Homebodies Read online

  Homebodies

  Cheryl Loudermelt

  Copyright © Cheryl Loudermelt 2018

  www.cloudermelt.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below or email [email protected]

  Idyll Owl Books

  875 S. Estrella Pkwy #6882

  Goodyear, AZ 85338

  www.idyllowl.com

  Published by Idyll Owl Books 2018

  Cover Art by Eva van Ginhoven

  ISBN: (Paperback) 978-1-949089-03-5

  (eBook) 978-1-949089-02-8

  For Candy

  Homebodies

  1

  Todd got home at five-fifteen, and because Emily knew Todd was ridiculously routine, her daily irritation began promptly at five-sixteen, one minute after Todd kissed her forehead, threw in a DVD he’d seen a hundred times, and flopped down on the sofa while he waited on her to finish cooking dinner. Part of her, a very small part, thought she shouldn’t be so frustrated with him because he did go to work every day and was probably tired when he got home, but the other, much larger part felt like thwacking him soundly on the back of the head with the nearest pan.

  Irritation was her default mood for cooking anything, a small stubborn piece of her brain getting things done, and a much larger, irritable piece messing everything up by distracting her with thoughts of skull smacking. It didn’t help that Todd had a huge cowlick directly at the crown of his head. It was like he came preinstalled with a frying pan target because God knew he was going to be a pain.

  Since she found it impossible to keep her mind in the kitchen, Emily was a miserable cook. Time failed to improve her abilities. She could make the same recipe seven hundred times and still not increase her chances of it coming out any better. Someone, she couldn’t remember who, had once told her the key to good cooking was to make everything with love, but Todd was just lucky she didn’t spit in the food. To his credit, Todd never complained no matter how bad it was. She wasn’t sure if that decision was an act of kindness on his part or if he had reasonably good survival instincts that told him he’d probably lose his head if he commented on how dry the meat was. Whatever the reason, each day she made dinner, she remembered that Todd never complained, and the small stubborn part that managed remotely edible food would swell just enough to hold back the fury of the frying pan. And eventually, they could sit together and eat, both still conscious and unbroken, at least on a good day.

  This was not a good day. She was in danger of losing both the product of her labor and her self-control. The potatoes were about to boil over, the sauce was trying hard to burn on the bottom, the meat needed to be turned before it charred in the skillet, and she only had two hands and enough skill to handle one of these problems at a time. She did the reasonable thing and called for Todd to help her in the kitchen, and he did the completely unreasonable thing she expected him to do because he was so infallibly routine.

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” He called from the living room, and then laughed at some stupid part of that ridiculous movie he couldn’t possibly still enjoy after seeing it so many times. She imagined his face smiling. He always started out handsome. He kept in shape, which was nice, and he was very tall with soft green eyes and a wide mouth that added something extra to his happiness. But all of that was ruined after an hour or two of his company when the beauty of him shattered and all that remained was a grating feeling, like having broken glass in every pore.

  She was at least four hands short of getting dinner on without destroying it, but she wished for a fifth hand and a long arm to beat him with the heavy iron skillet they only used for tortillas and cornbread. The potatoes boiled over at least five minutes before Todd got off the sofa, and the meat was black on one side and filling the kitchen with smoke. She managed to save the sauce. Little victories, she told herself, mostly to keep from bonking him.

  “What can I do?” Todd asked, watching her frantically trying to salvage dinner as though she were some odd zoo creature who didn’t know how to use human things.

  “There’s nothing left to do now but eat burnt food. I needed you five minutes ago.” She tried and failed to keep coldness from her voice. She was all out of little victories that day.

  “It wasn’t five minutes.”

  Todd rolled his eyes at her, clearly unaware of how close his forehead was to impacting the bottom of a hot pan. “It might have been six.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. I swear it is physically impossible for you to cook something without wrecking the kitchen.” There was a bemused tone to his voice that did not decrease her desire to thump him with a blunt object. “What’s that all over everything?”

  “Potatoes.” She managed through clenched teeth. “I’m making mashed potatoes.”

  “Were you planning on mashing them directly on the stove?”

  “Yes, Todd. I only called you in here to admire my masterful technique of mashing potatoes directly on the stove.” She might have not had the extra hand to slug him with, so she threw pots and pans with both eyes.

  Todd took a step back and smiled his bomb-diffusing smile. “I like mashed potatoes, no matter how you want to make them. What else have you got?”

  She stared down at the meat still smoking in the pan. Every day he asked her what she was making she felt an odd distance, like the floor had become another foot further away. “Uh. Blackened pork chops, I guess.”

  “It almost sounds like you meant to do that.”

  “Yeah. I asked for you to come help so you could admire that too.” If she wasn’t careful, all the food was going to taste like sarcasm, because she was slopping it all over the kitchen.

  He nodded, still grinning at her. “It looks like you’ve got things under control.”

