There were two dogs, and without a drink Dass had trouble remembering their names. His mind was jumpy when he hadn’t had a drink. He’d no sooner be trying to remember the name of the black-one-with-the-white-tip (on his tail), than he’d be figuring out a way to get some money. Then he’d be thinking of who he owed money to, and how unlikely it was he would ever pay it back, and then he’d be thinking about all of the places he’d have to avoid going, in order to avoid running into those people, and because some of those places were BARS he’d be thinking about how to get a drink.
But the dogs were important today. He had to take them away. Marnie was going to dry out. She wouldn’t go unless someone took care of the dogs (Beachie? Bitchie? Barbie?). He told her he’d take care of it. Just as soon as he could.
She was going off in a cab, but she wanted to see him go with the dogs first.
She had cab money. And him with no drinking money.
“You’re not taking them to kill them, are you?” Marnie looked bad. Drink bad. Her hands were shaking so bad she had to take three tries at the lipstick.
“No no no,” he said, thinking about the cab money (in her purse, maybe). He wanted so badly to ask her for a couple of bucks for the dogs, you know but she’d see right through that, and he already did, and she’d know it would be drunk up by noon. (Sooner, but then without the cab money she would have to take the bus, or get on the horn and start calling around their bum friends for a ride and that might be bad news, bad bad news cause you can’t control the car unless you’re driving and there were people who’d just as soon drive her right down to Andy’s, down the street aways and Marnie was shaking bad enough to say okay; so it would be noon at the soonest).
The dogs were barking at someone going by. They were always barking. It was busy street, lots of people home during the day. Dass had fixed the gate up a few weeks earlier (and was damn proud of that work, four nails and a piece of board from the alley, but damn proud just the same – most days just finding the hammer would have been cause for celebration). Course, he’d been drinking that day. Pay day. That was why they had the front door open and the dogs running all over the street. People kept coming over and taking off, leaving the door open. Dogs kept getting out. Barking, scaring the little kid across the street. Kid was bit by a dog when he was barely walking. Scared since, the kid’s mom told Dass all the while angling for a beer.
Dog’s liked being outside. Dass left Marnie in the bathroom and he opened the door. They barrelled out past him, the big one (yellow dog) knocking him into the front door. It bounced against the wall and popped him back.
He would’ve liked a drink.
Sun was out. No snow yet, but coming. Winter was such a stupid, evil bitch, dangerous like acid when a man had to remember his coat and boots and gloves when often he couldn’t remember the names of his wife’s dogs.
“What the hell’s the big one’s name,” Dass called into the bathroom.
“Digger?”
Digger. How the fucken hell was he supposed to remember Digger? Especially since he was already Yellow Dog in his mind.

Marnie came out of the bathroom tucking her shirt into her jeans. Her lipstick was more or less straight and she’d combed her hair and pulled it back in a tail. She looked not bad except for the scarey look in her eye and he nodded as much to her.
“You’re not going to party while I’m gone, are you Dass?’
He groaned and looked away from her, watching the dogs bark and run along the fence at someone walking by. “No,” he said into the window. “With what? My good looks?”
You go get straight at a hospital and I’ll just get straight here on my own. Nice fucken world.
“And you’re going to take the dogs somewhere nice?” He grunted again. She knew fuck all.
Then like a cat or something she was right up behind him, her shaky hands on his back. He shook her off. “I’m feeling awful low, Dass. Scared and low.”
“Maybe you should take an ambulance,” he said. Deferred cost.
“I got my cab money. Is it out there? Did you call it?”
“You get anything else from his all-mighty?” She tapped him lightly on the back. He had a feeling it was hoping to be a sock, but she wasn’t feeling up to that.
“You know I don’t. You know I’d give you,” she said. “I’m sorry. You got any cigarettes?”
“No. You think the bastard would spring for a nice breakfast for you.”
Behind him, Marnie restlessly when through things, looking. Looking for cigarettes, looking for money, looking for booze, just looking. There was no where new to look. They both did it, all the time. It was their way of pacing.
“No fucking cigarettes,” she said. “Nice goodbye.” Then she started crying.

The cab came late, reluctant. The driver sat in the car and honked for her. She took her little shopping bag with a change of clothes and her cab money (or maybe it was tucked in her shoe, to his credit, it wasn’t like Dass had really, really looked) and waved from the cab. She looked scared and sick. He waved her off and realized he forgot to ask the other dog’s name.

