He ran into Cheryl in the bar at the airport Hyatt in Pittsburgh. She was having drinks with two other women—probably flight attendants, Paul thought, by the looks of them. They were across the room, at a table, under the TV with the basketball game he was following. He stopped watching the game and let Cheryl happen to him. She was precisely the kind of woman that could happen to a man from across a room, he thought drunkenly, a woman with big eyes and big lips, a woman with lots of hair in which to mentally intertwine your fingers, a woman on the heavy side who wore clothes not to cover her body but to be filled by her body. He hadn’t seen her in three or four years, not since the reunion when she’d come with that meathead pilot who sang Adele in the karaoke competition, while Paul and his wife and Cheryl sat at their table drinking and howling with laughter. Later that night in bed, talking about how funny she was, Annie had asked, “You ever wish you’d married her?” and without missing a beat he’d said, “Cheryl? No way.” He’d meant it, too. But now there was Cheryl under the basketball game, Cheryl his high school friend and first painful crush, Cheryl with her legs crossed below the table in a way that made him want to slither over there on his belly.
Eventually her friends left and she was waiting for her change and he approached the table tentatively and said, “Cheryl?” and that’s how he wound up with the dog.
They talked for forty-five minutes. She was living in Pittsburgh temporarily, she told him, with her mother in Moon Township. She and the pilot were divorced, but she’d kept all their friends, and came to drink with them here when they laid over in Pittsburgh. Paul told her he was in town on business. He told her he and Annie were separated, which he said mostly to try on for size. Technically, it wasn’t true.
They’d had a blowout fight the night before he left their house outside Philly. It had started with something small—they’d both been having months of frustration and unrest at work, and had become increasingly testy with each other at home—and before he knew it their entire marriage was engulfed in flames. He’d never seen a fire spread so fast; it was like they’d spent the last several months squirting lighter fluid all over everything in sight, so when the match was lit, everything went up. Within a half hour they’d both said a number of the things you weren’t supposed to say, things that were true only in the throes of escalation: she said he was an idiot; he said she was a bitch; she said they never should have had Ava; he said they never should have gotten married to begin with. For the first time in their nine-year marriage he’d spent the night on the couch. When he woke early the next morning, he felt sick to his stomach. All he wanted to do was to slink into the bedroom, apologize, curl up next to her for a few minutes before he had to leave. Then he went into the kitchen to start the coffee and found yet another escalation: her wedding ring, smack in the center of the kitchen island. It was as if he’d walked into a sliding glass door he thought was open; he actually swooned for a moment, had to grab the handle of the fridge to steady himself. Then he crept into the bedroom, averted his eyes from her sleeping form, retrieved his already packed suitcase, closed the front door quietly, and got in his car and drove across the state. Since then, well past the thirty-six-hour mark now, there’d been only two tersely worded texts from her—one about their contribution to the silent auction at Ava’s preschool, and one about the smell coming out of the dishwasher—so really he had no idea if they were actually separating or not. He admitted all of this to Cheryl. It poured out of him. When the bartender abruptly made last call, Cheryl invited him to come back to her house so he could tell her the rest of the story.
Cheryl wasn’t anything like Annie. Cheryl had no filter, which made her both funny and infuriating, often simultaneously. I call ’em as I see ’em, she’d been famous for saying, which in high school had swung her popularity pendulum wildly from one extreme to the other, depending on what she was callin’ and who she was seein’. Annie was a litigator. They’d met in a professional capacity and she’d come to their marriage pre-equipped with filters. And every year, it seemed to Paul, she’d added more. She couldn’t answer even a simple question without thinking about it for at least fifteen seconds, dissecting it in her mind while the questioner waited. Once he’d found this adorable; they’d joked about it even. He told her that having a conversation with her was like playing Mouse Trap; by the time a thought got to her mouth, it had gone through so many obstacles that you couldn’t help but wonder what had been edited along the way. This had been funny, once—to both of them. But in all her expressions of late, Paul could picture that silver marble on its excruciating ramble down the winding plastic steps, and it made him want to scream.
“Okay,” he said to Cheryl’s invitation, his escalation to the wedding ring on the kitchen island. “Sure. I’d like that.”
“We’re not having sex,” she said, picking up her purse. “Just so you know.”
“Of course,” he said, blushing. He didn’t think he’d go through with anything, even if she initiated, but he was curious to keep watching to find out what would happen.
He followed her in his car to her house. It wasn’t far, maybe ten minutes, but he drove with the hyper-awareness of a potential DUI, so he was exhausted by the time they arrived. He’d always been faithful to Annie, though out of nowhere a few months ago, when they’d gotten the invitation to the next reunion, she’d made a pointed and surprising reference about him “rushing off” to get Cheryl a plate of olives during the terrible karaoke years before, a detail he didn’t recall.
Cheryl and her mother lived on a quiet street of small, unassuming ranch houses and American flags. When they walked into the house, even though it was 1:15 in the morning, her mother was sitting in the living room watching television, wearing a terry-cloth robe that surrounded her like a tent.
