She looks to Jake for validation, but he is taking a water break.
“I stopped by to pick up a book Jill borrowed.” I blink, slowly. Anna used to say this called attention to my azure blue eyes, but Dorothy is staring at the orange jumpsuit. “I am a phone repairman.” My voice is leaden, as if I am reading from a script. “You know,” I say. “Phones.” I pick up the receiver of the Andersons’ phone and wag it as if to say, Here is an example of a phone I would be qualified to repair. I want Dorothy to start talking so I can stop talking. The need blankets me like summer heat.
Finally, she says, “Book?”
I point to the swollen missive on the counter.
“I don’t have my glasses.” Dorothy squints to read the title. Her face relaxes.
“You caught me.” I raise my hands as if guilty of something. “Self-help, I’m embarrassed to say. Renovation of the soul.”
“Woman as Tree.” Dorothy frowns. “Poor Jill.”
“Yes.” My smile falters. “Poor Jill.”
“I walked Jake this morning, but I feel like I forgot to put his leash back in the vestibule.” She makes a move to walk past me.
I block her way. “It’s there.”
She advances and I back up. We are now in the archway. I affect a casual lean. The only thing separating Dorothy from a room of demolished records and a homicidal twenty-year-old is my untoned arm. I flex. My bicep, if it’s possible, shrugs. In the other room, I hear the sound of a cocked gun.
“Dorothy,” I say. “I saw the leash not five minutes ago.”
“Well, if you’re certain…” Dorothy does not know whether to believe me, but Dorothy wants to get to where she’s going and I have very nice eyes. I read all of this in hers, which she lowers to Jake, who has placed his two delicate front paws on her knees.
“Jake-eroo!” she says. “Jake Jake Jake-eroo!” The dog begins to jump again with renewed vigor.
“This has been fun,” I say. “I’ll tell Jill she has a wonderful neighbor.”
Dorothy looks up from the dog. “Ramon, was it?”
“That’s my name.” I lead her to the door and open it.
“And you’ll make sure he has enough water before you leave?”
“Absolument,” I say.
“Oh,” she winks. “French.”
Dorothy jogs away. I make a big show of waving to her through the kitchen window. Then it’s just Jake and me.
…
I met Mars when I did his family’s house and found him sleeping in a back room. He threatened to go to the police so I took him on. Mars is the name I gave him. He said it could be like a Red Beard pirate thing, with him eventually taking over and me sailing off into the sunset. I said, Let’s do the Anderson house and see how it goes. He’s young and has time for a few bad lives. I’m old; I cut out fast food a couple weeks ago when I excised curse words from my vocabulary and joined the gym.
I want to go back to when I was eating oranges and saying yes to things. Before Anna’s accident fourteen months ago, I knew what it meant to leap out of a chair with enthusiasm. Now my muscles are flabby with disuse, and I don’t think the push-ups I’m doing at the gym are making any difference.
I find Mars upstairs in the master bedroom, pawing through Jill’s underwear drawer. He holds up a pair of red lace undies. “This is what I’m talking about.” He places them under his nose and inhales deeply. “Do you think the husband understands what to do with a thong like this?”
“It’s better not to think of them as people.”
He pins the undies to his face with his nose so they can hang unassisted and tosses his head back and forth. “Do you mind if I take these though?”
“In fact I do mind, Mars.” I rub both temples with my fore-fingers.
I want Jill to run-walk-cry on the treadmill and say to her girlfriend, “They took everything that mattered. My daughter’s jewelry boxes, my husband’s baseball trophies, poof!” I want her to shake her head, locked in the band that pulls her face into a painful-looking grimace, and know I have done her a favor. She will say, I will never take anything for granted again.
We hammer-smash the pictures lined up on the bureau, all of Jill. We karate-kick the antique mirror, donkey-punch the wedding picture.
Mars says, “So you used to be like, what, a teacher? The paper said you were some kind of professor with a wife. That she’s dead but you write them letters about her, and the letters have fancy-ass words like an Ivy League professor.”
I am happy the papers have me teaching at an Ivy League school. It feels like a promotion from where I do teach — a community college classroom that smells like a sandwich. My shoulders tense with unearned pride.
“So what happened?” he says. “Cancer?”
The panties are still on his face. “Will you kindly take those off?”
“Will you kindly blah blah blah?” Mars disappears into the master bathroom.
In Jill’s bureau I find a card from the husband, whose name turns out to be Craig. Amateurish thanks-for-sticking-by-me-through-hard-times crap.
Jill Anderson can put together entire paragraphs using nothing but the word husband. “My husband said… my husband knows… my husband sees….” The fact that he has an actual name cheers me even though it’s Craig, the sound a car door makes when it needs oil. She is a woman who thinks a book can turn her into an oak tree, who has imagined a hole inside her so big it could vacuum up the tables and chairs, the refrigerator magnets, the candlesticks, her two kids, and the husband. That can be the cruelest part of happiness — its tendency to disguise itself in boredom.
“Why is there a lock on the medicine cabinet?” I can hear but not see Mars talking to himself in the bathroom. “Who the fuck locks up their toothpaste?”
“Doesn’t matter.” I check my watch.
“I’m smashing it.”
“Leave it alone,” I yell. I hear a few jarring thumps and the sound of glass exploding.
“Holy shit,” Mars says when the sound settles. “Pluto, come in here.”
Mars stands in front of a giant medicine cabinet, whose doors are now on the floor. Hundreds of prescription drug bottles glimmer inside.
Mars holds one up. “They’re all Craig’s.”
I cross to the hacksawed cabinet and read. OxyContin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, Percocet, Ambien.
“Dude is seriously sick.” Mars whistles. “I know you’re gonna let me take some of these.”
“We don’t do anything with the drugs,” I say.
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
Craig Anderson. Twice a day, three times a day, once daily. Craig Anderson. Craig Anderson. “Not effing kidding you at all.”
“Don’t think of them as people, huh?”
“Stay on task.” I leave, dragging the pillowcase behind me like a bad leg.
He follows, the thong hooked around his ears like a Red Baron cap. “You’re no fun, man.”
…
In Craig’s study, Mars elbow-clears the desk of framed pictures while I stare at a portrait of Craig, Jill, the girls, and Jake the dog. Jill and the girls wear matching summer dresses, Jake wears a complementing visor. A sunset, smug looks, etc.
It’s the only picture of Craig in the house. His nose is bulbous in a pleasing way that probably makes his new clients trust him instantly. It sits on top of a mustache — a sunset on a well-trimmed horizon.
Normally something like this portrait would repulse me. When you are unhappy, other people’s happiness comes off as an affront; innocuous beach pictures are framed fuck-yous. However, Jake looks charming in his visor, jaunty even, like he has just cracked a good-hearted joke to everyone’s delight. A soft feeling unrolls inside my chest.