Gimpy
by Jacob R. Weber
Art by Omotola Ajibade
The dog’s diarrhea was bad, and Gimpy now realized the sole bag he’d brought to clean up after him had a hole in it. Benny had whined for an hour, until listening to it became a worse strain on Gimpy’s hangover than getting up to take him out. He wasn’t up for this, not after a night of the kind of drinking you do when you don’t get the promotion again and this was your last chance to make the big move up before thirty. It was absurd of the universe to ask him to be responsible for a dog on a morning like this, and Gimpy showed the universe what he thought of it by pretending to pick up after Benny, including carefully wrapping up the bag of air he’d scooped up, then pulling the dog back home and dropping the bag and the leash on the kitchen floor together and going back to bed.
He smacked the spot next to him a couple of times to let Benny know he was welcome to lie down next to him, but Benny preferred his spot in the corner. Gimpy hadn’t meant to make a dog bed; one day he’d just thrown a blanket he needed to wash into the corner of the room. But Benny had chosen that spot to sleep since the day it became available. He licked his feet while Gimpy tried to go back to sleep. This was becoming a problem. The dog had sores on his feet, which made him lick more, which caused more sores to form. He had pills that cost a hundred dollars a month he fed him with cheese slices, but they weren’t working anymore.
“Benny, fucking cut it out, will you?” Gimpy wished he’d gotten himself water while he was up, but it was out of the question now.
Gimpy’s shouting only got Benny to stop to cock his head to the side for a minute to look at Gimpy, after which he went back to making a snack out of his own paws. Too tired to do anything more about it, he let the dog have his own way and went back to sleep. Lumi would yell at him when she saw what shape the dog was in anyway, and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it now. He’d probably end up having to go back to the vet to pay another five hundred dollars he didn’t have just to get anti-biotics again.
The dog was a hound of some sort mixed with maybe a beagle. He was about three years old. Gimpy got him from a shelter when he asked Lumi to marry him and she told him to take care of a dog for a year first and then they’d talk. That was four months ago. He wished the dog would lie down with him on the bed when he felt like shit. That’s what dogs were good for. Everyone else posted photos on Instagram with their adorable dogs stretched out all over them on the couch. The day after not getting promoted again, he wanted something that acted like it couldn’t get enough of him.
He’d thought of just removing the blanket from the corner and seeing if Benny would come up on the bed with him, but that didn’t seem right. The dog had been in a shelter for two months when Gimpy took him, and nobody knew what his story had been before that. He’d been a drop-off. He wasn’t good around other dogs, and he growled at almost anyone who wasn’t Gimpy until he’d met them at least a dozen times. Sometimes, Gimpy would think Benny had accepted someone, and then the next time that person came over, the dumb dog would growl at them all over again like it was the first time they’d ever met. That is to say, the dog had issues, and for all anyone knew, he might have come by those issues honestly, and so if the dog needed to lie down on a dirty blanket in a miserable corner, he was entitled.
He’d only just gotten back to sleep when a text woke him up. Don’t sulk. Get up and go for a run. You’ll feel better.
He had her name saved in his phone as Iluminada, rather than Lumi. That was her full name, and even though her whole family—her mother and father and her two brothers and her two sisters she ran her cleaning business with—called her Lumi, Gimpy often thought the full name suited her a lot more. She had a way of making proclamations that had an unmistakable air of authority to them, almost an oracular quality. Get up and go for a run. You’ll feel better. She was exactly right. The night before, when he’d told her he hadn’t gotten the promotion he was sure he’d get this time, she texted this: Don’t go get too drunk because of this. It won’t make it better. I’m sorry. I love you.
If he’d listened to her then, he wouldn’t be wondering now whether he would have to get out of bed to throw up or if he could manage to ignore the urge and sleep until it passed. He’d have gotten up to go for the run that really would make him feel better. But it was already almost nine, which meant it was already too hot.