By noon Dass was shaking pretty bad. He ran a hand over his wobbling chin a few times, ignoring the beard that was now growing there, no longer just stubble and did his pacing. He peeked in vases, in drawers, under the rug, pulled the cushions off the sofa, checked inside the zippered sides of the cushions, under the back, under the sofa, under the rug again. The looking itself became a huge distraction, an activity so filled with futile hope that it completely, happily occupied him. He poked in emptied ashtrays, went through Marnie’s underwear drawer, in the chocolate box she kept her jewellery in, looked in the medicine chest, in the cutlery drawer, on top of the fridge, gave all the empty beer bottles a shake looking for a sip of something.
He did every room probably twice.
The dogs barked, more lazily by noon. They ate the dried crumbs in their bowls and slurped water from the toilet, and did their own version of the pace. They nosed under the usual places for bits of forgotten food, not realizing or not having to, that they’d been all those places already.
Maybe he could get money for them.
If he had to take care of them anyway he might as well see.

Marnie was damn attached to her dogs.

Shaking bad and feeling sick by one, Dass found a length of rope in the back shed and tied it to the collar of Yellow Dog. He did no better than clothesline for the other one, the black-one-with-the-white-tip (on his tail) and tied it with a half-knot to the collar. It slipped off a couple of times anyway, and he finally just tied the line around the animal’s neck and hoped for the best.
The Humane Society was a good twenty blocks from their place.
Marnie’d be eating some kind of lunch by then, he thought. Drying out for two weeks. Shots of stuff, probably to take away the worst of it. Food, bed, heat, people to talk to (about not drinking). Nothing to drink. It was a real toss-up.
Nothing to drink was harsh thinking.

Marnie was attached to those dogs. It was unnatural. They were there before him, even. He could remember (slightly) Yellow Dog sniffing around him. He poured a little beer into a dish for the dog as a way to impress Marnie. They’d laughed like hell when he slurped it up. He wished he had that now. That was the thing about drinks you gave away, you never got them back, and the glow of the generousity faded fast.
“Get some chow, hey boys?” Dass told the dogs periodically. It was cold out, and he tugged the zipper on his jacket all the way to the top. His nose was freezing. He held both leads in one hand and kept the other tucked in his pocket. Without thinking about it, he would do a search once in awhile for loose change, through all the pockets. It was comforting, and unconscious.
The dogs pulled him along. Get some chow.
All the months they’d been together, some real bad ones (which was why her brother was sending her off to dry out nothing to drink, ha ha Marnie, who’s your daddy now?) she always fed those animals. She’d scrape up the cash and buy goddamn dog food. Dass had almost hit her once over it, when they were first together, but he never did, of course. He’d never hit a woman. But (in recent memory) that was the closest he’d come.
Sweating with the bad sick the need a goddamn drink sick, trembling, eyes watering against the cold, smelling in clothes unwashed and unchanged for awhile, he pulled the dogs across the street and ignored the people ignoring him from the bus stop with wary eyes.
It was unnatural, the way she was attached to the dogs.
Besides, they could get them back. Wasn’t the what the Humane Society did? Wasn’t it like a pawn shop, but for dogs. And cats.
The christly things slept with them, for bloody sake. Leaving their dog hairs everywhere. They’d get inside your clothes and itch like the dickens. Get in the food. Eat you out of house and home.
They could get them back in a couple of weeks. Who the hell would want to buy a couple of mangy mutts that barked at every living thing.
“Get some chow,” he muttered, half-way to the dogs.

Dass took the two dogs into the low-bricked building with the small painted sign that didn’t exactly scream money, but looked just sleazy enough to remind him of a pawn shop. The door pulled cold air in with him and for a minute all he could smell was dog. It wiped out completely the smell of his own sick-sweat. It was comforting. Homey, even.
Grey hair stuck out over both ears over a fat, florid neck, with the zipper of his brown windbreaker jammed up into it. There was a fresh scab over a long, terrible looking scratch on the top of his bald head and a sore that hadn’t quite been healing on his cheek. The two ladies behind the counter looked up when he came in, first at the two barking dogs, and then at him.
That is what they saw.
He saw them see, and he tugged up his pants, self-consciously. He smiled at them, brown teeth poking through grey lips.
“Hi,” he said, and was suddenly uncertain as to how to go about it.
The dogs barked.
“Shuddup,” he snapped at them.
“Can I help you?” one of the women said.