“Look who I ran into,” Cheryl said. “Remember Paul from high school?”
“Your high school or my high school?” Cheryl’s mother said, struggling to turn in her recliner.
“She’s at this great stage,” Cheryl said, “where she might be funny or she might be senile.”
“I think we just met a few times,” Paul said, extending his hand, as overly polite as he might have been at sixteen. “I had dinner at your house once.”
“I’m going to bed,” she said, grabbing his hand and using it to haul herself to her feet. “Unless anybody’s in for gin?”
“In the morning, Mom,” Cheryl said.
“Or spades!” her mother said, suddenly animated. “Cher, there’s three of us so we can play spades!” She squeezed Paul’s hand. “You play spades?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Damn,” she said. “No one plays spades anymore.”
With her mother gone, Cheryl went into the kitchen and came back with two beers. “I’ve been here almost two years,” she said. “If I don’t get out now I’ll be here until she dies.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventy-one. The window’s closing.”
She handed him his beer and they lightly clinked the bottoms of their bottles.
“Get while the gettin’s good,” he said, which wasn’t something he’d ever said in his life. Jesus, who was he? Some drunk businessman, some middle-aged asshole, in some woman’s house—not even her house, her mother’s house. Recklessly, absurdly, he imagined where he and Cheryl could go together when she left her mother and he left Annie. He pictured them in the place he always saw ads for, that resort with the long sunny docks and those sex cabanas at the end.
“I’m thinking about Poughkeepsie,” she said. “My brother and his wife and kids are there.”
“I’ll miss you,” he said earnestly.
“Paul, I haven’t seen you in five years. Did you miss me yesterday?”
It’s possible he tried to kiss her then. Who knows? He was at least going in for a hug. Whatever it was supposed to be, it wasn’t pretty, and she stepped back and said, “Oh, Paul,” the way his mother used to say when he’d spilled something.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really just want to talk.”
She plopped down on the couch, tucked her feet under her. “So talk,” she said.
And so he talked. He told her about how Annie never seemed interested in anything that was interesting to him, how sometimes she got up and walked out of the room when he was in the middle of a sentence, and furthermore how she’d started jogging recently, so that when he woke up Annie was already out of bed, how she’d had an especially full schedule Ava’s first week of preschool so he’d nicely offered to take her every day that week and now months later he was still taking Ava every day, and picking her up, and despite this Ava seemed in all ways to prefer Annie to him, that when he went to her in the middle of the night two weeks before because he heard her crying she’d wailed WHERE’S MOMMY and cried harder, and furthermore he was shafted at work on an almost daily basis, usually by some asshat who’d only been in their office for eight weeks, and a sales job that had once seemed exciting because of the promise of travel was really 90% him sitting in endless, identical conference rooms in a series of endless, identical airport hotels with endless, identical runways unspooling outside his window.
“Wow,” she said, when he was finally done. She sipped from her coffee, which they’d switched to an hour before. “That’s a lot.”
“Right?” he said, sober, spent. He felt like a puddle.
“A lotta nothin’,” she said, because apparently she still called them as she saw them. She set her coffee down beside her. “I’m not being a bitch,” she continued, leaning forward. “I’m not saying you don’t feel like crap right now. You feel like crap, Paul! Life is hard! Jobs are awful! Relationships are impossible! Jesus Christ, it’s a wonder any of us make it through a single day.”
“You’re not really helping.”
“I liked her. Annie seemed great. I thought you two really suited each other.”
“We did.” He looked past Cheryl into an unfamiliar dining room, the table covered with stacks of newspapers and magazines. He was an idiot. How had he gotten here? What was he thinking? He thought of Annie, how they took turns walking ten thousand laps around their own dining room table every night for a month holding Ava when she had croup, passing her off when their arms went numb.
Cheryl yawned. “You guys have exactly the same ratio of boring to interesting.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Thanks?”
She smiled. “Go home, Paul. You’re going to be fine.”
He looked out the window and realized there was light in the sky. He was supposed to be in a meeting at the hotel at 7:30. He started reaching around for his phone and couldn’t locate it.
“I bet you left it in your car,” Cheryl said.
He agreed this was probably the case. They embraced by the front door. She smelled like high school.
“Call her,” she said into his shoulder.
“I will.”
He stepped onto the porch and a dog in the yard directly across the street started barking and twirling along its short wooden fence in a frenzy as he walked to his car. When he reached the driveway he spotted his phone in the dewy grass, a couple feet from the driver’s side door. He picked it up and wiped it on his shirt and saw he had nine messages, all from Annie.
She feels lousy. I think she’s coming down with something.
Are you in meetings already?
Text me back because I’m thinking about calling the doctor.
Where are you?
Her fever is 102.9. She looks weird. Her eyes are all weird. I called the doctor on call and am waiting for a call back.
Where are you?
Where are you?
