be a day in the not-so-distant future when she would be kicked off the McGilly family gravy train.
She used her once-creative hands to make tea and wash dishes. What a fine little housewife I’m turning out to be, she thought.
Ben, of course, was out with his new/old obsession. The golfing date had gone well; Ben had come home so excited about spending the day with Ken that Lily had suggested that he change his name to Barbie. “Besides,” she had said, “you don’t really want to go through life as a couple named Ben and Ken.”
“Is it any more ridiculous than going through life as Lily McGilly?”
Lily had conceded his point. She also had to concede something else: Her sarcasm toward Ben’s giddiness was due to nothing more than good, old-fashioned jealousy. It didn’t bother her that her ersatz husband was stepping out on her; she didn’t give a shit about that.
It was Ben’s happiness that drove her crazy, that made her think of her first days with Charlotte, when their love was green and about to blossom. That kind of joy was the complete opposite of what she was feeling these days. Tennyson may have believed that “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” but Lily wasn’t sure.
Of course, there wasn’t anything for Lily to be jealous of yet. Neither Ben nor Ken had admitted to the other that he was gay. Ben said they had each “dropped a few hairpins” during their game of golf, but being in a public place, neither of them had let his hair down entirely. Today, though, they were meeting in a more private setting. Ken had invited Ben to spend the afternoon at his house, listening to Brit pop and then eating sushi for dinner, which Ken had prepared from ingredients he had bought at the international farmer’s market in Atlanta. Lily had opined to Ben that he was home free: straight white men don’t make sushi.
Lily dried the last dish and sipped her tea. Just then, her eardrums were pierced by a high- pitched cry of pain. She dropped her cup into the sink and ran to Mimi’s room, only to find the little girl resting comfortably. She heard the cry again, and this time, with her maternal instinct laid to rest, she could tell the sound was animal, not human. It was coming from the backyard.
She ran down the hall and out the kitchen door. Mordecai was lying on his stomach, his face pressed against the chain-link fence, whimpering and howling in pain.
“It’s okay, Mordecai,” she said as she approached him. “It’s me, Mordecai.” Animals in pain, she knew, could strike out without thinking. She softly repeated his name to remind him that she was his friend.
When she got closer, she saw what had happened. Mordecai, famous for digging his way out of his dog pen at the big McGilly house, had attempted to do the same thing with the chain- link fence here. But he had, hit a painful snag.
The section of fencing he had exposed was torn, as though someone had clipped a jagged hole in it
— a hole just the right size to trap one of his mammoth front paws.
There was a lot of blood. In trying to remove his paw from the trap, he had only succeeded in digging the metal into his flesh.
“Poor baby,” Lily cooed. Mordecai whimpered in agreement.
Lily locked her fingers in the links above the hole and pulled upward. The big dog looked down at his freed paw with mournful eyes.
Lily had to agree that it did look pretty bad. His dark fur made the nature of his wounds hard to detect, but when he tried to stand, the injured foot dangled limply. For all Lily knew, it could be broken.
