I didn’t like to think about the answer.
THE TEMPERATURE HIT ninety-nine that afternoon. The trees along East Main were almost indistinguishable from one another inside the haze of heat and humidity and dust that covered the town. The tide was out and Bayou Teche had sunken inside its banks, and in the harshness of the sunlight, alligator gars roiled the water next to clumps of lily pads that had burned yellow on the edges. As I drove home, the wind was hot and smelled of tar and carbon monoxide, and even though I had left my air-conditioned offices only five minutes ago, I could feel sweat running down my sides like trails of ants.
Molly was not an angry or resentful woman, nor was she one who judged or sought to punish. But her disappointment in others could lie buried in her face as deep as a stone bruise. Perhaps she thought violence could be exorcised from an individual in the same way demons were cast out by medieval clerics. No, that was my own resentful thinking at work. Molly believed too much in others. At least, she probably believed too much in me.
We said little at supper and even less as we washed the dishes and put them away. As the light went out of the sky and the trees filled with thousands of birds, we found ways to occupy ourselves with chores that did not involve the other. Just before ten o’clock, when I usually watched the news, I heard her moving about in the kitchen, opening the icebox, setting down a plate on the table.
“Dave?” she said.
I got up from my soft chair in the living room and went to the kitchen door. She had on her nightgown and I could see the spray of freckles on her shoulders. “What’s up?” I said.
“I fixed you a piece of pie and
some milk.”
“Are you having any?”
“I’m pretty tired. I think I’m just going to bed.”
“I see,” I said.
“The heat seems to affect me more than it used to.”
“It’s been a hot one.”
“Good night,” she said.
“Yeah, good night,” I replied.
I lay on the couch and watched the local news until ten-thirty, then I stared at CNN for the amount of time it took me to fall asleep, in my clothes, a floor fan blowing in my face, my wife on the other side of the bedroom wall.
SOME PEOPLE IN A.A. say coincidence is your Higher Power acting anonymously. I’m not sure about that, but on Thursday morning, after I had already left for work, Tripod began to tremble and to cough and rasp deep in his throat, as though he had swallowed a hair-ball. Molly took him to a veterinary clinic, one that also boarded and groomed animals. While she was waiting for the veterinarian, a blade-faced, well-dressed man with an athletic build, six and a half feet tall, entered the room with a French poodle on a leash. The poodle’s fur was dyed pink. Molly had put Tripod in a cardboard box lined with newspaper and a vinyl garbage bag, and had fold-tucked the flaps on the top over Tripod’s head and placed the box by her foot. But Tripod had wedged his head between the flaps and had just started a survey of the room when the poodle’s scent struck his nostrils.
Lonnie Marceaux was filling out a form on a clipboard at the intake window, the poodle’s leash lying on the floor. The poodle turned toward Tripod’s box and made a soft growling sound, like the purr of a distant motorboat. Tripod jerked his head down through the flaps and skittered around in the box, coughing violently, his weight flopping sideways on the stump of his missing hind foot.
“Sir! Sir! Would you take control of your animal? He’s frightening my coon,” Molly said.
“Sasha is harmless, believe me,” Lonnie said.
“The coon doesn’t know that. I’m not sure I do, either,” she replied.
He nodded as though he understood the urgency of her request but kept writing. In the meantime, Tripod’s paws skittered and scratched inside the cardboard and his incontinence kicked into major download.
“Sir, you’re causing problems you can’t guess at. There’s a tether post for your pet in the other room,” Molly said.
“Sorry, I don’t quite understand.”
“This is a very old and sick raccoon. Your dog is terrifying him. Now, try to act with a little decency.”
“Please accept my apologies,” Lonnie said, bending over to pick up the poodle’s leash. Then he sat down three chairs away from Molly and Tripod and began reading a magazine, impervious to Molly’s stare.
Molly gathered Tripod’s box in her arms and rose from her chair just as the receptionist slid back the glass on the intake window. “Mr. Marceaux, did you want your poodle shampooed and clipped?” she asked.
“Give her the works. She’s going to a show this weekend,” he said, looking at the receptionist over the top of his magazine.
“You’re Lonnie Marceaux, the district attorney?” Molly said.
“I am,” he replied pleasantly.