Love Saves the Day

Laura’s breathing gets loud and hard, the way mine does when I’m chuffing. “What the hell do you know about it?” Her shriek makes all the fur on my back stand up, and no matter how fast I twitch it I can’t make it lie down again. “What do you know about me or my mother or anything? With your normal, happy, perfect family where everybody pulls together and helps each other out and just loves each other so much!”

“Do you even hear what you’re saying?” Josh yells. “Is that what you think? You think there’s such a thing as a perfect family? Sometimes my dad’s the greatest guy in the world, and sometimes he pisses me off so much I want to strangle him, but I won’t spend the rest of my life blaming him for everything that goes wrong in it.” I hear the sound of Josh’s shoes clopping against the kitchen tile as he paces. “Whatever it is you think your mother did that was so awful, get over it! I can practically hear you fighting with her in your head, like she’s still here and you’re still fourteen. Your mother is dead, Laura! Grow up already!”

Now I realize it—what Josh said before about Laura not taking time off from work. Sarah is dead. Sarah is dead, and nobody ever told me. Sarah is dead, and I’ll never see her again. She’ll never feed me or hold me or stroke my fur again. Never never never never. No matter how much time I spend with her boxes or my memories, nothing will ever bring Sarah back to me. The ache in my chest from Sarah’s being gone rips back open so suddenly that I can’t breathe. I curl up in a tight ball under the couch with my nose pressed into my tail, trying to make my ripped-open chest stay together.

“First I’m not grieving enough,” Laura yells, “and now I can’t get over it. Which is it?”

“Stop with the logic games, Counselor. I’m not your client and we all know you’re not my lawyer.”

“Maybe you’re the one who needs to grow up! Stop trying to be the king of community activism and get a job. Charity begins at home.”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a job right now?” Josh shouts. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch your profession crumble up and blow away into nothing, and have people telling you day after day how the only job you know how to do doesn’t exist anymore? When you’re nearly forty? Does it occur to you at any point during the fifteen hours a day when you aren’t here to think about how that feels? Or are you too busy totting up in your head exactly what you contribute and exactly what I contribute?”

“Who’s the oblivious one, Josh?” Laura yells back. “When’s the last time I worked a fifteen-hour day? Has it ever occurred to you to wonder what might be going on with my job?”

“No, I don’t wonder about your job!” It sounds like Josh has slammed his fist down on the kitchen table. I curl into a tighter ball under the living room couch, thinking, Please stop, please stop, please stop. Sarah is dead. I can’t take this, too. “Just like you don’t sit around your office all day wondering what’s going on with me. You know what I wonder about? I wonder why I never get to go out to dinner, or make plans with friends, or talk about a vacation. I wonder why I sit around here night after night alone. I think about the night we met—we danced, we talked, we had fun. We had a lot of nights like that. When was the last time we did any of those things? And I guess we don’t have to do anything on our anniversary, either, because another night at home will be such a blast! If you ever once came home and suggested we go out and do something, I think I’d have a heart attack.” I can hear Laura breathe in sharply when Josh says heart attack. “I know how important it is to you to make partner. But what are we doing here?”

“That’s not fair.” Laura’s voice has tears in it. “You knew how demanding my job was. You told me it was one of the things you loved most about me, and now you’re second-guessing it when my job is the only thing bringing any money into this house. How can we do any of those things if we don’t have money to do them with?”

Josh’s voice is quieter now. “What’s the point of having all the money in the world, Laura, if we’re miserable?”

When Laura speaks again, she sounds hoarse. “I didn’t realize I was making you miserable,” she says.

“Laura, I—” Josh starts, but Laura doesn’t let him finish.

“I have to go,” she says. “I have to get to my job while I still have one.” She walks to the closet, and I hear her open it to pull out her purse and heavy shoulder bag. Then she walks out the front door, slamming it shut behind her.