Single, Carefree, Mellow

He left and she imagined him getting into the car and saying to his wife, Maya said she was too busy to write the Libri Foundation grant and there she is getting drunk in her bathrobe!

Well, let him say that. Maya found she didn’t care.

She drank the rest of the bottle of wine and most of another and passed out on the couch. When she woke up in the morning, she had a crick in her neck, her tongue felt like it had grown fur, and she thought she might have low-grade brain damage from listening to Grandpa Jones all night. But Bailey was licking her hand, and Maya realized that she did, amazingly, feel a little bit happier.

Hazelene stopped by at lunchtime with two Middle Eastern platters from the deli and a marrowbone from the butcher. She and Maya ate the Middle Eastern platters but Bailey only sniffed the marrowbone and then lay down next to it, thumping her tail against the floor a few times.

“I’m afraid she doesn’t feel up to eating much,” Maya said apologetically. She thought of how Bailey used to devote herself to getting every last bit of marrow out of bones, how she would spend all afternoon maneuvering the bone around with her nose and scraping with her teeth, making that particular clunk-clunk sound of a dog with a bone. Nothing else makes that sound.

But Hazelene was made of sterner stuff. She got a teaspoon from the kitchen and lay down on the carpet next to Bailey and fed her tiny spoonfuls of marrow. “Here you go,” she said softly, encouragingly. “Isn’t that good? Aren’t you a lucky dog?”

When Bailey wouldn’t take any more marrow, Hazelene still lay next to her, stroking her softly. Maya carried everything into the kitchen and threw the teaspoon in the trash because even though it could be put through the dishwasher and sterilized, she did not want to wonder every morning as she ate her yogurt whether she was using a spoon from which a dog with mouth cancer had eaten.

Then she realized that Hazelene and certainly Rhodes himself would feel the opposite. They would be proud to eat yogurt with Bailey’s teaspoon, probably even before it had gone through the dishwasher. This thought made Maya cry (very quietly into a dish towel) because Rhodes, his mother, Bailey—they all deserved someone so much better.

Dr. Drummond called while Maya was in the shower, and left a message, saying he was calling to see how she and Bailey were. Maya knew that Dr. Drummond did not call all his clients and ask after their well-being, and part of her found this message meaningful and flattering, and part of her just felt impatient. She wanted to call him back and say, Look, my dog is dying and my relationship may be ending, so if you want to get involved with me, let’s just tell each other our stories and see how we go.

Because Maya had a theory that everyone had a story that somehow defined them, both the good and the bad, and that these stories should be shared early on in relationships. If the other person appreciated the story, that meant you could proceed with the relationship, and if the other person failed to understand the depth of the story, or were judgmental, then there was basically no point in further contact. She thought of them as litmus-test stories.

Maya’s own such story was that when she was twenty, she had an affair with an overweight economics professor and the one time they had sex with him on top, he was so heavy he actually bruised one of Maya’s ribs and when she cried, “Wait! Stop! I think you just broke my rib,” the economics professor said, “I haven’t finished yet.”

It was a short anecdote, but Maya found it rich in nuance and meaning. She had once told this to a man she was dating and the man had attempted to explain the story to her, saying, “What he meant was—” and Maya had nearly shouted, “I know what he meant! It’s the fact that he said it!” (Needless to say, she never saw that man again, and she never saw the economics professor again either, outside of class.)

Rhodes’s litmus-test story, which he had told Maya about six weeks into their relationship, was that in high school, his friend Vince Brandigan had slept over and the next morning while Rhodes was in the shower, Hazelene had come up to the bedroom to see what they wanted for breakfast. When she knocked, Vince had shouted “Come in!” and when she opened the door, he was on the bed, masturbating, and obviously had been waiting for her. And although Hazelene had requested after this that Vince no longer visit, Rhodes remained friends with him through most of high school, and had in fact only stopped being friends with him after Vince made the football team and they didn’t have much in common anymore. (A fascinating addendum to this story was that Vince was not only Rhodes’s friend but a neighbor and his parents still lived about four blocks away from Rhodes’s parents. Vince himself presumably still came home to visit his parents, but sadly Maya had never seen him even though she made Rhodes drive slowly past the Brandigans’ house near major holidays.)

