Page 2 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

While I pondered shallow graves and trace evidence, Ollie snuffled at mailboxes, peed on hostas, and chewed the longer sprigs of fescue in people’s yards until I reminded him that he could graze at home. Mrs. Finley down on Eastbrook Street was unloading groceries from the back of her enormous Lincoln and I asked if she needed any help. She was ninety-three years old with hair that must have visited the salon at least once a week, small, intense brown eyes, and impeccable makeup. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped T-shirt and capri-length jeans that day. She asked me if I thought she was too frail to carry some dumb bags into her house and reminded me that I wouldn’t be of help anyway with my dog there. It was our usual kind of banter. I told her to have a nice afternoon and kept walking, delving back into my dark musings.

Ollie and I had been out for at least thirty minutes when he took off after a squirrel and jolted me back into reality. “No squirrel,” I said firmly, my wrist smarting. His leash was taut and he was postured like a total badass, straining forward, back legs planted firmly apart. I could barely restrain him. “Come on, bud. It’s gone anyway.”

I heard a giggle from a few houses down and felt my face go hot. I wouldn’t have cared if it was another Mrs. Finley or some kid playing basketball or something, but I knew without looking that it was Lisa Sutherland.

The Sutherlands lived around the corner and a block down from me in a little white house with dark blue shutters and had by far the best lawn in the neighborhood. Corey was tall and well-built, with flawless dark skin, shocking gray eyes, a shaved head, and a painstakingly trimmed beard. He was extremely good-looking for a man and was always pleasant to talk to. He worked as a loan originator at a bank and spent a crazy amount of time weeding his flowerbeds and trimming his roses. Lisa, his wife, was almost painfully short next to him, and sturdily built with fair skin, what was either natural or at least very convincing dirty-blond hair, blue eyes, a quick smile, and nice boobs. She was the type of person I really, really liked to look at, and I usually stumbled all over myself when I tried to have a conversation with her. She taught pre-K at one of the private schools and tended to be the one I saw doing the mowing, edging, and watering. Both of them were at least ten years my junior. I met them right away when they moved in, pretty much because I walked Ollie the same route at least once every day and they spent a ton of time in their front yard.

We had started off with the usual nods, half-smiles, and waves, but within a month or so, I was complimenting them on their landscaping, and they were admiring my dog. We usually just exchanged a few words while I walked by, but every once in a while, we talked for several minutes. I secretly loved the way Lisa dropped onto the sidewalk to pet Ollie and say goofy things to him. I loved how he licked her in return. I loved the gentle, upbeat cadence of her voice and could totally picture her with a class full of four-year-olds. I loved the way she looked me in the eye when we spoke. Pretty much, I crushed hard on a straight girl and hoped for a glimpse of her every time I walked past.

“Those nasty squirrels are just mocking you, old man.” Lisa abandoned what she was doing and came down to the sidewalk. Ollie lost interest in the squirrel and went to get pets, still tugging me down the street.

“How’re you doing?” I asked.

“Can’t complain. The weather’s lovely. Has to be twenty degrees cooler than it was earlier in the week.”

It had rained the day before, and this was the first time since the beginning of summer that the pavement was cool enough to take Ollie on a walk so early in the afternoon. “Your lawn is still looking good.”

It was mowed to just the right length, not messy, not scalped, and was painstakingly edged. Lisa shrugged like that was no big deal. “Thanks. Hard to keep it green this summer. Seems like we were watering every evening.”

They had been. I knew. I nodded nervously and realized that I was staring. Lisa had come onto one knee to scratch Ollie under his harness and his eyes had rolled back in his head. “When do you start back?”

“Next Monday. I’m working on my classroom this week.”

“I bet it looks amazing. I’d love to see it.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to take them back.

If I’d overstepped, Lisa took it in stride. “Everything is this big,” she said, motioning to the level of Ollie’s head. “Bet yours doesn’t look like that.”

I laughed. “Think of your high school math class, then imagine less inviting. I usually share with like six other teachers.”

“Do you drag your supplies around?”

“There’s not much to bring for college.”

“I guess. When do you go back?”

“The twenty-sixth.”

“Lucky.”

Our gazes locked until something distracted me. “Do you have lilacs in your backyard? I swear I smelled lilacs for a second.”

Lisa’s brow furrowed. “No. Do they grow here?”

Shit. “I guess they probably don’t. My grandmother had a ton of them when she lived up north. Anyway, it’s probably just the crape myrtles. I should probably…” I didn’t know if crape myrtles even smelled, I just knew I was off my meds and needed to get out of there.

Lisa stood back up and gave Ollie one more pat. “Bet you’re ready for your dinner.”

He was a grazer, but I nodded. “Have a good week. Try to rest some.”

“I’ll need it,” she said. “You too.”

I still felt a little odd, but Ollie had settled down nicely and we didn’t come across any more squirrels in the couple blocks home. Once back in the house, I did refill his kibble, then stuck a frozen lasagna in the oven and settled into my office.

I opened up my laptop and scrolled through some of the edits. Jace and I had worked together for over ten years, and I expected her to be tough on me. I’d always known that I couldn’t be a writer without thick skin, and I actually enjoyed the editing process. Rarely did we argue about anything, and I had to feel crazy strongly about a section or wording in order to even bother defending it because she was always right. This time she had suggested I switch the order of a few events, and I had to do major rewriting in order to make things follow.

I’d confided in her that I had trouble writing on my mood stabilizers, but I had never told her that in order to get really good work done, I went off of them. I knew she’d be in Catherine’s camp, of course, and that it was a really stupid thing to do, but I risked it from time to time anyway. I loved the feeling of words emerging from my brain through my fingertips in a rush, so fast I sometimes couldn’t keep up with them. Not all of them were good, but it was always so much easier to come back and cull the right phrases from masses than it was to strain to get perfection onto the screen the first time like I did while on the meds. When my brain was unadulterated, I could, and often did, spend all day and all night vomiting its contents uncensored. I scribbled on scrap paper and napkins when I was out of the house. I voice-texted to myself in the car. It distracted me from real life in a beautiful, albeit unhealthy, way.

I’d been off my meds for five days, long enough for the excruciating headache to pass, long enough to feel nervous and nauseated and off-kilter away from my laptop. It felt like shit, felt like the me I hated bitterly, but only away from my laptop. I did take the time to move my lasagna out of the oven after I noticed that the timer was beeping, but I ate only three or four bites, leaving the rest on the stovetop even though I knew that eventually, Ollie would go surfing and I’d end up with tomato sauce all over the kitchen. I sat at my laptop and the sun went down and the world grew still and the sun came up again. And I wrote.