Read Online Listen to Me by Hannah Pittard - Free Book Online Page B

now. Gerome still hadn’t peed and the rain was picking up, and Mark was determined not to get back in the car until the dog had done something. He didn’t want a repeat of the morning. The two times Gerome squatted—he almost never lifted his leg—a car drove by and the rainwater splashing up under its tires distracted him.
    Mark could feel himself getting rankled. He knew being mad at a dog was irrational. You can’t reason with an animal. But he couldn’t help it. He was peeved. “Come on, man,” he said. “Come on.”
    Finally, just as Maggie emerged from the little store, Gerome squatted and peed.
    â€œYou took forever,” Mark called from across the parking lot. His shoulders were wet from the rain, the tops of his shoes damp.
    Maggie shrugged. She had a coffee in each hand and a little plastic bag hooked around her wrist. “Yeah, but Gerome’s just now doing his business,” she said. “So what does it matter?”
    The coffee, like Mark knew it would be, was lukewarm.
    â€œThis is bad,” he said.
    â€œI’ll drink it,” Maggie said.
    But that wasn’t the point. Mark wanted coffee. He needed the caffeine.
    Maggie pulled the car back onto 35. Gerome was standing in the backseat. He was drooling—something he did when he was nervous. It drove Mark nuts that they had a neurotic dog. Neurotic people had neurotic dogs, and Mark was not a neurotic person. And Maggie was a vet, for Christ’s sake. It made no sense that Gerome wasn’t a more natural animal.
    â€œI swear to god, your dog is going to kill me if he doesn’t sit down,” Mark said.
    Maggie was ignoring him. Or, rather, she was ignoring his pessimism. Or what she’d call his pessimism. Which was an imprecise term for his current state of mind. What she
meant
by pessimism—even though she hadn’t said anything, but what she meant in her thoughts, which right now Mark could’ve read a mile away—was, in fact, his current
dissatisfaction.
That’s what she was actually ignoring. She didn’t like it when he complained about more than one thing at a time: the coffee, the dog.
    Well, tough luck. Sometimes the cookie crumbled in an unforgiving way, and sometimes Mark just needed to spout off about it. Sometimes it felt dishonest to keep his grievances to himself, which was what Maggie would have preferred.
    He took another sip of coffee and grimaced deliberately, even though he knew Maggie was looking at the road and not at him. It felt good to grimace. It felt good to indulge in a physical manifestation of his dissatisfaction. He grimaced again. He felt like a man.
A man’s man,
he thought.
A dog’s dog and a man’s man.
But Gerome was not a dog’s dog. Where had that thought even come from? He shook it off.
    Maggie switched the wipers to a higher speed. Outside, the air was glossy. Cotton ball clouds gathered overhead—milk blue at the bottom but rich green high up where the red sun hit the rounding peaks. In the distance, above a blinking streetlight, there were multiple cracks of sepia lightning.
    â€œThey were running on a generator,” Maggie said after a moment. “The gas station.”
    â€œA generator?” said Mark. “I guess you don’t need power to pump gas, huh? Or maybe you do. I hadn’t thought about it.”
    â€œThe guy said all the houses on his side of the street lost power. All the houses on the other side”—she pointed out Mark’s window—“still have it.”
    For a moment, he watched the houses, one after the other. Some with cars in the driveway, most empty. Some with tidily mown lawns, most not. In almost every yard, there was a child’s abandoned toy—a car, a castle, a shovel. If they’d had a kid, Mark would have avoided the brightly colored plastics, the neon yellows and greens that were geared more toward safety than fun. Not just for