Benny kept peeling the skin and fur off his paws with his tongue. Gimpy could hear the sores opening, and he could feel his checking account emptying with each stroke of Benny’s tongue across his feet. He opened up his bank app to look at his account. He’d spent seventy-eight dollars last night drinking. He must have gotten a few shots for Bakes and Nizzle. Why had he done that? They should have been buying drinks for him. They knew about the promotion. They knew about his shitty apartment and his student loan debt and his car that needed something done every three months and his credit card balance. He had just under three hundred dollars in checking. He had less than a thousand in savings. He had six thousand on his credit card, a balance he’d only shrunk by a thousand dollars in over a year of determined effort. He had eighty thousand dollars in student loan debt. At the end of the week, his bi-weekly pay of $1,689 would arrive in his account on the thirtieth, and two days later he would make a four-hundred-dollar student loan payment and pay his one-thousand-dollar rent, essentially sucking up the entire paycheck. So two hundred and some odd dollars needed to last him three more weeks, until the mid-month pay for August. There was no money for anti-biotics for Benny, not unless he wanted to push his credit card back up toward seven thousand again.
He sat up in bed, immediately regretted it and retreated to a semi-vertical position in which he propped himself up sideways with his elbow. If he kept this position for a minute, he hoped he would acclimate enough to sitting up halfway he’d be able by-and-by to move to a fully upright position. The only choice he had was to try to nurse the dog’s paws back to health through careful nursing and monitoring. He needed to go to Pet Palace. And he would, just as soon as he could sit up without retching. The sound of Benny licking his damn feet wasn’t helping.
Omotola Ajibade, “Left of the Wreck”, photograph
The baths at Pet Palace were already full by the time he got there. There were young couples whose lives centered around their dogs. They’d planned their Saturday around bath time and gotten there earlier. After the bath, they were probably headed to one of Chicago’s seemingly endless dog parks. Or maybe they’d already been to the dog park and were now getting a bath after. That made more sense. Play and get dirty, then get clean. That’s what smart and responsible dog parents would do. They certainly wouldn’t be taking their dogs here as a last-ditch effort to ward off an infection that should have been attended to weeks ago.
Gimpy took Benny to the least popular aisle of the store he could find, the one with the bedding for rabbit beds and glass aquariums. There was a strong scent of pine and aspen. Benny nosed into a bag of the shavings, didn’t find much to interest him, and went back to sitting on his haunches and shaking nervously. Gimpy heard the sounds of dog parents excitedly introducing their pets to other dogs from aisles with the organic food.
“Who’s your new friend, Maxie? Who’s that? Are you saying hi? Did you make a new friend?”
He wondered if Benny would ever be able to have dog friends. It had come as a surprise to him that some dogs even needed to be taught how to get along with others. He thought you just let them hang out together, sniff each other, wag tails and then they’d have it all figured out. But the one time he’d taken Benny to a dog park, he’d pinned his ears back and snarled as soon as an exuberant lab had come within ten feet of him. Gimpy bundled him up and took him out of there before he bit anyone. He couldn’t afford to pay anyone else’s vet bills.
“Hey, who do we have here?” a store employee in a blue vest, khaki shorts and sensible non-slip shoes came down the aisle, bending toward Benny.
“Oh, he’s not very…” Gimpy started, but Benny growled and took half a swipe at the employee’s hand with his teeth before Gimpy could finish his warning. “…friendly,” he finished.
“Oh, I’d say not,” the employee said. “You know, we have training here at the store.”
Gimpy had already looked into it. A hundred a fifty dollars for four weeks.
“Well, I just got him from the shelter. I’m going to try to work on him a little bit and see what I can do.”
“How long?”
“How long what?”
“Since you got him.”
“Oh, just two days ago,” Gimpy lied.
“Oh, poor guy. Wonder what he went through…oooh,” he gasped. He was looking at the sores on Benny’s feet. “You’ve got to get that looked at.”
“Yeah, the vet when I picked him up gave me anti-biotics. It’s actually better than it was a few days ago, believe it or not. I’m here now to give him his bath with the shampoo they gave me, which is part of the regimen. And he’s taking an anti-allergy pill to keep him from itching in the first place.”
“Mmm. Well, it sounds like you’re doing the right things. But get back to the vet right away if it gets worse.”
