“What is he going to jail for?”
“Burglary.”
“Joanna,” I say, “don’t stand there staring at me when I’m talking on the phone.”
“He robbed a house,” Bobby says.
“What kind of a dog is it?” I ask.
“Malamute and German shepherd. It’s in heat.”
“Well,” I say, “you always wanted a dog.”
“I call you all the time, and you never call me,” Bobby says.
“I never have interesting news.”
“You could call and tell me what you do on Tuesday nights.”
“Nothing very interesting,” I say.
“You could go to a bar and have rum drinks and weep,” Bobby says. He chuckles.
“Are you stoned?” I ask.
“Sure I am. Been home from work for an hour and a half. Ate a Celeste pizza, had a little smoke.”
“Do you really have a dog?” I ask.
“If you were a male dog, you wouldn’t have any doubt of it.”
“You’re always much more clever than I am. It’s hard to talk to you on the phone, Bobby.”
“It’s hard to be me,” Bobby says. A silence. “I’m not sure the dog likes me.”
“Bring it over. Joanna will love it.”
“I’ll be around with it Tuesday night,” he says.
“Why is it so interesting to you that I have one night a week to myself ?”
“Whatever you do,” Bobby says, “don’t rob a house.”
We hang up, and I go tell Joanna the news.
“You yelled at me,” she says.
“I did not. I asked you not to stand there staring at me while I was on the phone.”
“You raised your voice,” she says.
Soon it will be Tuesday night.
Joanna asks me suspiciously what I do on Tuesday nights.
“What does your father say I do?” I ask.
“He says he doesn’t know.”
“Does he seem curious?”
“It’s hard to tell with him,” she says.
Having got my answer, I’ve forgotten about her question.
“So what things do you do?” she says.
“Sometimes you like to play in your tent,” I say defensively. “Well, I like some time to just do what I want to do, too, Joanna.”
“That’s okay,” she says. She sounds like an adult placating a child.
I have to face the fact that I don’t do much of anything on Tuesdays, and that one night alone each week isn’t making me any less edgy or more agreeable to live with. I tell Dan this, as if it’s his fault.
“I don’t think you ever wanted to divorce Henry,” Dan says.
“Oh, Dan, I
“You two seem to get along fine.”
“But we fought. We didn’t get along.”
He looks at me. “Oh,” he says. He is being inordinately nice to me because of the scene I threw when a mouse got caught in one of the traps. The trap didn’t kill it. It just got it by the paw, and Dan had to beat it to death with a screwdriver.
“Maybe you’d rather the two of us did something regularly on Tuesday nights,” he says now. “Maybe I could get the night of my meetings changed.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Maybe I should give it a little longer.”
“That’s up to you,” he says. “There hasn’t been enough time to judge by, I guess.”
Inordinately kind. Deferential. He has been saying for a long time that our relationship is turning sour, and now it must have turned so sour for him that he doesn’t even want to fight. What does he want?
