the phone with a veterinary school in Ohio.
“Everything okay?” he asks when she gives him the go-ahead to come in.
“Sure, sure.” Laine wonders why she’s lying to Steve, whom she’s had lunches and coffee breaks with for more than a decade. By all accounts he’s her best friend. When Connor was sick, Steve was the one who fought hardest to keep her position for her.
“I was just worried. When I stopped by yesterday, Rita said you were working at home. I just wanted to make sure that everything was all right.”
“Yeah, it’s fine.” Laine nods. “We got this new dog, and Conn was out of town. I didn’t want to leave it alone right away.”
Steve sits in the chair across from her massive oak desk. Attractive in the way that all average-looking men with good jobs can be—expensive haircut, well-made suits that broaden rounded shoulders—he looks nothing like Connor, with his pretty, genderless features.
“That’s great, another golden?” Steve seems a little disappointed that there isn’t something more wrong, something that he can help her with.
“No, it’s some mixed breed we got at the pound. You know my kids, they wanted to ‘rescue’ a dog.”
She knows she could tell Steve, he’d listen and give advice. Even though he’s wanted to kiss her for ten years, he wouldn’t do that, unless she made it clear that she wanted him to. And she thinks that maybe someday she will want Steve Humboldt to kiss her. Someday when the white flag has been hung and she and Connor decide that the battle is lost. But now is not the time. So the conversation with Steve ends, and she asks him to shut her door on his way out.
By midweek Jorie slips and speaks to Laine directly, says that her book report on To Kill a Mockingbird was selec
ted by the class to be on display in the school’s main office.
“That’s m’girl,” Laine says.
“Daddy called,” Jorie says. “You’re supposed to call him at Uncle Jack’s.”
Five years ago, while Connor lapsed in and out of consciousness with chemo-related pneumonia, Laine had fainted because she hadn’t eaten or slept in days. Jack had scooped her off the hospital’s linoleum floor, cradled her in his arms, force feeding her peanut M&M’s and Gummy Bears from the vending machine.
“Hi, Laine,” Jack says now, stiff and formal, as if none of that had ever happened. “I think Conn ran out to Starbucks; I’ll have him call you back in a minute.”
“Wait, Jack.” Laine licks her lips. “Can I ask you something?”
There’s a pause, which tells Laine that Connor has confided in his brother, or at least something close to confiding, and she can’t tell if that makes her happy or sad.
“Sure,” Jack says.
“Has he been drinking coffee?”
“Wha— Oh, here he is, hold on.”
A shuffling, words exchanged, Connor is on the line.
“Yeah, I booked a ticket back for Friday. Is it cool if I come back to the house?”
“Of course.”
“I get in around one, but you don’t have to pick me up. I left the bike there.”
“Okay.” She considers telling him about keeping Mouse II, about the girls, about not kissing Steve Humboldt. “So I’ll see you sometime on Friday then?”
She waits for him by the terminal exit, tries to look beyond where security will let her pass. Fifteen minutes after the monitor announces his flight arrived, there’s still no sign of Connor and she wonders if he wasn’t on the plane or if he somehow found some other exit. A strange panic flutters in her chest. Maybe he changed his mind about coming back? Maybe he decided to hop a plane to Rome instead? But then there he is, tall and limby, in a leather coat she got him years ago.
When he sees her he stops, grins, shakes his head.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he says.
“I kept your fucking dog.”
“I know, Jorie told me. I knew you would anyway.”
“Yeah, it’s a good dog. It doesn’t have rabies.”
They get his duffel from the baggage carousel, and she asks about his brother, about Chicago. She wants to ask what he said to Jack, how he explained his strange familyless appearance, but she doesn’t.
“Can I hitch a ride with you to long-term parking?” Connor asks. “Probably quicker than waiting for the shuttle.”
“Actually”—Laine feels herself blushing, and she never gets embarrassed about anything—“you said you had the bike here, so I took the T. I figured I could hitch a ride with you.”
He says nothing about how she hates the Harley, about how she hasn’t ridden it with him since he first got it. Instead he smiles again, nods. During the tram ride to the lot, it starts to drizzle. By the time he gets the motorcycle, it’s raining hard.
“You sure you don’t want to take a cab back?” he asks, starting the bike. “I know you don’t like to ride without a helmet, especially in bad weather.”
She thinks of Connor on the floor next to their dying dog, how if she hadn’t said anything, he would have kept that dog alive forever, taking it outside day after day as if suddenly it would start making urine again. And Jorie and Connor at the kitchen table a month ago, resurrecting the Alamo from Popsicle sticks and construction paper. His daughter passing on the lesson she already knew at twelve, one he hadn’t learned at thirty-six—you don’t get points for fighting a hopeless fight, you just get dead.
Laine’s hair is already wet and cold around her face, and she knows her windbreaker will hardly keep her warm once they get on the road. But maybe Connor was right about the Alamo, too. Sometimes you get recognized for trying, a footnote in a history book and the sleep that comes with knowing you did all you could.
“I don’t mind the rain,” Laine says. “I’ll ride with you.”
He nods and she climbs on behind him, wrapping her long arms around his waist. Fat raindrops pelt her face, so she closes her eyes and rests her head on his neck. At first his skin is hot, but it loses warmth as they continue.
