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I had Bagel with me and my car keys in my pocket. I had my work outfit in my car and if it didn’t get washed for a day or two, I’d survive. And there was a bag of kibble in the garage.
Are you really doing this?I thought.
I felt like a kid running away from home. But that’s not what was happening at all. I was escaping from a bad mistake I’d made nearly two years earlier. No, I wasn’t a kid sneaking out at night, I was a man escaping from a prison of his own making.
My hands shook, but I looked at Bagel’s beautiful face and saw her eyes look back at me with the kind of love and awe that I would never get from a human being. That was it. I was going.
Quickly but quietly, I went into the garage and tossed the bag of kibble into the trunk of my car. Bagel jumped into the backseat as soon as I opened the door. I got in the front seat, put my hands on the wheels, and realized this was it: there’d be no turning back once I started the engine.
Better not delay the inevitable. I started the car and pressed the garage door opener.
The garage door raised slowly and noisily as I put the car into reverse.
Come on, I thought. I knew Hannah had to have heard it, and in about two seconds time that knowledge was confirmed as she opened the door.
“Where the fuck are you going?” she asked.
I pressed down on the gas and peeled out of the garage, down the driveway, sliding into the street without looking as a car heading down the road slammed on its brakes and honked its horn at me. There was no time to apologize, I just sped off in the general direction of the 101 freeway.
When I got there, I headed north, away from the city, knowing Hannah would be less familiar with those areas. It was unlikely she’d be able to find me, nor would she probably come after me; she wasn’t the terminator. But I didn’t want to take any chances.
“Okay, so what’s the plan, Bagel?” I asked. The reflection in the rearview mirror was just her smiling face as she panted and looked oddly relaxed. Ever since she was a puppy, she loved car rides. After all, they usually meant she’d be going to the park.
“I guess you’re not going to be much help, are you?” Still, it helped me to talk out loud, even if it wasn’t to someone who understood me. “First things first, we need a place to stay for the night. We’ll check into a motel somewhere. Can you promise to be quiet? No barking?”
Her blank, adorable expression was good enough for me.
“And then, from there, we find a friend who’ll let us crash at their place until we can find a place of our own.”
She looked at me with interest as I spoke, hanging on every word. It was clear she didn’t have any problems with my plan, and I couldn’t identify any major issues, either.
“Great,” I said. “Then that’s what we’re doing.”
I drove about ten miles until a sign indicated that there was a motel off of the next exit, which I took and pulled into the lot. I asked for a room in the back, hoping that would make it easier to sneak Bagel in, but the girl at the counter — probably not older than 19 — clearly didn’t give a shit about anything other than the videos she was swiping through on her phone.
As soon as Bagel and I got to our room, I pulled out my phone to send a mass text to everyone I knew who was in the general area, asking them if they had a place I could stay at.
Before I could, I saw that I had eight missed calls from Hannah and a dozen text messages, all a variation on, “Where the fuck did you go?”
I ignored all of them and composed my message, short and to the point: Does anyone have a place I can crash at with Bagel for a week or so? And I hit send, hoping for an instant response. There wasn’t one.
I turned on the TV and started flipping through the channels until I landed on an early episode of Friends, which I left on as background noise as I waited in vain for my phone to buzz. The episode ended and another began. Still no response.
Bagel had already jumped on the bed by this point and was beginning to snore. Maybe she had the right idea.
I dropped onto the bed beside my baby girl and cuddled up next to her. She curled her body into mine as I rubbed her side.
As my eyes began to close, my phone lit up and buzzed. I sat up, preparing myself in case it was another text from Hannah, but it wasn’t. It was from Kiefer, that guy who referred that patient from earlier to me.
Yo, I need a subletter. There’s a no pet policy, but the super doesn’t care, and the landlord’s never around.
Sometimes things just work out and fall magically into place.
CHAPTER5
***MILA***
Isipped on my coffee, watching intently as our lead programmer, Erik Rogers, gave a presentation with impressive bar graphs and pie charts about the future of the Matchmaker Pro app. Unfortunately, all the flash and pizzazz was hiding very disappointing results.
