Because She No Longer Speaks to Her Son

She was in the living room when she heard the noise. She’d just sat next to her dog Moose, who was fast asleep in the center of the sofa, where he always slept. “Did you hear that?” she asked him. He parted his eyelids for the time it takes a flea to hop onto his coat and went back to sleep. He had heard the noise too.

The couch was a red crushed-velvet one, given to her by her neighbor, who was moving and couldn’t take it with her. It was overstuffed and gave the already small room an even smaller feel, especially when combined with the matching overstuffed chair, the extra-large box-style television and the China hutch passed down to her from her mother’s mother’s mother. Add to this a dozen or so tall potted plants, half of which were growing up the walls, and the place looked more like a corner of the Amazon rainforest strewn with furniture than an elderly woman’s home on a fixed income.

Anyway, about that noise. She thought it came from the direction of the kitchen. Or maybe it was from the basement, or perhaps outside. It sounded like a pumpkin smashing from a moderate height, only it wasn’t October, nowhere near.

The Price Is Right appeared on the television when she hit the on button. Just in time. Her favorite show. She always turned it on after she had cleared up the dishes from the big breakfast she made for everyone and wiped down the table. This morning it was eggs, scrambled, three sausage links each, two pieces of toast and nine slices of bacon because—what the heck.

As the audience for the Price finished clapping, she made a note in a sketchbook next to the couch, on the bulky table she'd picked up at a garage sale for three dollars because the woman said it had a stain from a hot cup of coffee. Still, Imogene didn’t care because she intended to put a doily in the center of the table to cover it anyway. She wrote, “bacon” and then “cheese.”

For tomorrow’s breakfast, she would make them all omelets. They loved omelets, especially Moose, who, she thought, could live on cheese if given that option. She too loved the taste of a fine cheddar or an American cheese. Imogene didn’t care that the lady at the supermarket made an argument over the fact that American cheese was not real cheese at all, but rather a compilation of ingredients that made up a cheese-like product. “It is so real cheese,” she yelled. Anyway, it didn’t matter if American cheese was real cheese or fake cheese or the kind of cheese in the middle, because they all loved it.

On a commercial break, she thought about the noise she had heard earlier, before the television set had been turned on, before she thought about the American cheese lady, and she began to water her plants. She bent over to pick up several ficus leaves that had fallen overnight and tossed them in the tin trash can near the front door. While she was at the glass front door, she opened it and stared at her begonias that were just beginning to fully open themselves to the sun. Somewhere in the distance, a neighbor dog barked. Several robins chirped and flew fast from the linden trees near the road. The grass, she mused, ought to be mowed.

“I’ll remember to remind the landlord later,” she remembered thinking before closing the door. She liked living there. It was close to the grocery store and a short drive to the doctor’s office. She could be downtown in fifteen minutes by car, even though she never wanted to go downtown, or headed to the countryside to see her sister in fifteen minutes, which she never wanted to do either. The countryside smelling as it does like horse shit and dirt. Yes, this neighborhood suited her just fine.

Her landlord was a man she used to have sex with pretty regularly when she worked as a hairdresser in the mall that was now more than a half-hour drive away. He drove the UPS truck and delivered hair products to her and the three other stylists who worked there. At first he paid her no mind, because she was older and he was still married and anyway, he was too busy on his multiple stop routes to flirt with an older woman of a less than discernible age, a woman who with the addition of half a dozen years could have been the same age as his mother. But one night, when she was the last person in the salon, and she was the last stop on his route, she invited him in, and he went in, and she gave him a free haircut, etc., “all on the house,” she joked.

When her husband told her a year later he wanted a divorce so he could pursue younger women, which he likely never did because he was an ugly, fat guy with a scraggly beard and atrocious table manners, she didn’t protest. She signed the papers, and he sold the house. This made her homeless, and when the UPS man was told the story, he said, " Why not move into the place I just bought on the south side of town.” He would give her a deal, he said… in exchange for free haircuts and such. And so the deal was made.

But the deal ended, and her rent went up. They were still friends, but after the UPS man retired, he got married, and the arrangement came to an end. And that’s who she was thinking about when she sat back on the couch as the Price continued, and she guessed the cost of a coffee maker (she had one just like it), a gold watch (she was always a little off on jewelry), and a four-person tent. (She was way off on the tent, since she detested camping and sleeping outdoors.)

She found herself absentmindedly rubbing Moose’s giant head. She thought again about the noise; what could have caused it? Where did it come from? Should she get up and investigate? In the front window, however, a fly caught her attention. She pushed herself out of the sofa and reached behind the wall to the kitchen and felt for the swatter that had hung there from before she had met Chuck the UPS man and maybe before he bought the place. It was an orangy pink color and had a crack down the middle, no doubt from the thousands, maybe millions, of flies it had killed over the years.

She killed the fly after three failed attempts. Finally, she struck it, and it fell into the ficus, where she figured it would eventually add some much-needed nutrients to the soil after it composted. She hated flies.

