by Phoebe Fox
“Hi, Daddy.”
He’d changed too in the last months, in some ways for the better—like my mom, he seemed happier most of the time, the heaviness that had overtaken him during her absence lifted. But now and then it seemed to me he was trying too hard with her, his smile a little too broad, his laughter a little forced. Sometimes I wondered if he was working extra hard to make sure she loved him.
I knew what that felt like.
But I couldn’t Breakup Doctor my mom and dad. They didn’t ask me to, and I wouldn’t have known where to start if they had. They had to work their marriage out for themselves, Stu and Sasha and I had decided. Meanwhile, we carried on as best we could as if everything were normal, I think all of us hoping that by doing so, we would make it true.
“What’s new in your business, Stu?” my mom asked as we started passing around dishes and serving ourselves. “Did you get the Windward Apartments account?”
My brother nodded as he plunked a precariously heaping spoonful of herbed rice onto his plate. My mother cleared her throat and Stu’s second scoop was more moderate. “Yup. Twice-a-month landscape care half the year, and monthly after that, with regular seasonal plantings at the entrances to the parking areas and buildings.”
“Attaboy! Knew you’d win that account,” my dad put in.
“Contract?” my mom asked.
“Two years.”
“Signed?”
“All over the dotted line. Nice and legal, Ma.”
After a few more parental probes at Stu it was my turn. Yay.
“I’ve started doing group therapy sessions for my Breakup Doctor practice,” I floated tentatively.
My dad’s reply was instantaneous: “That’s wonderful, sweetheart.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why would anyone share their personal business like that in a group?” my mom said, and I swear I heard the sound of my balloon popping.
“I don’t know, Mom,” I said, sitting up straighter and looking back at her. “Maybe because I can help them?” My tone was terse. Mom knew how to push my buttons, and I reacted with knee-jerk defensiveness every time.
“I think it’s a genius idea,” Sasha gushed. “People need something like this.”
I gave her a grateful nod.
“Thanks, Sash.”
Mom tightened her lips and said nothing.
Sasha stared at my mom as if she could hypnotize her with her gaze, nodding like a bobblehead.
“Don’t you think so, Mrs. Ogden? That it’s so cool that Brook can help people through their tough times? Don’t you think it’s really great of Brook to want to reach out to more people?”
I knew she was only trying to help, but Sasha was laying it on really thick. My mom would see through it in a second, and it would crush Sasha to be on the receiving end of my mother’s disapproval. I kicked her to get her attention.
“Ow!” Stu said, glaring at me.
“Bedford-Stuyvesant Ogden! We do not shout at the dinner table.”
“She kicked me, Ma!”
“Brook Lyn!”
“Sorry.” I shoved my fork into the rice. “My foot slipped.”
“You shouldn’t be fidgeting at the table.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“You kids settle down,” my dad admonished mildly. “Your mother worked hard on this meal.”
At least it was a new record—this time it had taken almost half an hour at my parents’ house for us all to be reduced to adolescence.
Dinner wrapped up a little earlier than usual—a fact I was grateful for. I didn’t want to leave Jake alone any longer than I had to. Sasha and Stu dropped me off in the driveway before zipping off together.
I was looking forward to having a living creature to come home to for a change, but as soon as I opened my bedroom door my stomach sank.
Big mounds of snowdrifts covered every inch of my room.
Because while I’d carefully dogproofed everything on the floor Jake could possibly get into mischief with, I had neglected to consider that he was six feet tall on his hind legs. And Jake had helped himself to my comforter, all my pillows, and the curtains, shredding everything with his sharp piranha teeth into piles and piles of fluff. It looked like werewolves had had a throwdown in my bedroom.
He looked up with a big proud grin as I entered, raising his head from the pillow cadaver he held between his huge paws, tufts of foam spilling from his mouth.
“No!” I screamed, advancing on him. “Bad dog! Bad Jake!”
He cowered and slinked backward, toward the bed.
“Why?! Why did you do this? I left you a monkey!” I shouted, picking up the stuffed animal and brandishing it at him like a weapon. “I left you a big squeaky banana!”
I’d backed him against the corner where bed and the wall met, and he couldn’t retreat from me any further, so Jake ducked his head, shooting quick, repentant looks at me with liquid brown eyes.
Guilt pinched me, but I couldn’t get hold of my anger. Every single textile in the room was ruined. I reached down and grabbed his collar, and he flinched.
“Outside!” I barked. “Now!” I walked him directly to my back door and nearly shoved him out.
I cleaned up the mess as best as I could, scooping the piles into Hefty bags with a dustpan and vacuuming up the rest. Jake had pulled the curtain rod off one bracket, and they hung askew—what was left of them, which was about three feet that ended in a wet, ragged hem. I pulled them off the rod. Now I had no bedding and no window covering. I guessed I’d be sleeping in my office tonight.
I brought Jake inside and fed him in silence. I’d calmed down enough to be gentler with him, but I was still seething. What was I going to do about the dog for the next however many weeks until Ben’s Cedar Key job was over? It was too late to back out—I was the one who’d talked him into letting me take care of Jake.