“Oh, I will,” Gimpy said. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for this little guy.”
“You know, that’s part of the problem with training them. Treating them like they’re human. It’s called anthropomorphizing.”
Gimpy could tell that knowledge of this one polysyllabic word gave this dog trainer a feeling of great power, and it immediately made him want to take the guy down a peg.
“Yes, from Greek Anthropos, meaning ‘man’ and morphe meaning ‘form or shape. Coined in the 17th Century, I think.”
His minor in classics wasn’t worth a damn in the office. He’d wished a hundred times he’d taken Spanish instead. Three of the firm’s big advertising clients were focused on Spanish-speaking markets. One sold cheese. His girlfriend was a native speaker and he couldn’t say anything. Which meant none of those clients was the one Gimpy could break through with getting to manage by himself. Classics was useless to his career, but devastatingly handy when occasion called for making people feel stupid about themselves.
Omotola Ajibade, “Barnegat”, photograph
He managed to get Benny bathed, dousing him in the medicinal shampoo he was supposed to have used up two months ago the first time the dog broke out in sores on his paws. His back and neck were stiff from holding onto Benny tightly while giving him a bath, partly to keep the dog from shaking and partly to keep him from jumping out of the tub.
They got back in the car, which thankfully hadn’t given Gimpy any trouble since the alternator last month. Benny panted while the air got going, and Gimpy tried to pet his head to comfort him. The dog responded by hopping over the middle console and curling up in the back seat.
When they got back, it was apparent the apartment needed attention. He paid more than he should to have an apartment with its own washer and dryer in it, because the hardest part about city living was finding time to do laundry when everyone tried to do it at the same time. But he still often left his clothes all over the apartment until he was down to wearing his graduation robe to walk around in.
He scooped up everything in sight, including the blanket in the corner. This wasn’t a trick to get the dog to sleep with him; he just thought he ought to clean the thing. He’d put it back when he was done. When he paused to wonder whether it was wise to put his work shirts in the same load as a dog blanket that had been slept on for the last two months, he turned the water to hot and added more detergent.
So that was done. Benny walked around the apartment confused for a while, then laid down in the spot where the blanket used to be. The carpet beneath him was a gleaming off-white surrounded by a sea of near total blackness from where his hair had fallen. Gimpy went to the closet and got the vacuum. He started in Benny’s corner, and the dog bolted for under the desk. When Gimpy got to near the desk, Benny slipped past him and went back to the corner while Gimpy finished the whole apartment, including the parts he never used.
So that was done, too. What now? It was one minute after noon on a Saturday. He ought to use his time well. He couldn’t go for a run. It was ninety-five out. He couldn’t go back ten years, pick a different major and a different path in life and end up in a better place here at the same one minute past noon on July 26th. Two minutes past noon now. He probably couldn’t even realistically hope to use the day to figure out what he was going to do from here on to make his future better.
It was becoming clear that he wasn’t good at advertising. He couldn’t even give Lumi good free advice for her cleaning company. It was called…well, Gimpy could never remember what it was called. “Hernandez Sisters Cleaning?” No, that was too obvious. He’d have remembered that. It was something with “sisters” in it, but he couldn’t remember what. Since he couldn’t remember it, he thought maybe others would have the same problem.
“There are three of you. You should call it ‘Three Little Maids.’”
“Why?”
“You know, from the Mikado. Gilbert and Sullivan. Three of you who clean. Three little maids.”
He’d hoped that Gilbert and Sullivan might be one piece of information his expensive college education might have given him the provided an edge on Lumi, but he was disappointed.
“No, I get Gilbert and Sullivan. But the three little maids in the song are the other kind of maids. The one that means, like, a young woman or a virgin or something like that. It doesn’t make sense, and it would make us seem like we’re stupid.”
So he wasn’t even good enough to give his girlfriend marketing advice, and his college education didn’t make him any more knowledgeable about his own cultural hearth than the woman who went to work with her sisters as soon as she got her high school diploma. He made sixty-eight thousand dollars a year. She made over a hundred. He had crushing debt. She had none.