She stood back from counter, hardly glancing at the dogs and asked the man what he wanted them to do with them.
Dass tried to explain in a round about way about Marnie and her “trip”, saying she was going out of town (out of this world, off the planet) for awhile and couldn’t take care of the dogs. He explained for a good five minutes, wrapping words around lies and forgetting which he’d told, truth or lies. He thought at one point he might have said something (thinking he was needing something extra there and not quite being able to put his finger on compassion but remembering something dimly like it, and remarking that Marnie loved those dogs and then calling her poor Marnie and maybe – he hoped not for reasons he also couldn’t quite reach – saying something about her giving up the bottle).
“You want us to kennel these dogs?” the woman said. She said dogs like she meant shoes.
Dass was confused. He didn’t think that was what he wanted. (What he wanted was a drink). He thought he’d explained it. Apparently he hadn’t, and he launched in self-defense into another explanation of Marnie and her love for the dogs and his own inability to care for them. And hit upon what he thought might be the right thing to say.
“Gotta work, you know.”
The woman tired and reached under the counter pulling out a long sheet of paper with endless official questions.
“You’re surrendering the dogs to the Humane Society, is that right?” she asked without waiting for his answer. She spun the form around so it’s right side faced Dass. She put a Bic pen on top of the paper.
“Fill out as much of the form as possible –“ she said, and turned to the other woman, who throughout the exchange had simply leaned on the counter and watched. She said something to her that Dass didn’t quite catch. He stared at the form.
Name, address, the usual shit. He picked up the pen. His hand was shaking very badly by then and he was thinking he had done a very bad (bad dog thing) thing and no one had yet mentioned money.

His throat was very dry. He needed a drink. Couldn’t think without a drink. Couldn’t fill out the form without a drink. He wished suddenly that he was just home, throwing up into the can, getting on the horn, finding someone with some money. Taking beer bottles in. Looking for beer bottles in the parking lot behind the hotel. Anything. He wished he’d said he’d found the dogs. (Wished he hadn’t mentioned Marnie wished she didn’t trust him with the goddamn dogs whose names he couldn’t even –)
“This one’s Ginger,” he said, suddenly. Shook his head. “Digger. Name’s Digger. He’s a good dog,” he added, and petted the head. The other woman was coming around the counter to take them.
Tucker.
“The little one’s Tucker,” he said. Thought. Tucker. That was it; they called him Fucker when they were happy and drinking.
Marnie. Poor Marnie.
The form sat unfilled on the counter and the woman was holding her hand out for the leads. Dass hesitated.
“Um,” he managed.
The two women waited.
“What about some money?” he said, and licked his lips feeling bad about that, but unable to help himself, the need and the dryness and the looking women making him do it.
“It’s ten dollars a dog,” the woman behind the counter said. Dass relaxed visibly, his heart rising in his throat (twenty dollars! twenty dollars! lunch too!)
“It’s an administration fee,” she said efficiently. The other woman took the clothesline and the yellow nylon rope from Dass’s hand even as the words started to work inside his head, even before he became utterly crestfallen even before he had a chance to discard it immediately they don’t mean that.
“We’ll need cash or cheque – with proper identification, of course – we don’t have debit or credit card.” the woman said.
The dogs were being led away. They went happily enough, without so much as a good bye to Dass, the smell of food that he couldn’t smell likely heavy in their nostrils like the smell of warm beer in a cardboard carton in from the cold.
Marnie.
I don’t have any money. He wasn’t sure he said it. So he repeated it. “I don’t have any money.”
The woman sighed heavily.
“You can take the dogs back with you, sir,” she said, but made no move to call the other woman back with them. “Are you able to care for them?”
“I thought –“
From behind a door, dogs yelped and squealed and hollared for release. He thought he recognized Yellow Dog’s bark among them. But they all, probably sounded the same.
“I thought –“
”We will care for the dogs if you cannot pay the fee. We don’t like to – we are a charitable organization, sir. We rely on the donations and administration fees of the people who use our services in order to stay alive,” she said, the words heavy with meaning and disapproval, but it was rote, and not necessarily personal. Not any longer. She turned away from him and began shuffling papers, putting a bright orange sticker on each sheet. Letters. The sticker had a picture of a smiling cartoon cat.
“If you could fill out the form, in any case. Any history you know about the dogs, their names and ages – if you don’t mind,” she said, her back to him.
He picked up the pen, his hand shaking.

