Homebodies Read online

“Whatever.” Todd turned back into the living room and spoke over his shoulder as if it would be the last word on the subject. “We’re not keeping the dog.”

  Em grabbed her own plate, resisted the urge to chuck it at the back of Todd’s head like a ceramic Frisbee, and followed him into the living room. “You don’t get to decide that. You don’t just get to make decisions for me.”

  “You didn’t even ask me first. You don’t seem to mind making decisions without me. Shouldn’t it work both ways?”

  “Sure, but other than having to share the sofa, this decision doesn’t affect you, and it makes a big difference to me.”

  “What made you just suddenly adopt a dirty dog?”

  “He’s not dirty. I washed him three times. He smells like coconuts.”

  “Tell that to his breath.”

  “I didn’t think about it. I didn’t have time. We were running away from a man we saw. Red just jumped in the car, and I drove off. But he’s a good boy and he deserves a nice place to live as much as anybody. I’d have taken him home if he’d been wearing a tag, but he just had an old collar on and nothing else.”

  “Em, we don’t need a dog.” Todd was almost to the point of yelling at her, but in a moment of silence, his face began to shift from stubbornness to something more like concern. His eyebrows drew together thoughtfully, and he grew quieter again. “What man at the dump?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t stop to talk to him.”

  “Did he come after you?”

  “He was far away. I doubt he saw me.”

  Todd pinched the center of his nose. “Are you sure it wasn’t the gate guard?”

  “Of course. He waved to me on the way in like he always does. This was someone different. I mean really different.”

  “You saw someone? I mean human.”

  “They’re all human, Todd.”

  “Damnit, Em. You know what I mean.” His eyes flashed with real anger and his voice deepened to a tone that was all fear and commanding.

  “Yeah. I did.” She knew he wouldn’t believe her, but his reaction to this information was darker than she expected. She regretted telling him at all. She wished they had the kind of relationship where she could tell him things and he wouldn’t accuse her of being crazy, but that wasn’t the way of it.

  Todd’s voice had returned to disbelief, and his eyes aloof, scathing. “That’s impossible.”

  Em shoved a hunk of potato into her mouth that she picked off her plate with two fingers. “I thought it was impossible too, but he was throwing garbage bags around like he was looking for something. Most people don’t do that when I see them in the dump.”

  “What did he look like?” Todd seemed like he was saying something that was quite different than the something he wanted to say. Lines formed on his forehead with the effort of restraint.

  She half wished he’d scream at her. Sometimes his patience, his self-control was the worst thing. It made him cold. How could someone be both cold and loving? That was the real impossibility. “He was tall and had black hair. He was far off; I couldn’t really see his face or anything. He had legs like a spider.”

  Todd seemed to calm even further. He released the bridge of his nose and returned to fathering her like she was some over imaginative child. “Em, honey. You know you didn’t really see anything.”

  Emily set her plate down on the edge of the sofa knowing good and well that Red was going to have at it before she could finish, but her stomach was in knots anyway and there was no point in forcing food into it. Red immediately went for the plate, and in his excitement of licking the thing, knocked it into the floor where it shattered on the carpet. Emily jumped slightly at the sound but didn’t bend down to pick up the pieces. “I’m not crazy, Todd. I know what I saw.”

  “I believe you thought you saw someone, but you couldn’t have seen that, honey. It could only have been, I mean, it couldn’t have been a real person.”

  Emily crossed her arms over her chest and tried to quell tremors of frustration in her arms. If he were going to be cold, then she also would try to be. “What the hell does that even mean? All people are real people. It’s not like there’s some factory out there cranking out fake humans and sending them out in the world to confuse me. I wouldn’t even have seen him if it weren’t for Red. Red saw him first, so I know he was there.” Logical enough, she believed, even for Todd’s strict sense of information processing. He couldn’t dispute the validity of two pairs of eyes.