Paul?
??????????
He typed furiously.
Oh my god just got these so sorry
Nothing.
Is she okay? Are you at the doctor
Nothing.
I’m so sorry I lost my phobe
Okay, she was writing. He saw thought bubbles. She was there. She was—
Why are you in a suburb of Pittsburgh?
He lowered himself into his car, his butt in the seat, his feet on Cheryl’s driveway. This was bad. Extremely bad. Their phones were linked. They had the FindMyiPhone app for emergencies. This was an emergency. And she had FoundHisiPhone.
He scrolled back through her texts. She’d started writing him at 5:07 a.m. It was now 6:20. Precious seconds were passing. The longer he went without answering, the worse it would be. He looked back at Cheryl’s house. He was a fool to have come out here. He could not tell Annie where he was. He just couldn’t. Not with the shaky ground they were on. If he wanted to make things right between them, if he wanted a chance to fix things, he could not tell her.
I came out here from the hotel this morning. To get something.
To get what?
Time. Must buy time. He looked around for an answer.
It’s a surprise.
What kind of surprise?
It’s
. . .
His finger hovered over the keys. What was he doing? Goddammit he should just tell her the truth. Listen, he’d say, you wouldn’t believe this crazy thing that happened. But now he’d already said the thing about the surprise.
for you. And Ava.
What kind of surprise?
A big one. A
. . .
Across the street the idiot dog continued barking. Listen, he’d say, you wouldn’t believe who I ran into! Total coincidence! He typed
dog
and hit send.
You got a dog???
Had he gotten a dog?
You got a dog in Pittsburgh? Wtf?
Not just a dog. *The* dog.
What are you talking about?
I
. . .
What was he talking about? In a frenzy he typed
The one Ava wanted. From that book she loves
He looked across the street and typed
The black one with the white under its chin
What book is that?
We got it from the library. I read it to her a hundred times.
No clue what you’re talking about.
He typed
The Best Loved Dog
Then he got out of the car, dashed across the street, opened the front gate, grabbed the twirling dog by the collar, pulled him out of the yard, closed the gate behind them, trotted the dog across the street, and nudged him into his car. A nudge was all it took—the dog clambered across the driver’s seat and the console and sat down on the passenger seat on top of his still wagging tail. Paul picked up his phone.
That doesn’t even sound familiar to me.
I’ll be home before she goes to bed. I love you. I’m sorry.
He jerked the car into reverse, turned and looked over his shoulder at the dog’s house. It was quiet. No one was on the porch in pajamas, aiming a shotgun at him. Cheryl’s house was quiet too, the living room lights extinguished. The dog was wiggling on his wagging tail, panting, a portrait of anticipation. What unexpected early morning adventure is this? It was a mutt, this dog, maybe some kind of lab/hound mix, medium sized, a long snout and pointed ears, all black but for an oval patch of white from throat to chest. If it was alarmed to have been rushed from its home, it sure didn’t show it. Probably it wasn’t a very good home, Paul reasoned. Who left their dog out at 6:00 in the morning to bark and wake up the neighborhood anyway?
*
He sped back to the Hyatt, left the dog in the car, showered and changed, went to two meetings in two conference rooms, loaded up two plates at the buffet lunch, walked the dog around the front of the hotel to pee and poop, and started the six-hour drive home at 1:15, with one plate on his thigh and the other on the floor in the back seat.
He’d never had a dog before. His parents were cat people, and growing up he and his two older sisters always had cats on their laps. He and Annie had never had pets; neither of them were animal lovers, and it seemed like an unnecessary pain, considering their hectic work schedules. Annie liked making decisions by listing the advantages and disadvantages of all choices on a yellow legal pad, and then proceeding accordingly, and the list of disadvantages was so much longer in regards to pets that they’d never even bothered to actually make the list. They both knew the only thing in the advantage column was Ava’s enthusiasm—she’d been asking for a dog on and off for months—but before that she’d been asking for a goat, and before that a crocodile, so they assumed she’d grow out of it eventually. They were banking on a hamster stage at some point; that was plenty of pet for them.
In the back seat, the dog had eaten the roast beef sandwich and the seasoned potato crisps and was now happily chewing on the paper plate. As they drove east on the turnpike Paul worked on his story, imagining all the questions Annie would have waiting for him upon arrival. Even when Annie was happy she had a million questions about everything; when she was unhappy or angry, the questions doubled. Had he planned all along on getting a dog on this trip, or had the idea come to him after their fight? (He spent an hour considering which of these options put him in a better light.) Either way, how did he know where to go for the dog? It was an adult dog, so clearly he hadn’t gone to a breeder. Had he found it at the pound? Seen an ad in the local paper? Was it something from Facebook? Had someone he knew in Pittsburgh, a business associate, told him about it? How exactly had he come to be in possession of the very dog he was pretending his daughter desperately wanted?
To read the rest of this story and more from this issue, you can purchase the Winter 2023 issue here.