Surrender. You want to surrender the dogs to us, is that right?
Was that right? Dass couldn’t seem to think. Couldn’t remember if that was right at all. Surrender didn’t sound right. Not at all.
He wrote Yellow Dog and Butcher for the their names. He guessed wildly at ages. He wrote his address and put his and Marnie’s name as owners, using her last name, leaving the phone number blank.
“We can get the dogs back?” he said. He looked for a place to put the pen, and there was no place. He thought about sticking it through the narrow coin space in the Humane Society donations can beside the cash register, but it was too small. The pen rolled off the counter and on to the floor. He ducked to pick it up and just held it.
“This is not a kennel, sir. You cannot bring animals in and then retrieve them later. If you want them back, there will be fees for their care and feeding, any veterinary bills they might incur, including a standard de-fleaing and bath. Do they have their shots?”
“Yes,” he lied. He nodded for emphasis.
“It usually runs to about $80 a dog,” she said, and then she looked at him briefly, showing her disapproval. There that get ya.
$160. For the two of them.
He nodded, white-faced. Backtracked. “Maybe I should just take them back with me now –“ he said. His mouth was so dry, his insides so uncertain that the words came out garbled. But she understood.
“Can you take care of them?” She accused.
The door where the dogs were was ice-coloured glass with mesh screen. A heavy door. It sounded like there were thirty-forty dogs back there, all barking, freaking out with the new pair.
“I better take them,” he said fast.
“I don’t think you’re in a position to care for them. Do you have dog food at home?” she fired questions quickly. “You said yourself the primary care-giver of the dogs was going to be away and couldn’t help take care of them. Didn’t you? You are the dogs’ proper owner, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Yut. I better take them,” he said.
“Maybe you’d better think about it. If you can’t properly care for your animals, they could be seized.”
Seized.
“I don’t have $160.”
The woman leaned forward and said gently, “We can find proper homes for the dogs, you know. Good homes. They’re in good hands here. Maybe you want to think about that.”
“Marnie loves those dogs. They sleep with us.” She nodded.
“Excuse me,” she said, not unkindly. And she disappeared into an office, leaving him standing there.
All his thinking rushed forward on him at once. She didn’t seem to be getting the dogs. The dogs were in the back. He thought maybe she was calling the cops. Why why? Why would she do that? There was no reason, but sometimes there wasn’t. Maybe security. Would a place like this have security. Maybe big mean dogs they couldn’t unload.
Good homes.
Maybe she wasn’t even coming back out. Maybe he was dismissed. No she said think about it. Maybe she was leaving him alone with his thoughts.

$160!
And no drink. No smokes even, for a moment like this. He ran dirty hands through his sticky hair and over his stubbly chin and under his neck, scratching his finger on his zipper. No drink no drink no drink no
And no dogs.
Of course he took the bright orange can with the meagre coin donations from tired fathers and mothers talked into being good homes by little kids. When he had drink in him he’d think better. He’d figure something out.
Truth was, they stole those dogs. Right from under him.
Tucker and Digger. Marnie’s boys.
The can rattled all the way to the back of the hotel. He broke it open with a rock, all the time singing in his head Tucker and Digger Tucker and Digger.

add smokes and scene with her saying good bye to dogs

“With all its sham and drudgery and broken dreamsit is still a beautiful world.”
From “The Desiderata” by Max Ehrman, 1927