  Like some magical dinner imp, he disappeared into the other room, leaving her to not only finish dinner, but clean up the mess too. She did the cleaning first, both so the sticky parts wouldn’t have time to dry on everything, but also so Todd’s food would be cold. She had one more little victory after all.

  She also left the cabinet doors open because she was short enough to walk under them, but he was tall enough to smash into them with his face and generally not situationally aware enough to avoid that trap before it was too late. By the time they sat down to dinner, Emily had eaten enough vexation to feel full. She stared at her plate, disgusted with its contents, and then around the room so she didn’t have to look at Todd.

  Their house had two living rooms, one was supposed to be a formal room for company, but since they never had company inside the house, it was little more than a mausoleum to Crate and Barrel. The kitchen divided the formal area from the family room, which probably she should really call the couple room since they weren’t large enough to constitute a whole family; it had both the dining room table and their sofa, which was very large and had a chaise on each end. When they’d bought it, Todd hadn’t known what the hell a chaise was. He just called it the feet thing, which was funny at the time, but getting old. Their dining room table was large too, with cushy blue chairs that would seat eight people with ease. It was ridiculous how much extra space they had for two people, but they needed the ridiculous furniture to fill up the ludicrous house, so they could be just as foolish as everyone else on the street. She poked at the burnt meat with a fork prong. It was so stiff she could have used it as a doorstop.

  Todd said exactly nothing, whic
h was either very smart or exceedingly stupid, but she didn’t have the energy to figure out which and still maintain the intensity of concentration it took to shuffle lumpy mashed potatoes around her plate. Eventually, she lost the will for that too and left the potatoes in a misshapen little glob.

  “Not hungry?” Todd sawed at his meat in a way slightly reminiscent of a lumberjack. “You don’t eat enough.”

  “I have lost weight.” It was starting to be a struggle to keep jeans above her hips. “I used to think that was a good thing.”

  “So, eat more. Eat whatever you want for a few days. I’ll stop and get you chocolate.” Getting chocolate was Todd’s way of soothing every argument, and she was beginning to associate the taste with being angry with him.

  “I don’t want chocolate.”

  He set his fork and knife down beside his plate. “What do you want?”

  Sometimes even his patience was enough to make her livid. “Not this and not chocolate. At this point, new jeans would probably be easier.” She stood up from the table and scooped her dirty silverware onto the plate.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere. I just don’t want to eat.” After she scraped the better portion of her dinner into the garbage and put her plate in the sink, she couldn’t bring herself to go back in the room with Todd. He would make her talk when she didn’t feel like talking, and when she did feel like talking he would pretend that she had nothing to say. Instead, she went into their formal room to wander aimlessly until Todd was done eating, and she could finish the dishes.

  She had no hope that Todd would do the dishes. Dishes were not a thing Todd did, and she was pretty sure that he either didn’t know how to wash dishes, or that he was completely convinced a mystical dish fairy took care of that task, meaning his exertion in that arena was never required. She tried to remember that Todd did other things. He went to work every day and never mentioned her getting a job or something even though their house and half a dozen credit cards always kept them in debt. He washed the cars and changed their oil and tires, and he fixed anything in the house that was broken.

  Most things. There were some things he refused to work on, like more effective communication or empathizing with her less logical emotions. Everything else was in working order, but sometimes it was better if they didn’t speak. She heard the soft reverberation of his footsteps in the kitchen, his plate slide onto the counter, and then his retreat into the other room to watch his movie.

  Emily closed her eyes to blink away the nuisance of mildly homicidal images and went to the window. She was proud of the formal room from a decorative standpoint. Everything was soft yellow and grey, with little pops of teal that tied everything together. It looked like the kind of room printed in a magazine, except she bought everything on clearance and had to do some of the work herself. Still, that room always felt a little suffocated because of the boards on the windows. Even though she’d painted them to match the room, she did wish sometimes that she could add a bit of yellow sun to the other shades of yellow there. The boards were Todd’s idea, and even though she didn’t like them, she thought that he should have some say so about the way their house looked since he had to live there too. They’d compromised in leaving little spaces between the boards, so that she could peer between them and into the front yard. It was dark; the streetlights hadn’t worked in ages, but she pulled back one of the curtains anyway to look out on the grass.

  Immediately, she groaned and could not stop the annoyed eye roll that was determined to happen even without her consent. Brown and bloodshot eyes stared back at her from the front yard. She sighed and waved. “Hello, Mr. Turlington.”

  Mr. Turlington growled, and a bubble of tar-like drool formed at the corner of his mouth. The veins in his forehead were black and raised above his grey skin. “I assume you’re here about the landscaping again. Wait here a tick while I grab Todd.”