He needed to talk to her, but Saturday was a busy day for her business. They got into a lot of offices on the weekend, the clients with the really big accounts. He sent her a text, knowing it might be a long wait to hear an answer.
Trying to be productive. Just feel a little lost.
He regretted sending it as soon as he let it go, because it was a little too close to making her into a genie with all the answers. She didn’t talk much about the difference in race between them, but she did say that white people sometimes treated everyone who wasn’t white like they had some mystical connection with the universe that gave them all the answers. Like Latinos never sat around in their homes on Saturday wasting time because they had no idea what the fuck they were doing with their lives. Iluminada was just her name, not an actual description of her status with the divine rulers of the cosmos. He shouldn’t act like she had all the answers.
Benny started in on his feet again. Gimpy had hoped that the bath would put an end to it for a while. The vet said the most likely cause was allergens. Gimpy was supposed to wipe off the dog’s feet every time he came in from outside to keep him from ingesting whatever was irritating him every time he left the house. Gimpy had failed to keep up with it, but he hoped a bath would have washed off whatever was bothering him. If it wasn’t allergies, the vet said the second most likely explanation was psychological. Either boredom or anxiety. Since Gimpy faced plenty of both himself, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do to help Benny.
A text. Go for a run.
For someone who didn’t like being treated like she had all the answers, she liked to give a lot of answers.
He had been a runner in college, although only at a Division III school, so there had been no scholarship to go with it. Telling Lumi he’d been a runner once had been a mistake; her answer to almost everything was that he’d feel better if he ran.
Not that she ran herself or did anything physically demanding other than the sixty hours a week she put in cleaning. She was probably forty pounds over whatever weight doctors had determined was healthy for her. She was squat and round and didn’t give a fuck. He probably wouldn’t have ever chased a girl like her, but he met her when they were both drunk and by the time the morning came and he had a chance to have a sober look at her, all he could remember was that it was the best sex of his life. It was worth a breakfast, and one breakfast was enough for him to decide he wanted her in his life, if only because she seemed to have the answers. Even if she swore she didn’t.
He’d die if he tried to run in this heat, but he could probably walk, and the dog would at least not lick himself while they were moving. After finding some more plastic bags he’d left in a kitchen drawer, he armed himself for the journey. Benny raised his eyebrows when he heard the bags rustling in Gimpy’s pockets, then lifted himself off the carpet when Gimpy pulled the leash off the hanger by the door.
The heat almost knocked Gimpy down as soon as he opened the door, so he stepped back inside with Benny for a moment. He went and got his backpack, filled it with two bottles of water from the fridge and an empty Cool Whip tub. Then he braced himself, pushed the door open, and walked side-by-side with Benny out the door and down the steps.
Assuming they were just headed to the dead grass behind the apartment complex where Gimpy usually took him to go to the bathroom, Benny started that way, but Gimpy tugged the leash and kept on going.
“Come on, boy, we’re not doing that right now.”
He thought he might survive a quick trip around the block. Not knowing whether he should pace himself, Benny peed on seven different spots before they even made it to the Haitian restaurant at the first corner. Having made it this far, Gimpy figured they could make it one more street before he turned and started to head back around. When he made it to that corner, he decided to go one more.
It was even too hot for insects, it seemed, which was something of a blessing. There was a pickup truck pulled up to the side of the road selling what looked like perfect watermelons for two-fifty a piece. If he weren’t walking the dog, he’d get one and take it home to eat the whole thing naked. He was already sweating everywhere and wished he’d worn a hat to keep the sun off his head and the sweat out of his eyes.
Suddenly, a woman came around the corner in front of them, holding onto two large labs she seemed barely able to keep from pulling her like a sled. He tightened up his grip on the leash and shortened how much slack he gave to Benny, pulling him off to the side next to the brick building. He leaned against the wall and found it too hot to touch.
“It’s okay, they’re friendly,” the woman said, her voice jumping as she bounced along to the dogs.
“He’s not,” Gimpy said, looking down at Benny, whose hackles were already in a frenzy.