It wasn't in the least ironic that the Meaning Of Life occured to Claire in the tampax isle of the grocery store. For one thing, she was frequently in the grocery store, so by the law of averages, chances were it would have been in the grocery store or while doing laundry. There was never enough food, and never enough clean clothes. She had four children, all boys, all mouth. So when it occurred to her that the Meaning of Life was nourishment, that if you are not nourished, and have not provided nourishment in some form, than you have not genuinely participated in life, living, being. It occured to her then, in spite of the fact that in her cart (so far) was a package of Oreo cookies and Always minis. She was, still, in a grocery store. She was not at all moved to smile ironically or roll her eyes. Instead, she took out her notebook and wrote it down, right under her last entry, which said, "Jenny could be a veternarian." That was for her book.
Of course, Claire was stoned. She did, after all, have four children, all boys. And it was in her opinion that no one in their right mind could stay straight long. Not with four boys. Not her, anyway.
Beryl kicked her from his seat in the cart, caught her just under her solar plexus. Don’t she said absently, thinking now, wrapping her head around nourishment. Great word. It felt good in her mouth like a melting piece of chocolate. It felt substantial. Oh, that one was good too.
Substantial. Words were great. They were like ... melting pieces of chocolate. In her mouth. Nourishment, substantial, unencumbered. Copasetic. All good.
Beryl was two. Still stuck in the cart while his brothers ran wild through the store (she couldn’t currently see Garth or Sed, but Jamie was at the end of the isle where the dish soap was. He was unscrewing a bottle of Jergens Sensitive skin. They were strictly Mir people. With one income and four kids. Mir or whatever was on sale.)
“Put it down, Jamie,” she called without enthusiasm. Jamie looked up, guilty and put it back, the top cock-eyed and loose. Beryl was two, Jamie three, Garth was five and Sed was seven, the big boy. His name was really Sedgewick, but who’s got time? He wasn’t named after anyone they knew, but in the hours after his birth, after Randy had time to slip outside and smoke a fattie he came back in and suggested Sedgewick. It seemed like a good name at the time, but was quickly shortened to Sed and Randy’s mother went on and on about when he was in school the kids would tease him. But by the time Sed got to school, Jamile, Carston, Lorenzo, Burke and all were in his class, and what the hell would that lot have to say about his name?

Sed was a substantial name, as Randy would say. It was a good word, so it was okay, but it was his current word for everything. Randy was one of those people who latched on to a word and sucked all the life out of it. Last time it had been absolutely. She still couldn’t use it deliberately, but sometimes it slipped out and when it did, it was Randy’s voice she heard back in her head. Absolutely. Everything was absolutely, for about six months. Substantial was still okay, although it was slipping into three months now and she found she was using it all the time. She wasn’t getting out enough. No new words.
Baby you are substantial, he’d said to her the night before when she let him do it to her without a condom. They were playing with fire. Substantial. She was okay, though, she could feel it. No way would the universe screw her over again. No way would the universe give her five. And if it did (no it won’t) it would at very least give her a girl the next time.
That would be substantial.
Garth came running around the end of the isle just as Claire was picking up two bottles of Mir dish soap. At 89 cents they were cheap as dirt, but the suds didn’t last long. They were unsubstantial, you could say. Unnourishing.
He ran up to the cart and behind her, grabbing the backs of her legs and knocking her forward so that he knee hit the metal edge. She grunted. Garth said something fast and she did answer him, but it was likely no more (substantial) coherent or logical than whatever he’d asked her, but in their own little language, formed in the five years that they’d been together, day in and out, alone for most of it, and for most of it, her time divided between him and three other children, at least one of them at any given time, an infant. They didn’t need words, per se, but got by on grunts and strokes, benign neglect and smooth easy smooches at tuck in time. All of it, everything they said to each other was meaningless and innocuous. The language of love.
There was sixty dollars in the account. She could buy groceries with most of it. Randy got paid on Thursday and they would use that to pay twenty bucks on the VISA, and the rest would go to electric and the water bill. Then the water would be paid off. After that they would have at least forty bucks til his next pay (and there was still some cash coming in on a side job Randy had done for the old man of a buddy – he’d spent two Saturdays putting a new engine into the guy’s ‘Cuda, minty shape Randy’d told her while he tried to wash the grease off his hands, Garth digging into the mix, Randy washing his hands with Garth’s two – equally grubby – hands in between his own. Neither of them had gotten very clean, but Garth picked up “minty” and used it much like his father used his own words; for awhile everything, except Calliou, was minty. Claire accepted and appreciated this about her second oldest. He knew a word when he heard it: minty rolled nicely off the tongue).
They could practically catch up every single month, and that seemed good enough.
What happened, what brought them down sometimes, was the late at night, after doing it, times when Randy would get on about the farm he wanted. The kids and the horses, the chickens, the garden, the growing their own food. It was all pretty, but what happened was he caught Claire up in his talking and it would lift her too high.
“And what kind of house should we build?” She would pose this question, often as not while sucking up a fattie and holding it, so that the question, posed with furrowed brow and narrowed eyes, would sound like, “‘wat kine a ‘ouse should we bu–ld?” Build rushed out of her mouth with the exhale.
“We should have a summer kitchen,” Randy would say. She’d get him to describe a summer kitchen and what that sort of thing would be for, although when they talked and the house formed in her mind, it was always summer. There was no winter in the story, no coats, boots, mitts, scarves, ski pants, long underwear, sweat shirts –
She would nod.
“And a sauna. We could build the sauna off the back end of the house. Gotta be a south facing back end, with floor to ceiling windows, catch all that summer light. Heat itself.”

