Radicchio

I didn’t have anything to do, but watch the snake. We were not supposed to go out, but there was over a foot of snow on the ground. No one was going anywhere. The man pushing the snow blower outside my window had a mask on. I yelled something to Steve about wearing a mask outside, and he yelled back that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Steve would die of an embolism at the age of seventy-four. By then, I’ll have already been gone for two years. My death will be peaceful. It will happen on a Friday night. How exciting. Today is a Sunday. We are nearly a year into a global pandemic, and there is a debate going on about going out or staying home. I’ve always wanted to stay home, so there’s no debating with me. Steve says I’m so good at playing by the rules that I’ve been in my element lately. That I want the pandemic to keep going so that I can keep staying home, no FOMO, no reason to flake on plans at the last minute. My moral superiority brandished like a weapon. I look in the tank and the snake is hiding. He doesn’t know how to spend a Sunday afternoon. Steve doesn’t either. He’s been going on walks, but he hates them. He hates walking. He tells me about what he sees on his walks. I hate hearing about his walks. I wish he would stop walking. I wish he would sit in his chair and never walk again. I yell and ask him when he last fed the snake. He yells back that he thinks it was Friday? I tap on the glass. The snake is hiding. I don’t blame him.

The snake is named Milo and Steve got him, because he wanted to have an affair, but he pukes anytime he feels guilty, and cheating on me would have had him puking everyday for at least a year. So he got a snake instead. Had I known how much work a snake can be, I would have let him have the affair. Milo isn’t large, but he’s impractical. Steve discovered after adopting him that he’s actually terrified of snakes and watching them feed triggers his acid reflux. That’s how I wound up purchasing frozen baby mice and dropping them in the tank and asking myself if there was any way a snake could be taught to love the taste of a vegetable. Not something basic, like a carrot, but complex, like radicchio. What if someone were to cut the radicchio into the shape of a mouse? Could you fool the snake? Would its system totally reject the radicchio? What if that was all there was to eat? I understand the difference between carnivores and herbivores, but if a body has no other means of sustenance, shouldn’t it adapt? Shouldn’t it do what it has to do?

We keep Milo in the garage with a heat lamp and all of Steve’s old Esquire magazines. He once told me that he was going to make wearing nice gloves his “brand.” His personal “brand.” I asked him why he needed a “brand” when he’s a Toyota salesman. Before Steve dies, he’ll sell the house we lived in and move to a condo in Saint Fletcher. He’ll flirt with a widowed neighbor two houses down from him and he’ll tell her about his dead wife and how he used to own a snake, because even all those years later, it’ll still be the most interesting thing about him. The widowed neighbor won’t find him attractive, because no woman ever did, including me, but she’ll give him turnips from her garden to be polite. She doesn’t grow radicchio. I have no idea where radicchio grows, but I doubt it grows in Saint Fletcher. Milo twitches, or maybe it’s just my imagination. Right before I die, I’ll try out a new haircut and take a Mandarin class. It’s pointless to learn a language like that so late in life. You can’t hear the subtle differences in sound, and I’ve never had anything close to perfect pitch. I’ll meet a young man in the class who has a snake tattooed on his wrist, and I’ll think of Milo eating those frozen baby mice, but I won’t remember my reflections on radicchio.

Heading upstairs, I smell the chili in the slow cooker and the sugar cookie candle I lit, because when it’s snowing, it might as well smell like Christmas. I adjust the picture frame on the wall that shows our two daughters riding on a carousel with their grandparents. The picture always tilts to the left, no matter how often we move it back into place, but I never stop. I’ll be adjusting that painting until I’m dead. One of the girls is in finance and will marry, divorce, and remarry. The other will go to Ireland and tell everyone she’s Irish, when she’s mostly Italian and a little bit Polish. She’ll live a lie for the rest of her life, and when she dies, everyone will grieve a person that never existed. In spite of all the deception, I will always consider her my favorite of the two girls, because she checks in on me and Steve and Milo nearly everyday.

Milo’s death will be sudden and unexpectedly moving. He will somehow escape his cage, and I will find him on the cold cement floor of the garage. Not moving. Steve will go on and on about how he could have gotten out of the cage, but by then, he’s completed a near total abdication of pet ownership. I’ll pick up Milo in my arms and marvel at how strong he feels even in death. I’ll be the one who buries him in the backyard somewhere in my garden. I wish I could remember where. It’s nowhere near the radicchio, because I don’t grow radicchio. I’m not sure how I would know how. Steve is in our bedroom and he’s keeping a secret that will never be divulged. I go into the living room and put on a bad movie I’ve seen a thousand times. Outside the snow is falling as though it needs to beat the moon. Cover the ground before the moonlight can. I’ll wait for Steve to come in and sit with me. I’ll put my hand on his hand. I’ll ask him if the girls called, and he’ll say one of them.

And I’ll know which one he means.