Why They Run the Way They Do

by Susan Perabo

  “This is it,” he’d told her. “I swear to god, she’s not going to last the day. You can’t take him away now.”

  “We’re going, Simon,” she’d said. “You’ve told me eight times she’s not going to last the day.”

  It was true that the dog had been dying for a long time. The vet had said it would probably be only a matter of a few weeks, but it had now been well over two months without a lasting, significant decline. Some days she wouldn’t touch her food, but other days she ate with the vigor and single-mindedness of her healthy self. Many evenings she stared dolefully at him with what he was certain were pleading eyes, and he would prepare himself to put her down the following day. But then the next morning she’d explode out the front door and across the lawn after a terrified squirrel. It was like anything else, Simon thought. As it turned out, you could never really tell what the next day of your life would bring. Most of the time even the weathermen were wrong about tomorrow.

  But this day, Saturday, was the worst yet. She hadn’t eaten since Thursday, had been unsteady on her feet when going outside to pee on the damp leaves that covered the yard. And she hadn’t even wagged her tail when the doorbell rang.

  “The dog’ll probably outlive us all,” Rachel said. “I’m not giving up this trip.”

  So what could he do? He watched his son kiss the dog (on the lips) and the dog thumped her tail once. This was a powerful tail, a tail that had knocked Charlie down at least twice a day when he was a toddler, a tail that had swept glasses and candles off tables, a tail that could sting shins like a belt. One thump was what it had left for Charlie, and one thump was what he got. And then, Sunday afternoon, Simon had been on the couch watching the game and the dog was lying next to the TV. She’d been making sounds, little moans in her sleep, for weeks. Midway through the third quarter he became aware that she was no longer moaning, though he could see the rise and fall of her fur as she lay on her side. He put the game on mute and watched her, rise and fall, rise and fall, no moan, rise and fall, a little flutter of the eyelids, rise and fall. And then: nothing.

  He counted to ten, then to twenty, then another slow ten. Still nothing. His eyes moved back to the TV. He watched a down; a penalty flag was thrown. He and Rachel had found the dog tied to a concrete post in the garage of Rachel’s apartment building. This was before they were married. He had his own place but spent most of his time at hers. They’d said hello to the dog for three days, coming and going from her car. Then one night he’d gotten up to go to the bathroom, and something (more than a compulsion, but not so fully formed to be an idea) made him go down to the garage and the dog was there, asleep on the concrete, and it was 4:30 in the morning so he knew the dog really belonged to no one, and so he untied her and brought her up to Rachel’s apartment and when she woke up she said, “Is there something breathing on my feet?” and they had both laughed about this for years afterward.

  The thing was, he’d promised Charlie a funeral. The dog had been a sack of cancer for over two months, time enough for him and Charlie to discuss what would happen. Either Simon would take her to the vet to have her put down, if she seemed in too much pain, or she would die at home. After that, they would bury her in the backyard. Charlie had written out the order of the service one night, while the dog lay at his feet under the kitchen table. The sheet of paper was magneted to the refrigerator.

  Opening Remarks

  Simon Winter

  Remembrance

  Charlie Winter

  Guitar Solo

  Charlie Winter

  Burial

  Simon Winter

  Sprinkling of Dirt

  Charlie Winter

  Song

  All

  Charlie had known the dog his whole life. Family and friends had often joked that Charlie was actually Simon and Rachel’s second child. A year ago, in the messiest stretch of the divorce, it seemed they might fight over the dog, too. But then Rachel had relented. It was going to be hard enough, she said, shuttling Charlie back and forth every Wednesday; to share custody of the dog was madness. And, Simon knew, there was more than a little guilt involved. She was throwing him out. There was, finally, a limit to the damage you could inflict on a person all at once. Let the man have his dog, for Chrissake. And so he had moved a few miles away to a small house in a cluttered neighborhood, and soon enough the dog learned that this was the way things were going to be, and she stopped straining at the door when Rachel came to pick up Charlie.

  Simon descended the stairs again. It was Tuesday night. He’d taken the last two days off work. He could not leave the house with the dog in the freezer. What if he was killed in a car accident? Someone eventually would find the dog in the freezer and think he’d gone insane. Maybe they’d even think he’d killed her, then crashed his car intentionally. Would Rachel believe this? Would Charlie?

  The phone rang and he was so startled that he dropped it; it clattered down the stairs and he rushed to retrieve it, then struck his head on the banister so hard that when he straightened up for a moment he thought he was going to faint.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” she said. “I know I said we’d call. I’m sorry. There’s no access at this place and—”

  “She’s dead,” he said. “I’ve been trying to call you since Sunday. She died. She’s dead.”

  “Oh, my sweet baby,” she said, and he knew that if he’d been able to tell her in person that they would have embraced now, that it would have been the thing that finally overshadowed everything else and he would have gotten at least one goddamn decent moment out of all this. But like this, three hundred miles away, he gained nothing from her sadness. Her grief was as worthless as his own.

  “Do you want me to tell him?” she asked.

  “I’m not going to fight you for it,” he said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I just meant—”

  “When can you leave?” he asked. “Can you get home tonight?”

