My friend L.T. hardly ever talks about how his wife disappeared, or how she’s probably dead, just another victim of the Axe Man, but he likes to tell the story of how she walked out on him. He does it with just the right roll of the eyes, as if to say, “She fooled me, boys—right, good, and proper!” He’ll sometimes tell the story to a bunch of men sitting on one of the loading docks behind the plant and eating their lunches, him eating his lunch, too, the one he fixed for himself—
no Lulubelle back at home to do it for him these days. They usually laugh when he tells the story, which always ends with L.T.’s Theory of Pets. Hell, I usually laugh. It’s a funny story, even if you do know how it turned out. Not that any of us do, not completely.
“I punched out at four, just like usual,” L.T. will say, “then went down to Deb’s Den for a couple of beers, just like most days. Had a game of pinball, then went home. That was where things stopped being just like usual. When a person gets up in the morning, he doesn’t have the slightest idea how much may have changed in his life by the time he lays his head down again that night. ‘Ye know not the day or the hour,’ the Bible says. I believe that particular verse is about dying, but it fits everything else, boys. Everything else in this world. You just never know when you’re going to bust a fiddle-string.
“When I turn into the driveway I see the garage door’s open and the little Subaru she brought to the marriage is gone, but that doesn’t strike me as immediately peculiar. She was always driving off someplace—to a yard sale or someplace—and leaving the goddam garage door open. I’d tell her, ‘Lulu, if you keep doing that long enough, someone’ll eventually take advantage of it. Come in and take a rake or a bag of peat moss or maybe even the power mower. Hell, even a Seventh-Day Adventist fresh out of college and doing his merit badge rounds will steal if you put enough temptation in his way, and that’s the worst kind of person to tempt, because they feel it more than the rest of us.’ Anyway, she’d always say, ‘I’ll do better, L.T., try, anyway, I 266
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really will, honey.’ And she did do better, just backslid from time to time like any ordinary sinner.
“I park off to the side so she’ll be able to get her car in when she comes back from wherever, but I close the garage door. Then I go in by way of the kitchen. I check the mailbox, but it’s empty, the mail inside on the counter, so she must have left after eleven, because he don’t come until at least then. The mailman, I mean.
“Well, Lucy’s right there by the door, crying in that way Siamese have—I like that cry, think it’s sort of cute, but Lulu always hated it, maybe because it sounds like a baby’s cry and she didn’t want anything to do with babies. ‘What would I want with a rugmonkey?’
she’d say.
“Lucy being at the door wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, either. That cat loved my ass. Still does. She’s two years old now. We got her at the start of the last year we were married. Right around.
Seems impossible to believe Lulu’s been gone a year, and we were only together three to start with. But Lulubelle was the type to make an impression on you. Lulubelle had what I have to call star quality. You know who she always reminded me of? Lucille Ball. Now that I think of it, I guess that’s why I named the cat Lucy, although I don’t remember thinking it at the time. It might have been what you’d call a subconscious association. She’d come into a room—Lulubelle, I mean, not the cat—and just light it up somehow. A person like that, when they’re gone you can hardly believe it, and you keep expecting them to come back.
“Meanwhile, there’s the cat. Her name was Lucy to start with, but Lulubelle hated the way she acted so much that she started calling her Screwlucy, and it kind of stuck. Lucy wasn’t nuts, though, she only wanted to be loved. Wanted to be loved more than any other pet I ever had in my life, and I’ve had quite a few.
“Anyway, I come in the house and pick up the cat and pet her a little and she climbs up onto my shoulder and sits there, purring and talking her Siamese talk. I check the mail on the counter, put the bills in the basket, then go over to the fridge to get Lucy something to eat.
I always keep a working can of cat food in there, with a piece of tin-267
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foil over the top. Saves having Lucy get excited and digging her claws into my shoulder when she hears the can opener. Cats are smart, you know. Much smarter than dogs. They’re different in other ways, too. It might be that the biggest division in the world isn’t men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs. Did any of you pork-packers ever think of that?
“Lulu bitched like hell about having an open can of cat food in the fridge, even one with a piece of foil over the top, said it made everything in there taste like old tuna, but I wouldn’t give in on that one.
On most stuff I did it her way, but that cat food business was one of the few places where I really stood up for my rights. It didn’t have anything to do with the cat food, anyway. It had to do with the cat.
She just didn’t like Lucy, that was all. Lucy was her cat, but she didn’t like it.
“Anyway, I go over to the fridge, and I see there’s a note on it, stuck there with one of the vegetable magnets. It’s from Lulubelle.
Best as I can remember, it goes like this:
“‘Dear L.T.—I am leaving you, honey. Unless you come home early, I will be long gone by the time you get this note. I don’t think you will get home early, you have never got home early in all the time we have been married, but at least I know you’ll get this almost as soon as you get in the door, because the first thing you always do when you get home isn’t to come see me and say “Hi sweet girl I’m home” and give me a kiss but go to the fridge and get whatever’s left of the last nasty can of Calo you put in there and feed Screwlucy. So at least I know you won’t just go upstairs and get shocked when you see my Elvis Last Supper picture is gone and my half of the closet is mostly empty and think we had a burglar who likes ladies’ dresses (unlike some who only care about what is under them).
“ ‘I get irritated with you sometimes, honey, but I still think you’re sweet and kind and nice, you will always be my little maple duff and sugar dumpling, no matter where our paths may lead. It’s just that I have decided I was never cut out to be a Spam-packer’s wife. I don’t mean that in any conceited way, either. I even called the Psychic Hot-line last week as I struggled with this decision, lying awake night after 268
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night (and listening to you snore, boy, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings but have you ever got a snore on you), and I was given this message: “A broken spoon may become a fork.” I didn’t understand that at first, but I didn’t give up on it. I am not smart like some people (or like some people think they are smart), but I work at things. The best mill grinds slow but exceedingly fine, my mother used to say, and I ground away at this like a pepper mill in a Chinese restaurant, thinking late at night while you snored and no doubt dreamed of how many pork-snouts you could get in a can of Spam. And it came to me that saying about how a broken spoon can become a fork is a beautiful thing to behold. Because a fork has tines. And those tines may have to separate, like you and me must now have to separate, but still they have the same handle. So do we. We are both human beings, L.T., capable of loving and respecting one another. Look at all the fights we had about Frank and Screwlucy and still we mostly managed to get along. Yet the time has now come for me to seek my for-tune along different lines from yours, and to poke into the great roast of life with a different point from yours. Besides, I miss my mother.’ ”