  He didn’t even try. “Babe, I get that you’re lonely, and maybe we can talk about getting a dog that hasn’t been living in a dump, but you’re obviously having deeper issues if you’ve started hallucinating.”

  He was barely even listening, so convinced that she was crazy that no amount of evidence would convince him otherwise. She felt fire rise to her eyes. “Yeah, I’m having issues, and they are all you. I wasn’t hallucinating. I saw him. Why do you treat me like I’m insane?”

  “I don’t treat you like you’re insane.” Todd rolled his eyes.

  This only exacerbated her annoyance and illustrated her point. “You think I’m insane about you treating me like I’m insane.”

  “Because you didn’t see anyone!” Todd was yelling now. She couldn’t understand why he’d be so enraged. It didn’t matter to them if she saw something or she didn’t. If she did see someone, that person was far away and didn’t know where they lived. If she didn’t, which she was sure was not the case, it didn’t matter because it wasn’t real. His evident outrage most likely did not have the effect he intended.

  It only made her feel colder, sullen. “Tomorrow use that machine at work to make Red a new tag and bring home the stuff to put in a doggy door.”

  “You are not keeping the damn dog!”

  “Then you are not keeping your damn wife.” It wasn’t even a threat. There was nothing in her but flatness. “Do what I said, Todd. Or I swear to God, I’ll build you a house in the yard.”

  Todd snorted and rubbed his forehead; his face was quite red, but he’d returned to his condescending parent voice again. “You don’t want me to think you’re insane, but you’re acting like a maniac.”

  “I doesn’t matter if I act normal, or crazy, or cold. You’ll keep treating me the same way. You don’t change, even if I do.”

  “Because you always act like you’ve lost your mind.” He was beginning to pout.

  The fact that he was attempting to sway her sympathies only pissed her off more. “You think so? Just wait. I have not yet begun to show you crazy. I’m keeping the dog. It’s not a request. It’s not a conversation. It’s not even something that’s about to happen, it has already. You can get the hell over it, and next time the garbage starts piling up you can take it to the dump yourself, like before. I hate that place.”

  Todd’s face went pale; his voice hollowed and dropped to almost nothing. “What do you mean, like before?”

  She could almost think he’d been more afraid than angry just then. She couldn’t blame him for feeling afraid. She’d seen it with her own eyes and run like hell. Even the dog had been afraid. She felt her emotions ebbing back to calmness. “You used to take the garbage out, when the trucks still came, you took it to the curb.”

  “You remember the trucks coming?”

  She felt confused enough to procced with caution. She wished she’d grabbed a couple of the orange road cones to help her navigate her marriage. “It wasn’t that long ago.”

  “Why would you suddenly think about that?”

  “I don’t know. But you did it before, and you can do it again. I won’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m serious, Todd.”

  “I said okay.”

  6

  That night Todd slept downstairs. Emily thought he didn’t really mean to; it didn’t feel like he’d deliberately avoided their bed. He fell asleep on the sofa while he watched movies, and she curled up with Red in silence like stone. She thought maybe, as she and Red headed u
p to bed, that he would wake up in the night and come up stairs to join them, but when she woke up in the morning, with sweaty feet because Red was sleeping on them, Todd had left them alone all night and had already left for work.

  Sleep was enough to cool her temper and kindle her regret. Though she had no intention of giving up her new furry friend, because she was already completely in love with Red, she still felt bad about the way she’d brought him up to Todd. She had only wanted to surprise him, to knock him off his guard, but sometimes she was a real bitch and didn’t realize it till long after the fact. Sometimes she even felt bad about it. Red lifted his head and stared at her sleepily.

  “I did a bad thing, Red.” Red wiggled up the bed, crawling on his stomach to lay his head on her chest. “I need to fix it.” The heat of the dog radiating through her was comforting, but she laid there feeling like a crappy person for another ten minutes before she had absorbed enough snuggles to motivate herself. She pushed the dog gently off, so she could climb out of bed. “Breakfast first.”