And she remembers five years ago, when Connor was sick, his oncologist warned he shouldn’t take hot showers, that with the anemia he could pass out. Point blank, Connor had refused—“I’ll get out if I feel dizzy.” But Laine had been terrified of finding him slumped against the glass walls, so she had sat on the edge of the Jacuzzi, arms looped around her knees, watching him through the beveled glass.
“Lainey, if you’re going to sit there, you might as well come in,” he said, voice warbled from the spray.
Silently she took off her jogging pants, T-shirt, bra, and panties, pulled open the vacuum of the doors, and stepped onto the rubber floor mat. They rarely showered together because Connor always ran the water too hot, but that time it felt purifying—like they were made of metal and could be melted down, reshaped and changed into other things. She took the loofah sponge he’d been using, squirted on more body wash, and began to clean him. Before running the webbed material against any part of his body, she kissed it. A blessing more than sex—touching lips to a prayer book that touched the Torah during that horrible bat mitzvah. When she finished, he held her, smashed against him. Because of sickness and drugs and worry, their bodies were both stripped down to the bare necessities. Their bones sought their counterparts, his hips reaching for hers, ribs pressed against ribs. They stood under the spray until her fingers shriveled and aged, until it was unbearable, until there was no more heat in the water.
the way
he said “putz”
Unfortunately for Mona, Jack’s girlfriend isn’t a bimbo. Kathy is blond, does have great tits (probably real), and is seventeen years younger than Jack. But the truth is Kathy just made partner at a prestigious firm, has an Ivy-covered education, and probably made more her first year out of law school than any newspaper has ever considered paying Mona.
Still “Blond Ponytail” is what Mona’s sister insists on calling Kathy.
“Jack still making an ass of himself with Blond Ponytail?” Melanie asks when she and Mona have one of their Bloody Mary brunches on a Sunday morning.
“They seem happy.” Mona threads a red curl behind her ear, and lets Melanie be bitchy for her. The girls weren’t close as children, but found themselves single and in Chicago as they slipped into their forties. “Its been so long, I wish them no evil.”
Melanie blows air through her lips, says: “You’re a better woman than I am.”
“Eh,” Mona says, takes another spicy sip. “She can have him.”
But when she gets home from brunch, Mona showers, dries her hair, and reapplies makeup, even though she has no plans for the evening. Waiting for Jack to bring back their son, she puts on new jeans (she may not have Kathy’s cleavage, but she’s still got a great ass), and the kind of sexy casual top that only works on soap opera people.
The doorman buzzes the intercom.
“Jack Reed and Ryan are here,” he says from eighteen stories down. It’s the same doorman as when Jack lived in the building, and Mona wonders if they have the same mindless conversations about sports and the weather they had six years ago.
“Send them up,” she says. Almost as a reflex she fluffs her hair in the mirrored foyer, shoves her lips forward in a pout. She has the door open when the elevator delivers her ex-husband, in pressed pants and a dress shirt, even on the weekend.
Without acknowledging Mona at all, her six-year-old son dashes by her. “SpongeBob is on.” His words float behind him, followed by the elastic voices of cartoon characters.
Jack lingers in the door frame, looking uncomfortable and a little sick, sweat beading his brow, flush across his cheeks.
“Can I talk to you for a sec?” he asks.
“Sure,” Mona says, heart rattling with uncertainty. “Do you want coffee?”
<
br /> Jack nods, and she leads him to the kitchen. The espresso machine—sleek and black with a single button that grinds the beans and brews individual cups—had been something from their bridal registry. But Mona makes the coffee, as if Jack wouldn’t know how.
“Thanks.” He sits at the kitchen table, sips. His bushy eyebrows crimp with worry and he presses his lips into a tight white line. This is the kind of moment she relished when they were together, one of the rare times when he lets her help him.
“What’s up?” She sits in the chair next to his.
“Mo—” He looks at her, his mouth not quite open and not quite closed, like he doesn’t remember how to use it. Realizing what he’s going to say, she stops him so she won’t have to hear it.
“You’re marrying Kathy, aren’t you?” she asks, feeling sobs and screams ripening in her belly. Bowing her head, she rubs the bridge of her nose.
“I’m sorry,” Jack says.
He hadn’t ever apologized for sleeping with Kathy in the first place, hadn’t apologized when he moved out or when he asked for a divorce.
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
And something surprising happens: Mona doesn’t break down. Her sinuses dry up, and she takes Jack’s hand from the table, feels its familiar weight. Leaning into him she touches her lips to his forehead where his graying black hair parts.
“It’s okay,” she says, realizing it’s true as she says it. “And, frankly, it’s about time.”
When he looks at her again, there’s something in his eyes that can only be described as gratitude. It’s a private moment she will share with no one. When she tells her sister, she will let Melanie say things about blondes and home-wreckers, nod, and order another Bloody Mary. But now she holds Jack, feels his torso tremble.
“I’m happy for you,” she says, and he thanks her again and again.
Kathy Kreinhart decided she had a thing for Jack Reed when he called Paul Billings a putz. She’d been a summer associate and Jack had been assigned her partner/liaison because he’d gone to Penn for undergrad and law school and she was on the same track, set to start her final year in the fall. Jack had given her a few assignments, and she’d thought he was kind of cute in a square-jawed, overpriced-haircut kind of way. But when he invited her into his office and told her she’d done a stellar job on a brief she’d helped write, he shook her hand with command and smiled at her firm grip.
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