Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [4]
Stopping at a tag sale on the way to pick up coffee for Christine one morning, he had purchased a pair of lamps and a can opener for eight dollars, stuffing the items into the trunk of his car in the event that he suddenly found himself on his own in need of adequate lighting and a tuna fish sandwich. This was followed by more and more surreptitious Saturday-morning visits to tag sales and flea markets, where he continued to fill his trunk to the point of nearly bursting. Though it took him weeks to accept the inevitable, he wanted to be equipped to move on, knowing in his heart that he might soon be living alone with his best friend, Puggles, whose name he had changed to Skywalker during his first week in the apartment. Though his friends thought him crazy for changing the name of a dog that he had owned for two years, Milo understood that dogs reacted more to tone than words, so an excited, high-pitched “Skywalker!” proved to attract just as much attention from his beagle as did a similarly intoned “Puggles!”
Besides, he had always hated the name that Christine had given the dog.
It had been during their late-afternoon runs that the deterioration of the marriage had become obvious to Milo. Though things had apparently been going sour for some time (at least in Christine’s estimation), he had never suspected real trouble until they began running together in early spring. Despite the never-ending plague of odd and inexplicable demands placed on him, Milo had managed to effectively conceal each and every one from his wife from the moment they had begun dating, and this, in addition to other, more routine efforts to keep Christine happy, should have been more than enough to keep their marriage on a sound footing. At least this is what Milo had thought when they began jogging through the neighborhood, side by side.
Christine had taken up the sport after years of relatively little physical activity, so it had come to as a surprise to Milo when he came home one day to find her doubled over and panting in the kitchen. Though she had always been in fine shape, her late-afternoon runs, seemingly initiated on a whim, had begun to take on an almost religious quality when Milo finally asked to join her. Upon reflection, he should have known that the sudden urge to exercise was a sign of trouble. He had seen married women begin intense exercise regimes before, and it usually signaled one of three things: The wife had experienced a health scare, the wife was having an affair, or the husband had been caught cheating. Though none of these was the case in Milo and Christine’s marriage (as far as Milo knew), he suspected that Christine was attempting to dramatically improve her physical appearance, and he should have realized that few women (or men) are willing to do this for a spouse after three years of marriage.
Christine agreed to allow Milo to run with her, and for the first month, she finished the two-mile route through the neighborhood well ahead of her breathless, bedraggled husband. But as Milo continued to run, his high school cross-country genes began to reassert themselves, and his desire to impress his wife soon had him running stride for stride with her along the course. As Milo’s endurance and speed improved, he noticed that Christine continued to push the pace, running faster and harder as Milo attempted to keep up, until one day, as they rounded a corner in a near sprint, Christine drew to a stop, threw up her hands, and shouted, “What the hell?”
Milo pulled to a stop along his wife, oblivious to the cause of her anger. Though in retrospect the cause should have been obvious, at the time it was not. “What’s the matter?”
“You just keep coming, don’t you? You can’t let me have my own thing! You just have to be better than me!”
“Honey, I’m just trying to keep up with you,” he said