He could have warned me, I thought with a flare of resentment. And for that matter, so could his mom. Maybe Adelaide’s show of reluctance to lose the dog was for Ben’s benefit. Maybe the crazy animal had been tearing up her house for weeks already.
“Come on, Jake,” I said wearily when he’d finished his dinner. “Let’s go to bed.”
I changed my mind about the office when I carried an armful of blankets in there and saw my nice sofa. At least in my bedroom, hopefully the damn dog had done all the damage he could do. He trailed me back across the house, and I folded up one blanket for a pillow, then lay down on my bare mattress and drew the other one over me.
“Try not to eat these off me as I sleep,” I grumbled as he collapsed down beside me with a weary hrrrmmfff.
“What’s the matter?” I muttered. “Did you wear yourself out destroying my house?”
Jake lifted his head and nudged my arm with his nose. When I ignored him, he nuzzled me more insistently, and finally I grudgingly gave him a few strokes.
“I’m going to take that as canine for ‘I’m sorry.’ But you’re on probation, dog.” I scratched his ear and he leaned into my hand. “Now go to sleep.”
Like a magic trick, he did—curling up contentedly on the floor beside me and almost immediately starting a low but steady snoring. Between that, the uncomfortable blanket under my head, and the light from a street lamp streaming in through the bare windows, I, on the other hand, was up most of the night.
Jake was definitely getting the better end of this roommate deal. And he didn’t have a radio show to do at six a.m.
thirteen
Even though getting up at four thirty a.m. was among the worst parts of my week, I’d pushed hard for my odd on-air schedule on KXAR, the station where I hosted an hour-long relationship advice show first thing Monday mornings and on the rush-hour drive home Friday afternoons. I figured that the time when people most needed to tal
k to someone was either right before the weekend, when they might be tempted to do something ill-advised, or right after, when they already had.
By six o’clock the next morning I was sitting on my stool on the opposite side of a bank of electronic equipment from Jim Veneer, real name Norm McGayhay, host of the A.M. Drive Time Morning Show, with headphones clamped to my ears. Before Jim had even introduced us both we usually had a lineup of callers, and today was no exception.
He pressed one of the lighted buttons. “Okay, caller, you’re on the air.”
“Um, hi. Dr. Ogden?”
“Morning, caller. Would you like to give me a name?” I asked into my mike.
“Sure. Um.” He faltered. “Ri...er...ban.”
Strung-together phonics—sure sign of a made-up name. But I went with whatever a caller offered me—people calling in about their most naked feelings or embarrassing behavior didn’t always want to lose their anonymity.
“Okay, Rierban. What’s on your mind?”
“Uh, my...my wife. She’s...I think she’s, uh...you know. Probably having an affair.”
Oh, boy. First thing on a Monday morning, that was deep territory to mine. “What makes you think that?”
He was silent for a second, and I glanced up at Jim. When I’d first started coming onto the show he got nervous when callers faltered for their thoughts—dead air was apparently the cardinal sin of radio. But over the last few months he’d gotten a little more familiar with the rhythms of rejection—he wasn’t even looking at me, just sipping his coffee and glancing over some notes.
“Okay.” My caller cleared his throat. “Well, she joined a gym. She lost weight. She’s, uh...can I say this on radio? She got waxed. You know. Down there.”
That caught Jim’s attention. He looked up at me, grinning.
“I take it this is all fairly out-of-character behavior for her?”
“Oh, my gosh, sure it is. She’s never done anything like that in the last forty years, I can tell you. We don’t do that sort of thing. We’re Christians.”
Now Jim was having a hard time keeping in his laughter. I felt a giggle welling up too, but I tamped it down. My caller’s pain was real.
“Well, Rierban, I can see that when someone we think we know inside and out starts behaving differently, it can be disconcerting. Is there anything else that leads you to think she might be looking outside your marriage?”
“Well...” Whatever he was trying to say, I could tell my caller was having a hard time coming out with it. “She’s, uh...Oh, boy. She’s forward with me now. Like, she always wants...it.” The last word was almost whispered.
Jim’s face had turned red and his lips were pressed so hard together to keep back a laugh I worried he wasn’t breathing. I had to look away.
“So she’s getting fit, taking care of herself, fixing herself up, and she takes more romantic initiative with you than she used to?”
“Yes! Exactly!” The relief in his tone was immediately colored with despair: “What do I do?”
“Well, for starters, Rierban, enjoy the hell out of that.”
Jim couldn’t take it anymore—he guffawed. Luckily his mike was off, but I hoped my caller wouldn’t hear it in the background and think he was being laughed at.
“Then make sure your wife knows you’re noticing the changes in her,” I went on.
“What?”
“Does she seem distracted when she’s with you? Does she disappear and you don’t know where she is? Does she not take your calls when you phone her, act evasive or distant with you?”
“Uh, kind of the opposite right now. She’s...” He hesitated and then blurted, “She’s all over me! That’s why I think she’s found someone—it’s got her all, you know...sexed up.”
Jim completely lost it, snorting with laughter; then he was up and moving, letting himself out the studio door with a wave at me behind his head to indicate I was on my own. Good—I had an unharried minute to talk to this caller.