  There was a pause. Then: “What?”

  “Can you leave tonight? If it has to be the morning it—”

  “Why would we leave?” she asked.

  “We have to have a funeral,” he said. He crossed the basement to the freezer. “I promised him we could have a funeral.”

  “You can have one when we get back,” she said. “It doesn’t matter when it is, does it?”

  “I have to bury the dog,” he said. “I can’t just—”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “You haven’t buried the dog? When did she die?”

  “Sunday,” he said. “Before dinner.”

  “Well, where is she? At the vet?”

  He opened the lid and looked inside. “She’s in the freezer.”

  “The freezer. Our freezer?

  “My freezer. You got the fridge; I got the—”

  “The dog is in the freezer?”

  “I told you, we have to have a funeral. He and I have—”

  “Stop, Simon. Listen to me. Bury the dog today and then you can have the funeral when we get back.”

  “There is an order of service,” he said. His ear hurt, and he realized he was grinding the phone into the side of his head. He switched to the other ear. “He had a plan and the burial is part of it and I’m not going to take this from him.”

  “Don’t pretend this is about him,” she said. “I think he’ll be willing to change the order of service, just maybe, so that the dog doesn’t have to lie in state in your basement.” There was a pause. Then she said, “Is she frozen? Is there, like, frost on her and stuff?”

  “Her tail’s like a stick,” he said.

  “Jesus, Simon,” she said, tenderly, though he thought the tenderness was more for the dog than for him. “Bury her, please.”

  “Bring him home,” he said.

  “We’ll be back Sunday,” she said. “My parents have waited a long time for this trip with him. I’m not going to just sweep him away because you’re too messed up to bury your dog.”<
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  “It’s his dog, too,” he said. “He wants to give her a proper burial.”

  “He’s eight,” she said. “I think a memorial service will suffice.”

  “Put him on the phone,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Not when you’re like this.”

  “Put him on the fucking phone or I’ll call the lawyer.”

  “Simon,” she said. “Jesus, Simon, he’s not even with me, okay? He’s out with my dad. Will you call somebody, please? Will you call Jerry or your sister or somebody? You need somebody to—”

  He touched the dog’s icy stomach. “You remember that time in the park when she picked up that turtle? You remember—”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not doing this. We’ll call you tomorrow, okay? Get yourself together and we’ll call you tomorrow and you can talk to him. And we’ll be home in a few days. I have to charge my phone, okay? I have like one bar left and I have to stand in the middle of this town to get anything. I swear to god I’m standing in the middle of an intersection right now.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I understand. You only have one bar left. You’ve only had one bar left for about the last five years.”

  “Good-bye, Simon,” she said.

  And then, abruptly, she was no longer beside him in the basement but instead standing in the middle of a snowy intersection in a little town in Pennsylvania. He pushed the off button on the phone, looked down at the dog. Once, when the dog had stepped on a nail and gotten six stitches in her paw, Rachel had made a bed on the living room floor and they’d all spent the night huddled together like a litter of puppies. He imagined her now, at the snowy intersection, blowing into her hands. Her knuckles were bright red. He imagined holding her cold hands, squeezing them between his own, until her fingers broke.

  He had some drinks. He could have called someone. He could have called his friend Jerry and Jerry would have come over and had drinks with him and talked trash with him about Rachel and told sweet stories about the dog, but frankly he was not interested in anyone intruding upon his misery. After Rachel had thrown him out his sister had come over every day for two weeks. She’d cooked for him and done his laundry and said lots of encouraging things and finally he’d asked her to please stop being so supportive and go home.

  Now it had been almost a year since the split and his sister and some of his friends were trying to fix him up. His sister had told him he was a hot property, that for every date-able guy in his midthirties there were ten datable girls. He didn’t doubt this was true. But he didn’t want to date anyone. Dating was awful, and he resented he’d been put in the position to endure it again. He was supposed to be finished with that part of his life. He’d done it already, had succeeded at it, found the woman he wanted to marry, and that was supposed to be that.

  That she had someone else was what he’d thought, of course, when she’d sent Charlie to her parents a year ago and said they had to have a serious talk. There was someone else—it hit him with complete clarity and certainty—and as he sat down at the dining room table across from her he could picture the guy perfectly and instead of anger he felt sheer panic, like he was blindfolded and standing on the edge of a building. And then she had said this thing:

  “I don’t know where I’m supposed to end up, but I know it’s not with you.”

  And then she had apologized! “I’m sorry, Simon, I got the sugar-free ice cream; I’m sorry, Simon, I forgot to take the dog out; I’m sorry, Simon, I don’t know where I’m supposed to end up, but I know it’s not with you.”

  For a moment after her apology he ceased to be a man and existed merely as a cliché. The wind was knocked out of him; his mouth fell open; his vision blurred. His actually felt a stabbing pain in his heart, as if she’d gone after him with a couple of her knitting needles. Who knew it could really happen like that, just like on TV? All the obligatory crap, it all came down. The weeks that followed proceeded like an endless colonoscopy, one indignity after the next. And now his dog was dead. So it was only right that he have a few drinks.