She would nod.
He would describe the barn. The second floor where the rooms all overlooked the large, main room of the house, the family room, where the piano would be and the big round rug, like the one his grandma used to have. He would talk about the six bedrooms, “one for you to write stories and sew in,” and everyone would have their own room. Their current house had two bedrooms, so Beryl was still in their room, in a crib he was outgrowing fast, and the other three were sharing, Jamie and Garth in one bed, and big boy Sed in his own. It was the bed that Randy grew up in. He liked that sort of thing. That sort of continuity.
Continuity was a good word.
Garth let go of her legs. Sed was in front of the cart, touching each box as they went by. He liked to touch. He liked to run his hands over things. It was his words. Beryl kicked. Claire moved back an inch or so and gave him room to do it without kicking her. Garth let go of her legs and walked to the front of the cart like Sed. Jamie wanted in. She hefted him and mixed him up with the dish soap, mini pads, cans of tinned fruit (on sale) and a package of cheese that she wanted, even though she was careful about her munchies. She usually stuck to the script that she would write (straight) before she left, and just suffer. The oreos were the worst. She wanted to buy three bags. She bought only one.
“I was thinking, we could build a covered walk thing, you know, from the house to the barn, so that we didn’t have to go outside in the winter to feed the animals. Could just walk there from the house. Won’t heat it, or anything, just cover it – keep you out of the wind. Could have like a coal shoot thing, except just a little door, between the house and the back yard, where I’ll cut wood and we could just fill up the shed from outside. That way, when I was away, you wouldn’t have to go outside to get wood.” He’d suck on the joint for awhile and they would both think about that.
It would take her sometimes awhile, but then she’d ask, “Where would you be?”
He would shrug, “Getting dough, I guess. Working. I could get on the pipe line and if you guys were set up properly, I could go work the line and you could live in the country. I could come home and shit. Be great.”
She would nod. “Be great.”
It was the idea of the wood stove that got to her most. Claire was sensitive to electric heat, and had only ever heard rumours about the comforts and delights of wood heat. Randy had grown up, more or less, with wood heat, whenever he went to his grandmother’s house to stay. His parents broke up a lot and his dad went to jail for awhile when he was a kid, and he was always changing schools and stuff, but he liked it when he went to his grandmother’s. She had the wood stove and he was the one who brought the wood in from outside when it was cold. She called him her little lumberjack, and beamed at him, coming in from the back with a load of wood. (“Wouldn’t have been more than a few sticks at a time, Claire, but she used to make me feel like I was dragging the whole bush in with me – christ,” he laugh. He’d been a skinny kid, and was still skinny as hell, no matter what he ate, but she saw pictures and he was a skinny kid.)

