“Hey, Clive,” I say.
He glances up from the spot he’s staring at on the wall beside the door. “Oh good! That really was the doorbell. It took me forever to find it.”
I have sizable wisteria vines growing on either side of my door which hide the doorbell. This isn’t an accident. I get lots of “people time” at the university. My tiny house is my sanctuary.
He smiles broadly. “Can I come in?”
Before I can tell him it’s not a good time, Lou bumps me with the force of a rhino and makes a break for it.
She barrels into Clive, her paws going right up onto his shoulders. He stumbles back a step and gives her head a bemused rubbing. “Hey, Lou. How you doing, girl?”
He looks confused by her enthusiasm. Good lord, he is so oblivious. He’s such a jack apple.
He gently lowers her back to the ground and she prances around his legs like a dog ten years younger than she really is as she tries to herd him into the house. I know when I’m defeated, so I step aside and let him in.
Clive is Lou’s favorite human in the universe. The fact that he cheated on me during our marriage just pissed me off. The fact that he didn’t even ask for her in the divorce damn near broke my heart.
How had I ever loved a man who couldn’t love a dog like Lou?
I shut the door behind him as Lou continues to beg pitifully for his attention. In his corner, Iago has moved on from cussing to passive-aggressively kicking birdseed out of his cage.
“Want a glass of wine?” I offer, less out of hospitality and more because I think I’m going to need it before this is all over.
“Um . . . sure.” There’s hesitancy in his voice as he looks around my tiny living room. “What’s going on?”
“Spring cleaning,” I say as I pick my way around the stacks of cardboard boxes and head into the kitchen.
“You didn’t do spring cleaning when we were married.”
His tone—which has just a hint of pout in it, like spring cleaning is some kind of sexual favor I never performed on him—makes me want to hit him over the head. Preferably with something pointy and heavy.
“Seriously?” I ask instead of looking for a murder weapon.
Clive follows carefully, picking his way around the bags of trash and boxes for donation.
He stops in the doorway to the kitchen, apparently willing to go no further, and props his shoulder against the doorjamb. “Since when do you like to clean at all?”
I ignore his question—and the box of wine sitting on the counter—to dig in the pantry until I find a bottle of red decent enough that Clive probably won’t wine-shame me. Thank God it’s got an actual cork in it.
I take it and the wine opener and hand them to Clive before rummaging for wineglasses. Clive is the kind of guy who likes to open nice bottles of wine in a display of manly strength. I’m the kind of woman who drinks boxed wine out of a tumbler and pretends it’s because it’s more environmentally friendly and not just because it’s cheaper.
It’s a wonder we’d lasted even five years.
Opening the bottle, he shakes his head as he follows me into the living room, once again taking in all the boxes and piles of junk. “What is going on with you?”
I set the glasses on the coffee table and then move a stack of papers from a chair to the floor and gesture for him to sit. My corner of the couch is free of detritus, but not of dogs, so I pick up Skip and put him in my lap as I sit.
“There’s nothing up.” Nothing that’s his business, anyway.
He looks around the room pointedly as he hands me the glass he’d poured for me.
I shrug. “I’m a slob. I always have been. It’s one of the reasons we got divorced,” I remind him. “Why are you here again?”
That’s an over simplification, of course. But Clive never could understand how my ADHD affected my ability to stay organized. How the very idea of organization made me feel incompetent and overwhelmed. It’s taken me years to understand these things and make peace with them. I have zero interest in trying to explain these things to Clive, especially since his zero interest in trying to understand them is actually one of the reasons our marriage failed.
As soon as he’s seated, Lou puts her head on his lap and sighs in blissful contentment. The jack apple doesn’t even notice, but at least he rests his hand on her head absentmindedly.
He ignores my question and says, “That’s not why we got divorced. And our house never looked like this. This looks like . . . what’s that show about people who hoard?”
