Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [20]
“Gabe, let go of me,” she gasped, her heart pounding. She thought of the baby. She wondered where Cunningham was hiding, that coward. Gabe’s hands were too tight on her. She recalled the tender way he had touched her an hour before. Their most brutal fights always came on like this; quick, unexpected, and fierce.
“I don’t want you here,” he said.
“Too bad. There’s something I have to tell you. We need to talk.”
“I don’t need to do anything. This is my place. Now go.”
“Gabe—if you won’t talk to me now, then it’s over,” she said, terrified.
“It’s over,” he said. He let the door close, and she stood alone in the hallway for a moment. Then he reemerged, and her heart soared pathetically until she noticed the suitcase in his hand, her aunt Ann Marie’s old Louis Vuitton. She thought of how all of this misery was their own construction—there was nothing stopping them from ending it now if they really wanted to, just going back inside and watching some baseball, and being happy, making a family together, making a life. And yet.
“Have a great trip,” he said, putting the suitcase on the ground at her feet and letting the door slam.
An old familiar feeling washed over her, the one she’d get every time they had a fight and she walked out of his apartment, slamming the door behind her; or every time she gave him an ultimatum that he brushed aside by telling her to leave. The act of leaving felt empowering.
But then she’d stand in the lobby of his building for ten minutes, make circles around his block for twenty, hoping he’d come after her, feeling the weight of her gesture, her penchant for the proud and the dramatic screwing her as usual.
“You’ve got moxie, butterfly,” her grandfather used to tell her when she was a teenager.
Yeah, well. In the end, moxie always seemed to come back and bite you in the ass.
Kathleen
Kathleen woke to the synchronized impact of a fat, speckled tongue running over her nose and a heavy weight pressing down against her right thigh.
“Get off me, you savages,” she said, opening her eyes. They kept at it, the tongue now slobbering across her chin, leaving behind a trail of drool. Kathleen wiped it away.
“Okay, I’m up.”
Mack and Mabel were full-grown German shepherds. He weighed eighty-two pounds, she weighed sixty-eight. But they danced about the bed like a couple of puppies, scratching her bare arms, mussing up the sheets.
“Cool it, you two,” she said in a fake stern voice. When it came to business matters she could be tough, but she had never had a knack for discipline, not with Maggie and Chris, and not with her dogs.
They calmed down after a bit, lying side by side in the now empty spot where Arlo slept. It was Sunday, but he had left at the crack of dawn to give an eight o’clock presentation to a town’s worth of Junior Girl Scouts in Paradise Pines, two and a half hours north.
Mack and Mabel panted, despite the fact that the room was cool, a swivel fan aimed toward the bed. Kathleen felt momentarily sad. She had rescued them when they were days old, from a litter of pups someone found abandoned on the side of Route 128. What kind of person would do that? To this day, she couldn’t fathom it. Now her babies were somehow fourteen years old and completely worn out from a few minutes’ worth of play.
She rolled over and burrowed into Mack, who burrowed into Mabel, for a sort of three-way spoon. This was how they had slept every night before she met Arlo. When he came along, he insisted the dogs sleep at the far end of the bed or, preferably, on the floor. Which explained why Mack still snubbed him, even ten years later.
From the time she was a kid, she had had a fondness for strays and lost creatures. How many evenings had she taken home a dog she’d found wandering around, only to have Alice say she’d have to let the dog go? Kathleen