  To the idea of food, Red heartily agreed; he leapt off the bed and squirmed by the door impatiently waiting for her to throw on a robe and follow him downstairs. She heated up some water for a cup of cocoa even though it was too warm for it, then threw a slab of meat for Red in the microwave to take the chill off. She didn’t bother with the plate and dropped it directly on the floor. She was pretty sure he’d clean up his own mess, and Red had swallowed all of the meat and was lapping at the tile before she peeled her apple.

  His back half was cleaning the tile, his tail wagging as she rooted through the cabinets. It had been a while since she decided she needed to make some kind of offering of apology, and the last thing she wanted to do first thing in the morning was any kind of cooking, but she decided after a few minutes to make Todd some snickerdoodles. They were his favorite, but she almost never made them due to cooking related homicidal rage. It had been so long, she couldn’t even remember the last time. She couldn’t remember Todd ever telling her that his favorite cookie was a snickerdoodle, but she felt confident in the information even though it floated seemingly unconnected to anything else.

  Before she did the awful deed of crafting apologetic cookies, she cleaned up the broken plate in the living room, then went outside to the garden to pluck weeds and soak up a bit of sunlight. She needed all the emotional fortitude she could get, not just for cooking, but for the task of apologizing. She was able to stay incredibly silent while she worked, and aside from a few sad cries, Mr. Johnson left her alone, even with Red dashing around like an idiot.

  When she finally did come back inside, it took less than an hour to finish the cookies. They turned out well, which was a complete surprise, and she managed to get through baking without breaking, burning, or throwing anything. She put the warm cookies in a plastic container and packed them in her backpack. She also packed the other necessities of travel, snacks for both human and dog, extra ammo. When she was ready to leave she went rooting through the garage where she found some thin rope that would work as a leash. Red let her tie it to his collar, but she stood there looking at the rope and felt bad for tying him after he’d lately been used to roaming so free. She had the feeling that she probably didn’t have to leash him at all, that he wanted her around as much as she wanted him, which was a lovely feeling, even if the only person who wanted her around was a dog. She untied the rope and Red sat down at her feet.

  There was no smart reason to walk. The neighborhood, despite the upper middle-class veneer, had been especially dangerous lately; still she had the opposite problem from Red, she spent too much time tied up, and needed a little while of breezes and exercise. She did not count going to the dump as either breezes or exercise, except for the running away. Red was not remotely tired from his laps around the yard and made it very clear when she opened the front door that he would enjoy a bit more room to burn off his indefatigable energy.

  The plan was to walk to Todd’s workplace, which wasn’t particularly far away, so she reasoned that between the dog and herself, they could keep each other safe. Todd worked at a local hardware store that was only about a mile and a half from their house. He’d taken the job at a pay cut because the previous company he worked for installing solar panels had gone under. The frustrating thing, he told her, was not that the company had failed, but that it had only failed because its CEO was defrauding the company into bankruptcy. He felt like his, and all the other employees’ hard work had gone to waste. Todd missed working outside, but he didn’t seem to hate the hardware store either. He’d gotten a promotion to manager, though she couldn’t recall how long ago that had been, and he was a tough boss.

  A little under an hour later when she and Red strolled into the door of the hardware store, she said hello to the cashier who was zip tied to the counter next to the register. He was a tall, balding man with a big pot belly that made him look older than he probably was. He’d probably taken too many smoke breaks and was longing for another cigarette, because he groaned with frustration as she and Red went by. She felt a little sorry for him. The zip tie was cutting into his wrist and a small glob of black had formed around the tie. She gave him a smile, hoping to cheer him up a bit, but he only groaned again and chewed the air as though it were made of nicotine.