Really, this story said everything about Rhodes, didn’t it? Why Maya might want to leave him, why she might stay forever. And actually it also said quite a bit about Hazelene, and made it literally impossible to think about anything else when you saw her after you heard it the first time.

Maya had her recurring nightmare about marrying Rhodes, the one that made her wake up, gasping and panicky. Nothing would calm her except to wake Rhodes, who didn’t mind. He didn’t need much sleep and he said he liked being awake in the middle of the night.

So she shook Rhodes’s shoulder, and said, “I had a bad dream.”

“Again?” Rhodes said sleepily. He never asked what her bad dreams were about, which was just as well.

But he came around quickly and made them cups of tea and they sat up in bed and watched Jeopardy! on the television. At one point Alex Trebek said that the three occupations who did best on the show were lawyers, teachers, and librarians.

“Hey, maybe that’ll be me someday,” Maya said.

“You!” Rhodes hooted. “I can hear you now. ‘I’ll take Curling Irons for four hundred, Yeast Infections for a thousand.’”

Maya laughed and they put the TV on mute and discussed her potential top Jeopardy! categories, which also included Scented Candles, Stephen King, True Crime, and Naps, with a daily double of Famous Women Scientists (that last one was a bit of a surprise, but she had once designed a website for the Women in Science wing of a museum).

By then Maya was calm again, and she and Rhodes made love, and Maya slid back under the covers while Rhodes got up and worked on his laptop. She felt happy, and secure, and relaxed. It was somewhat counterintuitive, considering her dream. But Maya had never really, consistently, thought her relationship with Rhodes made the least bit of sense at all.

Maya took Bailey back to Dr. Drummond, because Bailey would eat nothing now but a mush made of bread and milk, and the tumor in her cheek was almost the size of a grapefruit. Maya sometimes thought she could actually see it getting bigger.

Dr. Drummond sat on the floor with Bailey again and opened her mouth to look in with his light. Bailey struggled, so Maya sat on the floor, too, and helped hold her still.

Dr. Drummond examined Bailey’s mouth for a long time. Then he snapped off the light and looked at Maya. “The tumor is obstructing her throat now,” he said. “She can’t swallow very well and soon she’ll have trouble breathing.”

Maya tightened her grip on Bailey’s collar.

“I think in the next day or two, it will be time,” Dr. Drummond said.

“Time!” Maya said. Her voice squeaked. “But I thought you said two weeks! Before that they said six weeks!”

“I know,” Dr. Drummond said quietly. He didn’t seem to mind her blaming him. “It’s more aggressive than we thought.”

“But forty-eight hours …,” Maya began. It was such a short time. She wanted to argue him out of it.

“Think about it,” Dr. Drummond said gently. He put his hand between her shoulder blades and let it rest there. “Tomorrow or the next day. After that we’re into the weekend, and she won’t make it through until next Monday. I know you don’t want Bailey to suffer. I can come to your house and do it there, if you think Bailey would like that better.”

Maya nodded because she didn’t trust herself to speak.

Dr. Drummond gave Bailey another painkiller shot and some sort of very soft dog biscuit. He told Maya to call when she’d made a decision, and offered to walk her to her car again, but Maya shook her head.

She went out to her car and helped Bailey into the passenger seat. Then Maya got in on the driver’s side, but she did not start the car right away. She was thinking that someday, possibly very soon, she would be a single, carefree, mellow, dogless person, able to date full professors and vets and whomever else she wanted. She wished this thought made her happy. She wished she could feel anything other than the purest, most leaden, darkest gray kind of sorrow.

That night, Rhodes’s parents and Magellan brought over a homemade lasagna, some salad, and a bottle of wine. “I figured you probably didn’t feel up to cooking much,” Hazelene said.

Maya looked at the food, and then at their expectant faces. “You should join us.”

Rhodes was walking through the kitchen, and he stopped, scratching his stomach beneath his T-shirt. “Doesn’t it, like, counteract the helpfulness of bringing us dinner if you stay to eat it?” he asked. Rhodes said this kind of wildly negative thing in front of his parents all the time, which they either didn’t get or were used to by now.

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