It was the VISA that was killing them. When they got it, it was only for emergencies. But with what Randy made and they spent, everything was an emergency: the kids’ winter shit, gas in the car, the mattress for the bed Randy grew up on so Sed could grow up on it, even groceries a couple of months back when the washing machine started acting funny – funny was a stupid word, meaning so many things and yet being such a (unsubstantial) short and bland word – and it turned out to be the belt, except they didn’t know that until the guy from Kenmore came all the way out to their place and dicked around for a couple of hours. They were still paying for that. They tried really hard to keep things off it, but they always needed to use it for gas. Randy had to get to work. Work was across town, and he had put his time in on the bus, but they decided it wasn’t worth the extra hour he had to get up to take the bus across town, because he dropped into bed at eight thirty with the boys and for at least two months there was no sitting around shooting the shit together, smoking a fattie and talking about the wood stove and the covered walk to the barn and the way the boys would have riding lessons because it was an investment. Later they would give riding lessons to city kids who wanted to come out and experience the country.
They hardly ever talked about where their farm would be. They called it only the country.
It worked better when they had a toke. It was easier somehow to just get into it. There were fewer questions. They would lie in bed and just make the plans.
On the main floor there was going to be both a breakfast nook (she didn’t really have a good idea of what a “nook” was, but she’s heard it somewhere and “nook” was an excellent word – absolutely – and just wanted one. There was also going to be a big island with an aluminum stove top and four burners, with the oven maybe overhead so that the bottom of the island could be used for storage.
“It just makes good sense, Claire,” Randy told her. “You use all the space available, it’s smart planning. You can’t just run into these things half-cocked.” It was true. She never called him on the fact that if they had the cathedral ceilings, and the second floor loft how far this oven was going to have to be suspended, besides, it could have been suspended under the floor of the loft part, but it didn’t really sound like that was where the island was going to be.
Half-cocked was pretty good. Especially cocked. It popped in and out of your mouth twice. But you couldn’t run around saying cocked. But she stopped the cart and pulled out her notebook again, and turned to the last pages, where she wrote her good words. She added “cocked” under “supervise,” a very satisfying word, with it’s four syllables and nice solid finish.
Macaroni and cheese was on for five for five dollars, but you had to buy five. She stopped dead in her course and stared.
Five for five dollars. She looked in the cart and started mentally adding up the purchases there, a labourious task given her altered state.
Couldn’t do it, not and get bread for a week. She had to give something up. The only thing was the cheese. With heavy heart she lifted out the cheese and put it on the shelf by the mac and cheese and piled five boxes of the packaged stuff in. She recognized the irony, distantly and even smiled somewhat. Fake for real. Part of the job.
You gotta feed the kids.
Sed was thinking about something. Ruminating. (An okay word, but not special to say; she didn’t necessarily like ing words). His left hand was resting lightly on the cart, not leading, not pulling, not dragging, just resting. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew the expression that would be there in the same way she would know Beryl’s expressions as soon as he got some good ones. His mouth would be partly open, and his eyes would have that crossed look, not that he’d be cross-eyed (cock-eyed, you could say cock-eyed and get away with it) but his eyes would look sort of unfocussed. In a minute or two he would yank himself back and pull or push on the cart and he would be back among the land of the living, as Randy would say.

That was something Garth hardly ever did. He was in the now all the time. The universe gave Garth to Claire as a reminder. He liked to be touched and in touch, and he liked to know there was someone near-by to poke or please. He was the one who sat beside her when they watched the Simpsons, he was the one who had to sit by her when they watched the Simpsons, it was a part of his day and his day was a series of parts, all taking place now. He would shoot her a smile now and then, in his little travels. School killed him for the first month. Now he couldn’t miss. It was like the world imploded the day she took him out so they could go shopping for the winter shit in peace.
Tactile. Now that was a word. Both Garth and Sed were tactile in their way. With Sed it was actual stuff. Garth liked to touch her, mostly, but his brothers, too and Randy, but just in a certain way. Randy’s hair was long and smooth, not curly like Claire’s and when Randy read the kids their books at night, Garth snuggled in beside him and wrapped a strand of Randy’s hair around his finger and rubbed with his thumb. Beryl did kind of the same thing, except he sucked his thumb and rubbed the edge of the blanket.
Jamie didn’t do any of it.
Electric heat made Claire’s skin dry and sometimes the skin on her legs got so dry and itchy that she couldn’t sleep at night. Randy said it was the electric.
“Wood’s moister,” he told her. Sometimes (especially if she was stoned) she could feel the unnatural electric heat invading her lungs, seeping into the cells of her body, loading them like lead, the way she felt when they fought. When they fought she felt fat – not fat, but her word for it when she was too upset to think of anything other than how she felt – fat and heavy. As though she were the sort of thing that you had to move with a crane or a front end loader (both of which Randy had tickets to operate, which she figured maybe she got the image from, from those days when he was getting his tickets). She felt like her parts were made of lead and nothing was ever going to move them from their place.
There was something wrong with Jamie, and that too, made her feel (fat) heavy.
Jamie understood her, but never seemed to learn. He once put a fork – just like in the books – into the socket in the livingroom. She walked around (instinctively, hadn’t heard him for awhile) just as the current struck him. Almost without thought, she grabbed the sneaker that was on the floor – Sed’s – and whacked at the fork until it untangled from the socket. Then she grabbed and held him, rocking, sobbing, and he was okay. He seemed entirely unmoved by the whole thing.
No baby no baby no baby she’d murmured. He hadn’t so much as plopped a thumb in her mouth. She had still been breast feeding him then, and by rote, by instinct she’d offered her breast, but he ignored it, staring at the hand that had guided the current. He hadn’t cried or screamed, as the others would have.
It wasn’t a week later, he did the same thing. But in the bedroom. All the plugs were taped over. Duct tape. They peeled it off when they needed the socket. They hardly ever did. It was easy when you figured out what was expected.
He was a beautiful boy, with long dark lashes from her side, and lots of brown hair. His features were even and kindly. But she didn’t’ think he’d make it to school. She knew that sort of thing sometimes happened. It was only on particularly long nights, when Randy slept beside her, when she was just days before her period and just about anything could get her going, that she really dwelled on it. It would never be something to be happy about, but he was very beautiful, and it wasn’t really all that bad. He was talking finally. And that made everybody relax. Even the mothers.
She liked those brown horses with the black tails. They looked elegant. Anyone can learn to ride a horse. As long as she stayed near him, it would be okay.

