a murderer, getting Bo all worked up, and Jimmy had yelled, ‘Look, you kids, I was raised on a farm and you got to do what you got to do!’ Then he’d cried in bed, saying how the kittens had mewed in the bag all the way to the pond, and how he wished he’d never been raised on a farm, and she’d almost said, ‘You mean near a farm’ (his dad had run a car wash outside Cortland), but sometimes when she got too smart-assed he would do this hard pinching thing on her arm while waltzing her around the bedroom, as if the place where he was pinching was like her handle, going, ‘I’m not sure I totally heard what you just said to me.’
So, that time after the kittens, she’d only said, ‘Oh, honey, you did what you had to do.’
And he’d said, ‘I guess I did, but it’s sure not easy raising kids the right way.’
And then, because she hadn’t made his life harder by being a smart-ass, they had lain there making plans, like why not sell this place and move to Arizona and buy a car wash, why not buy the kids ‘Hooked on Phonics’, why not plant tomatoes, and then they’d got to wrestling around and (she had no idea why she remembered this) he had done this thing of, while holding her close, bursting this sudden laugh / despair snort into her hair, like a sneeze, or like he was about to start crying.
Which had made her feel special, him trusting her with that.
So what she would love, for tonight? Was getting the pup sold, putting the kids to bed early, and then, Jimmy seeing her as all organized in terms of the pup, they could mess around and afterward lie there making plans, and he could do that laugh/snort thing in her hair again.
Why that laugh / snort meant so much to her she had no freaking idea. It was just one of the weird things about the Wonder That Was Her, ha ha ha.
Outside, Bo hopped to his feet, suddenly curious, because (here we go) the lady who’d called had just pulled up?
Yep, and in a nice car, too, which meant too bad she’d put ‘Cheap’ in the ad.
Abbie squealed, ‘I love it, Mommy, I want it!’, as the puppy looked up dimly from its shoebox and the lady of the house went trudging away and one-two-three-four plucked up four dog turds from the rug.
Well, wow, what a super field trip for the kids, Marie thought, ha ha (the filth, the mildew smell, the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy cane inexplicably sticking out of it), and although some might have been disgusted (by the spare tire on the dining-room table, by the way the glum mother dog, the presumed in-house pooper, was dragging its rear over the pile of clothing in the corner, in a sitting position, splay-legged, a moronic look of pleasure on her face), Marie realized (resisting the urge to rush to the sink and wash her hands, in part because the sink had a basketball in it) that what this really was was deeply sad.
Please do not touch anything, please do not touch, she said to Josh and Abbie, but just in her head, wanting to give the children a chance to observe her being democratic and accepting, and afterward they could all wash up at the half-remodeled McDonald’s, as long as they just please please kept their hands out of their mouths, and God forbid they should rub their eyes.
The phone rang, and the lady of the house plodded into the kitchen, placing the daintily held, paper-towel-wrapped turds on the counter.
‘Mommy, I want it,’ Abbie said.
‘I will definitely walk him like twice a day,’ Josh said.
‘Don’t say “like”,’ Marie said.
‘I will definitely walk him twice a day,’ Josh said.
OK, then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain’t hep it. But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shall we say, of the most respectable . . .
Ha ha, wow, the mind was amazing,