  At 3:15 the next afternoon the doorbell rang. It was Lucy, the high school student who gave Charlie guitar lessons. Lucy kept her hair in a long braid and wore faded flowery skirts thay swayed at her ankles. She lived down the street and came every Wednesday after school to work with Charlie on songs like “House of the Rising Sun” and “Five Hundred Miles.” Simon had forgotten to tell her not to come this week; when he saw her shivering at the door his heart briefly lifted, so he invited her in and got her a cup of tea and sat down with her in the living room. When she asked after the dog, who usually greeted her with at least a healthy wag, he told her she was in the backyard.

  “Is Charlie out there?” she asked. She propped her guitar against the arm of the couch.

  “No,” he said. “He’s not home yet.”

  “That’s weird,” she said. “But sometimes the buses run late.”

  “Yes,” he said, with an air of finality he hadn’t intended. The room fell silent, no boy’s footsteps or dog’s pants to fill the space. She sipped carefully at her tea. Unable to think of anything else to talk about, he added, “Do you ride the bus?”

  “Not anymore,” she said. “My boyfriend has a car. But I used to. Do you remember when the guy was run over in the school parking lot? That was my bus that did it.”

  “Really?” he said, though he had no memory of the event.

  “He died like that,” she said, snapping her fingers in an approximation of instant death. “It was the last day of school. Someone dared him to lie under the tire, and he did it because he didn’t think the bus driver was even on the bus, but it turned out the driver was just bent over picking a candy wrapper off the floor, and then the driver sat up and pulled forward.”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t know him. He wasn’t in my grade or anything. But it was still horrible.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “You want to hear the really freaky part?”

  “It gets freakier?”

  She nodded. “They said they got a new bus, over the summer, because a bunch of parents called and said they shouldn’t make the kids ride a bus that killed somebody. So on the first day of school the next year we had a shiny new bus with a new number. But then I sat down in my seat, the third from the back, where I’d always sat since third grade, and ever since third grade there’d been this little flap in the seat in front of me where I could stick my gum in the morning and pick it up again in the afternoon, and I thought now I’d have to swallow my gum because I wouldn’t have the flap anymore. But guess what?”

  “What,” he said.

  “The flap was still there. Even my gum was still there, inside it; I never picked it up the afternoon of the accident. It was gray. The gum, I mean.”

  “It was the same bus,” Simon said.

  “Exactly,” she said. “They just painted it and gave it a new number. I wrote a song about it: ‘You Can’t Just Change the Number.’ You wanna hear it?”

  “Wow,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  She reached for her guitar, pulled it into her lap. “It’s kind of a metaphor,” she explained.

  “Cool,” he said, sitting forward in his chair.

  She strummed one note, a particularly sad one, Simon thought, which was odd because it seemed like a note should not be able to be sad on its own but only in its relationship to others. But then something stopped her—he could see it come across her face, the realization that something in the house was off, even corrupt—and she lay her hand over the strings to silence them.

  “Aren’t you worried about Charlie?” she asked. “He’s really late.”

  “Charlie’s on vacation with his mother,” he said. “And the dog’s not in the backyard. The dog’s dead. She died on Sunday.”

  “Oh no,” Lucy said. “Oh, Mr. Winter, I’m sorry. She was a sweet dog.”

  “She never tore anything up,” he said. “Not one shoe. Not one piece of mail
. And she’d even let you give her a bath, you know? She’d just stand there while you held the hose on her.”

  “I know,” Lucy said. She stood up, holding her guitar in front of her. She looked slightly nervous, Simon thought. Well, he reasoned, he’d outright lied to her; maybe she had a right to be nervous. “Listen, if Charlie’s not here, I think I should probably get going,” she said.

  “You want to stay for dinner?”

  “It’s quarter to four,” she said.

  “We could have an early dinner,” he said. “I could put some burgers on the grill.”

  “Mr. Winter, it’s like forty degrees outsi—”

  “Your boyfriend could come,” he said. “And your parents. Are they home? I could call them.”

  He had an image now of a yard full of neighbors, though except for Lucy he didn’t know a single one of them by name. In the picture in his mind he was standing at the grill wearing an apron that said “Top Chef.” He was surrounded by a crowd of trim people with gleaming white teeth. They were all laughing and drinking beer; an attractive black man slapped him jovially on the back. The scenario was so familiar that for a moment he thought this had once been his life, a life snatched from him by Rachel. Then he realized he’d seen it all recently in a TV commercial.

  “Never mind,” he told Lucy. He stood and walked with her to the front hall.

  “Did you have her cremated?” Lucy asked. “When my dog Willoughby died, we had her cremated and then we sprinkled her ashes at every house on the street. All the places she used to pee.”

  “She’s in the freezer,” Simon said, opening the door for her. He was suddenly very tired from all the company at the pretend barbecue.

  “What freezer?” she said. “You just have that dorm fridge.”

  “I got a full-size freezer in the divorce,” he said. “It’s in the basement. I had some Bomb Pops in there but I threw them away.”