When the Price ended, she started her crossword puzzle. This was not the NYT's crossword puzzle, rather a small, easy-to-do puzzle on the final page of a four-page circular that arrived once a week for free. She began with 6 down. A five-letter word for common. She presumed it would be “usual” after she saw that the 6-across word would for certain be “uke,” as in short for ukulele. The pencil she was using broke its nib, and she set it on the table next to the small booklet where she had earlier written the word bacon. She picked up another pencil, also broken, so she resigned herself to sharpening both and then continuing the puzzle. This meant she had to go into the den on the other side of the small house, past the front door, past the dead fly in the ficus. The cost of a bottle of shampoo and conditioner she guessed exactly and thought perhaps she should apply to be on the Price, except she didn’t know how a person went about such a thing and when she got back to her couch and sat down, she wrote on the piece of paper, “See how to get on the Price.”

Two sharpened pencils later, she finished the puzzle and set the free circular on the overstuffed ottoman that matched the couch that matched the overstuffed chair, a trio free of charge. Moose continued to sleep the day away, as was his wont. The dog, she thought, could sleep upwards of twenty hours a day, when he was not pissing and shitting in the backyard, or they were going on a waddle at the nature preserve down the street, yet another reason why living in this house was perfect for her.

Five minutes later she answered her ringing phone, which she had to fish out from under the dog's blubber-covered shoulder, the dog still not waking, stirring or acknowledging her hand. It was her house-cleaning client, one of only two she continued to have because the guy paid her cash and that cash she did not have to report to the government, and it helped to pay for their cheese and because she really liked the guy and his two wives.

It never bothered her that the guy had two wives. That was their business. He could do what he wanted. It was a free country after all. Of course he didn’t legally have two wives. He only had one — which one was the legal one, she could never remember. But they seemed happy. Sometimes happiness came in threes.

She hung up the phone. She leaned her head back on the couch, continued to feel her fingers comb through the fat dog's fur and fell asleep.

When she woke up, the dog was still sleeping, and the sunlight coming through the partially open drapes was hitting her in the eye just so. She stood, straightened her legs that ached and closed the left drape four inches to block the sun. The weatherman discussed the day's weather. It was going to be nice, he said. A good day to go for a walk.

“Moose, do you want to go out for a pee?” she asked the mutt. He kept his eyes closed until she repeated herself. She often had to repeat herself. He was like her ex-husband in that way. Never listened to her the first time. Moose did not want to get up. He’d just as soon soil himself as make the effort to go to the back door and down the two steps to the lawn to pee, but she made him, insisted he get up and follow her to the back door. That's when she thought about the noise again. “Come on, Moose, let’s go,” she insisted. The dog slid off the couch like a log over a slow-moving waterfall. And hit the floor.

They walked toward the kitchen, slow-moving, before their collective feet could touch the linoleum; she saw it. A puddle. While she watched the Price, while she swatted a fly, while she fell asleep, while the dog in the neighborhood barked, the ficus leaves fell silently to the floor; that's when the horrible noise happened.

All this time she had forgotten about Boomer. He’d finished eating and then promptly exploded in the center of the kitchen. All that remained of the dog she loved so dearly was his charcoal-shaped nose, the tip of his brown tail, and his red collar. The rest of him was strewn about the linoleum; guts, fur and blood she would later have to use a squeegee to gather covered the floor.

What the hell? How could this happen? She reached for the phone and called her vet. Dr. P. came on the phone seconds later, after the woman named Jan handed it to him; Imogene thought Jan looked like a man, a big, strapping woman who seemed to move lumber for a living instead of clipping dogs' toenails.

Dr. P seemed nonplussed. He listened to Imogene in hysterics, yelling about her dog having “blown itself up,” she said.

“Your dog did not blow itself up,” the doctor said calmly, as though he were giving directions on a bottle of antibiotics.

“He did so!” She insisted.

“No. Imogene. You blew him up. You feed him too much. We’ve gone over this in my office — many times. Ever since I’ve known your dogs, I’ve told you you feed them too much. They don’t need eggs and bacon every morning. They don’t need hot dogs and cheeseburgers for lunch, and they certainly don’t need an entire steak every night for dinner. We have discussed this, he said, many times in the past.” He was losing his cool now, and she thought he was about to hang up on her.

So she hung up on him, slammed the olive-green wall phone down so hard it broke the handset, and it had to hang near the fridge for the rest of the day, where the steaks she had planned to cook for the three of them waited to be opened and cooked.

Another glance at the mess on the kitchen floor revealed teeth strewn under the table and tips of bloody ears that were blown toward the back door. The kitchen smelled distinctly of iron and something sour, like spoiled milk. By this time, Moose had emerged behind her, his snout gently bumping the air, as if to determine where his friend had gone.

“Get out of here!” she snapped, in a voice tinged with the sound of tin falling on tin. Moose settled back on the couch and fell back asleep while Imogene reached under the kitchen sink for a bucket and a dustbin.

It was near dinner time when the kitchen was finally back to its original state. The guts and the hair and the innards of her exploded dog were tied neatly in several garbage bags and placed in the receptacle by the road. Come Monday, his body would be riding in the back of a truck, just the way he used to like.

She washed her hands, straightened her short wavy hair in the bathroom mirror. Steak and eggs and a piece of bacon, one for her and one for Moose, who, from the living room, heard the distinct sound of pots and pans clanging and the bacon package opening. He knew, because experience had taught him over the past four years of his short life, that dinner would be served in a bowl on the kitchen floor in twenty minutes. Until then, he closed his eyes and listened as his overly enlarged stomach began to growl.