“Rierban, I can’t say whether your wife is or isn’t having an affair. But it sounds to me like she wants to—with you.”
“Huh?”
“What you’ve described to me sounds like a woman who desperately wants her husband—and wants him to notice her, to pay attention to her as a woman, a sexual creature, not just a wife or a partner or the mother of your kids.”
“But...but I respect her.”
“Good! That’s the best basis there is for a healthy relationship. Now show her how much by taking her sexuality seriously. She’s clearly changing—whether it’s her time of life or some kind of awakening she had or just her wanting to shake things up. Find out what it is—meet her there. Are you attracted to her?”
“Of course I am! She’s so beautiful.”
I couldn’t help smiling at his fervent answer. “Okay. Let her seduce you. Respond to her advances. And in between enjoying what I think most callers would agree makes you a very lucky man, talk to her. Find out what’s going on—what she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, what’s changing for her. See your wife—really see her as a separate, growing person. Be a part of her growth. It sounds to me like she’s asking you to be—not as though she’s looking elsewhere for that.”
“Okey doke,” said my caller. “I’ll give it a go. But, uh...”
The door opened and Jim came back into the studio, having managed to compose himself.
“…but what if the old Johnson’s not as reliable as it used to be?” the man finished sheepishly.
The door wasn’t even fully shut behind Jim before he wheeled around and went right back out, his face red. I wrapped it up with the caller, telling him that there were treatments that could help him, and to talk to his doctor. “But most important,” I stressed again, “talk to your wife.”
He thanked me and hung up just as Jim came back in, holding a tiny Styrofoam cup of the bitter station coffee and hustling over to his mike.
“That’s our own Breakup Doctor, working it hard so you can too,” he said on air, winking at me. “Next caller—you’re on the air.”
“Morning, Doc,” an instantly familiar gravelly voice drawled, and my heart slammed into my ribs. What the hell was Chip Santana doing calling in?
“Morning, caller,” I said cautiously. “What’s on your mind?”
I heard a heavy sigh, as if he were exhaling smoke. “Well, I’ve been seeing someone.”
I blinked. “You...What?”
“I mean a therapist. And I’m trying to make amends to some women I’ve, well, maybe not been great to in breakups.”
“Oh?” I kept my tone neutral.
“So my therapist has me writing a letter to one lady I dated, and I’m kind of stuck. I don’t know what to say. And I can’t show up for my next session with my therapist without the letter. She’s a whip cracker.”
I smothered a smile. “Sometimes we need to be held accountable, caller.”
“Oh, I know it, Doc. I need her to stay on top of me.”
Heat poured into my face at the sudden image his words conjured. “E-excuse me?”
I heard his raspy chuckle. “I just mean I’m a dude, Doc. This feely stuff she wants me to write isn’t my forte. You got any ideas?”
Glancing up from where I held my finger poised over the mute button, I saw that Jim was looking at what must be my bright red face with his eyebrows up at his hairline. I needed to get my mind out of the gutter. “Well,” I said, my tone crisp, “I think your therapist might tell you to start with a thumbnail outline of what you want to say to this woman. Just off the top of your head, but from your heart. And then write it out—don’t judge it. Just say what you’d say if you weren’t worried about her reaction, or that you’re being too revealing. You can go back and tweak it later if you need to. The important thing is
to be honest about what you’re sorry for, and apologize—if you’re genuinely sorry, if you’ve truly changed.”
“I am. And I have, Doc. I’ve changed a lot. I promise.”
He sounded so sincere, so eager, I wanted to believe him. “Okay, Ch—caller. Get busy on that letter. You don’t want to disappoint your therapist.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I definitely do not want to do that. Thanks, Doc. See you soon.”
Jim disconnected the call, shooting a quizzical look at me at Chip’s parting words. I just shrugged, nodding at him to put the next caller on the air.
Ben called about ten minutes after the show ended, as I was getting into my car in the station parking lot. I could hear the rumble of equipment in the background.
“Morning,” he said. “Good show today.”
“You were listening?”
“Had it on my computer in the construction office. I think our office manager is hooked on it.”
I pulled the phone away as a loud beeping sounded on Ben’s end. “How can you hear it over all that?”
“That just started. It’s pretty quiet around here before seven thirty. How are you doing with Jake so far? Everything okay?”
Except for the fact that your crazy dog ate my house? Sure, everything’s aces. But all I said was, “He’s all right.”
“I’d totally understand if you changed your mind about keeping him, Brook. The last thing I want to do is make your life harder. You’ve already got your hands full.”
The worry in his voice—and his consideration—made a snap decision for me. “Everything’s fine,” I lied. “Jake’s...very sweet.” That part was true, at least.
“Good.” Even in that one syllable I heard Ben’s relief. “I wasn’t sure how he’d do on his first night somewhere unfamiliar. Sometimes he gets a little scared.”
I remembered Jake’s fearful eyes when I’d literally backed him into a corner. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the oversize dog might be feeling disoriented, taken from his two familiar people and places by someone he didn’t know that well, and then left behind all alone somewhere new.