  It took a while to find Todd. She walked across practically the whole store and all she found were more zip-tied employees and a customer wandering through the appliances. She and Red slipped down an adjacent aisle to give the customer some space, because the customer looked like she had questions about refrigerators and Emily didn’t want to be called on for an opinion. The customer was banging a fist against a refrigerator door hard enough to hear at some distance, and Emily could hardly blame her for her irritation, since there weren’t any employees in this part of the store at all. It was always that way though, there was never someone around when they were needed, and fifteen employees crowding an aisle when they were just stocking shelves and getting in the way.

  She found Todd in the manager’s office, leaning back in his computer chair with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling light. She watched him for a minute to see if he’d notice her, but Todd sometimes had the situational awareness of a sloth. She finally had to get his attention, because she couldn’t determine if he was sleeping with his eyes open. “Todd?” She said from the door. “What are you doing?”

  He sat up so quickly he almost slid out of the chair, and he sputtered out his answer. “I’m on break.” His surprise wore off quickly. He frowned, first her, then even more so at the dog. “What are you doing here?”

  “We wanted to come and see you.” Emily scratched Red’s ears to comfort him, but it was a useless gesture. The dog didn’t seem perturbed.

  Todd’s frown deepened. He leaned forward in the chair, propped his elbows up on the desk, and crossed his arms. “You can’t just show up at my job like this. I’m on the clock.”

  He sounded completely fatherly again. She’d never thought about it, but she wondered if he used that same voice to his zip tied employees to keep them in their sections. ‘Now Frank, I think you’ve had one too many smoke breaks today. Give me your hands so I can zip you to the counter. You know this is for the best.’

  She sighed but tried to sound chipper. It wouldn’t do to pick a fight when she was there to apologize, even if he was making her want to apologize less by the minute. “I thought you said you were on break.” She took off her backpack and put it on his desk. “We brought you something.”

  He looked at the dog, his nose scrunched in skepticism. “We?”

  It was impossible to keep the eye roll from her voice, even if she managed to keep her eyes still in her head. “Obviously, me and Red.”

  “So?” Todd blinked at her as if she was going to spring some other terrible surprise on him at any second, like maybe she found a few cats and squirrel she also intended to keep.

  “I made snickerdoodles.” She pulled the plastic container from h
er backpack and thrust it toward him. “You said they were your favorite, didn’t you?”

  She thought he’d be pleased, maybe even happy, but Todd looked as though someone had let his air out and he slumped in his chair like a flat tire. “I didn’t know you remembered that.”

  She didn’t understand why he wasn’t even a little grateful. She thought maybe she had remembered incorrectly, and he was actually deathly allergic to snickerdoodles or they gave him diarrhea or something. “But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah.” He took the box of cookies and peeled off the plastic lid. He didn’t take one, but he stared at them in the container as if they were some kind of oddity which might jump out of the box, attach themselves to his face, and proceed to suck out his brain. “Thanks.”

  She was starting to feel sad, which masqueraded as frustrated. Why couldn’t cookies just fix everything? “I wanted to say sorry. I know I’ve been weird.”

  Todd stopped studying the snickerdoodles to examine her instead. “It’s fine,” he said, but she felt like he was still expecting some sort of malicious end game.

  “No, it isn’t. I shouldn’t just crap on you every time there’s something wrong with me.” She put the brakes on just in time to keep from adding, ‘now eat your fucking cookies.’

  “Really.” Todd stared back at the cookies, trying to avoid looking at her. “It’s fine.”

  “Okay.” She said, though not really feeling as much ease to her conscience as she had hoped, and much more annoyance than she’d anticipated. “I guess Red and I should go. By the way, you’ve got a customer waiting in appliances. They seem pretty annoyed already, might help if they see a manager.”

  Todd nodded and grabbed a long-handled axe that was leaning against the drawers of his desk. “I’ll go take care of them.”

  “Okay. Enjoy the cookies.” Emily gave him half a smile and prepared to go, but Todd reached out and got hold of her arm. “Wait a minute.” He paused as though he were considering what to say. “I don’t want that customer to think I’ve been in here slacking off. They’ll just get angrier.”