By the time they got to check out, the edges of life were starting to intrude. Sed asked for a treat and then Garth started.
“No,” she said. She added again, mentally. The edges were mathematical. They always were. The numbers were so unforgiving: 89, 79, 1.99, 3.59, with no soft, easy round numbers to use – the kindest it got was 2.29. Randy said they did it on purpose, to confuse you.

It came in just under, except she couldn’t remember (or didn’t know) what was taxed and what wasn’t, and so those moments in the before (not in the now) were always like waiting for the lotto. The anticipation.
That was another sort of lame word, like funny. It was long, and so it promised much, but rarely delivered. Anticipation. Bah. It wasn’t on the list.
Jamie smiled at her. His first real connection since he was opening the dish soap bottles.
“Hi,” she said. He kept smiling. She wasn’t sure if he was smiling back or just still smiling. She smiled.
Garth said, “When we have the house, can I have a treat?”
She said yes. The cashier rung them up. It was close, but she was okay. She handed over her debit card and let them do their magic with it. The world was full of edges that were both smooth and harshening.
Harshening. That was kind of cool. Harsh was better in theory, but not in practise. But the ing was distracting. The ing implied so much and she just couldn’t think that way. Not then. Later maybe, when they had the house.
When she had her sewing room, she was going to make a big quilt for their bed. All the little patches that made up a quilt were, for her, going to be words. The letters of the words would be the patches. She could see it in her mind.
Cocked.
Substantial.
Copasetic.
Nimbly.
Whence.
Absolutely.
Tactile.
Nourishment.
They managed to save about forty dollars a month. The year before they’d put their tax refund into the savings, too. And things would happen. And those things would go into the pile.
Garth’s hand slid up the side of her thigh, making it tingle happily.
Tingle. That was good, but she thought maybe she had wriggle or maybe it was wiggle in her list, and that was too much the same. If you got into rhyming words, you’d be there all day, and who has time?
But still, tingle.
The cashier told her, “Fifty-six, ninety-five,” she said. Claire had been pretty close. Just over. She’d been at fifty-four. Fifty-four wasn’t sixty.
They were ahead.

She never told Sed and Garth about the farm. Sometimes it was on the tip of her tongue to do it, sometimes when the afternoon was long and it was too cold outside or Jamie or Beryl was sleeping or she had her period and she didn’t believe squat about squat, but she never did tell them. The closest she came was to drawing a horse for them to colour. It could have been a horse, could have been a cow (except for the udders). But then she heard things like, fifty-four, ninety-five and she thought maybe she should.
Then edges seeped through and she just, simply, never did.
It was mathematics anyway, and they’d all be dealing with that soon enough. Sed first then Garth, then Beryl. Even Jamie in his time, would learn to count.
Mommy’s 29. Daddy’s 31. Time is substantial.
All ways.