  She closed the curtain in a manner that was more like slamming the door in Alan Turlington’s face. He was the kind of guy who she was sure didn’t own a single pair of pants that weren’t khakis. It was the only color in the world, apparently, and at any given time, he looked like he was preparing to depart on a private boat excursion, except that he didn’t own a boat, unless she counted the one he floated on in the sea of pretentiousness that flowed from his every cell. He had been the head of the homeowner’s association for as long as they’d lived there, and he was always bitching about the landscaping. Their homeowner’s association rules clearly said that weeds could reach a maximum height of six inches, and she pulled them practically every day, but Turlington just had to complain about something because he was a jerk and wasn’t content unless he had landscaping to bitch about and homeowners to harass. He’d been driving them crazy since they bought the house. She couldn’t remember how long it had been.

  “Todd.” Her voice was quiet but seething. “Mr. Turlington is in the yard again.”

  “Christ.” Todd rolled his eyes and reached beside the sofa for the shotgun he carried to and from work. “I’ll take care of it in a minute.”

  Emily stood in the doorway, her hands shaking because they couldn’t reach out and strangle him. Todd’s eyes didn’t waiver from the television. Sometimes she felt like she could cut off a hand, and he’d put off getting her a towel long enough for her to bleed out. “Give me the shotgun, Todd.”

  “I said I’d do it in a minute.” He wasn’t upset, which only made her more agitated. Sometimes, she was certain he told her that he would do things in a minute, so she would be impatient and do them before he had a chance.

  “I know you did, but you’re clearly very interested in this movie, still, after having seen it so many times, and Mr. Turlington is being polite enough to wait before chewing us out today, so give me the shotgun. I’ll take care of him.”

  “Okay.” Todd pulled his eyes from the T.V. for a split second to glance at her face, which Emily knew was painted with an expression that could leave no doubt of her mood. If he saw, if he cared, he said nothing, and handed over the shotgun. “You have to take the safety off. It’s that button on the side.”

  She jerked the shotgun out of his hand. “I know how to work the shotgun, Todd.” Emily marched into the formal room again, muttering to herself that she knew how to work the stove, and the dishwasher, and the mop, and the guns. She knew how to work the door locks, which she wrenched open so hard she was momentarily grateful she didn’t jerk them right out of the door. She could take care of Mr. Turlington. She could always take care of things because she always had to take care of things, because sometimes the only things Todd knew how to work were the DVD player and the buttons he could push to piss her off. “Todd’s busy, Mr. Turlington.” She smiled in the most neighborly way she could muster. “I guess it’s just you and me.”

  Mr. Turlington reached out an arm and clawed the air with black fingernails. A soft moan drifted across the pristine lawn.

  “I know.” She said, raising the shotgun. “Todd just works so much. I try to do it in the mornings, but I’m sure you understand there’s more to life than yard work.”

  Mr. Turlington took a step forward, unsteady on his feet because one of his legs had been partially chewed through his khakis. Another moan.

  “We do the best we can.” Emily pressed the safety. Red for dead. Did Todd really think she couldn’t understand something as basic as that? It even rhymed for Christ sake. She pulled the shotgun into the pocket of her shoulder and leveled it at Mr. Turlington’s head. She was pretty sure he dyed his hair to match his pants. “I promise. I’ll get on it first thing in the morning.”

  She pulled the trigger. There was a boom, a mist of red and black, a splatter, and some of Mr. Turlington ended up in the bushes and dripping from the leaves. The rest of him fell, the thump muted by their thick green grass. The first thing she did was spray off the bushes with the water hose. The last thing Mr. Turlington would want would be to muck up the landscaping.

 
“You have a good night. Mr. Turlington. Say hello to Brian for us.” She put the safety on and went into the garage for a shovel. She would bury him next to Brian, his son. She thought that's where he would want to be, and there were some lovely unkempt bushes nearby.

  Then alone, she dragged Mr. Turlington’s body to the empty lot at the end of the street where they put all the neighbors who came into the yard too often. She didn’t ask Todd to help. He’d only make her wait.

  2

  It was several hours before Emily made it in to finish the dishes, and by then, she was too tired to be angry anymore. She washed them as loudly as possible, but Todd had moved on to another movie and made no move to come and help her.

  She was wrong to hope for it. She was wrong to hope for anything, really. People had to stop growing eventually. Everything became stagnant and slowed to a crawl. At this point, their marriage was what it was going to be, and it wasn’t perfect, but it was nominally functional, and that was probably the best it would ever get for either of them.

  He didn’t show it of course, but Todd wasn’t any happier with her than she was with him. She was almost never in the mood for sex, and when they had sex it was boring. Todd needed someone who was laid back, but he’d married her, and she was a little high strung. She wondered why they stayed together and thought that maybe the thing they had most in common was their doleful acceptance of something that was marginally good enough.

  By the time she finished the dishes, dried her hands, and went to sit with him on the sofa, she had exhausted her way to inner peace. Being angry and getting over it might be the closest thing they had to real love. She watched him sitting on the sofa, three cushions, and miles away, and wondered if he noticed the difference in her mood between the crappy DVDs.