“Oh,” the woman said, her voice somewhere between disappointment and disapproval.
“I just got him from the shelter two days ago.”
“Oh, well good luck!” she said, before being pulled off toward a pigeon that was pecking at aluminum foil with food still stuck to it.
It took a block before the mohawk on Benny’s backside had gone back to normal. He could go from calm to believing he was in a death match for his life back to calm again, and that was the scariest thing for Gimpy. He never knew what the dog was going to do.
He decided to turn and head back up on the next street over, carefully looking around the corner first to be sure nobody was coming. At the halfway point back home, he pulled the waters out of his backpack, drank his and poured some out for Benny in the Cool Whip container. The dog drank it up, his tongue as rhythmic as the washing machine they’d left purring back in the apartment.
They made it back and Benny curled up and went to sleep in his corner. The laundry needed shifted to the dryer.
He wanted to ask Lumi what he should do next, but he was afraid of appearing too in need of her direction. She thought he was still frightfully immature, which was why she was testing him with the dog. So he tried to get advice without actually asking for it.
Just looking forward to seeing you tonight, trying to figure out how to make the time go faster.
They had one date a week, because she worked nights, when the buildings were empty. The family took off on Sundays after cleaning all day Saturday, so that was their night together. The phone delivered a reply with its cheery ding.
Cleaning.
Okay, so he had his answer. Probably a good idea. They usually ended up at his place at the ends of their dates, because even though it was a shithole, there weren’t nine people living in it. Lumi had enough money to almost pay cash for her own house, but she stayed living in the house with her parents in Pilsen. She said it was free to live there and she didn’t see any reason why she should give someone else the money she worked for when she could put it in her own damn account instead.
The bathroom needed serious attention. There were seven dirty towels on the floor, including his largest dish towel he’d resorted to when he ran out of the other kind. The floor was such a mess that instead of mopping it, he just dumped a bucket of sudsy water all over, then used the dirty towels to wipe the floor and clean it all up. Then he threw the towels into the washer. He got a Mr. Clean eraser for the sink, and when he was done with that, he used a t-shirt and some spray cleaner to do the toilet, then threw the t-shirt into the wash with the towels.
He used newspaper instead of paper towels to clean off the mirror above the sink. Lumi had taught him that. He didn’t even mess around with using cleaner on the tub; it was in an urgent state, and he just emptied a whole box of Brillo pads on it. His fingers were raw by the time he was done.
It wasn’t until he finished all the dishes in the kitchen and threw out everything spoiled in the refrigerator that he realized the text from Lumi wasn’t a command. She wasn’t saying, “Cleaning is how you should make the time pass,” she was saying, “I’m cleaning, you idiot, so leave me alone.” Oh well, it needed done, so it was probably a fortunate misunderstanding.
He was hungry, but they were headed to a restaurant he liked that night, so he didn’t want to eat too much. He grabbed two fifty from his change bottle and ran down the street, hoping the truck was still there. It was, and he did, in fact, eat an entire watermelon naked.
Omotola Ajibade, “Ocean Grove 2”, photograph
By the time he finished, Benny was awake and licking himself again and Gimpy’s gut was sloshing around. Alright, fine, Lumi. It might be hot enough to kill me, but if I’ve ever been hydrated enough to run in heat like this, it’s right now, and if I run the dog’s paws off, he won’t have anything left to lick.
They walked over to the trail along the lake. He’d feared it would be crowded and dangerous on a Saturday, but most people had shown enough sense to stay out of the heat. There was a biker and a skater, but no dog walkers.
Gimpy had never run with Benny before. He didn’t even know if Benny could run. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure whether he himself could run. He’d run three times in the whole year so far, each time promising himself to get back in shape, but each time failing to follow up that painful first run with a second one. He had a water bottle in one hand, the leash in the other, three bags in his pocket, and the key to his apartment tied into the drawstring of his shorts. He took off tentatively, half expecting his knees to explode on the second step.
Nothing hurt too bad, except maybe his lungs breathing in the heat. Benny seemed to get the idea and trotted along, although as slowly as Gimpy had started off, maybe Benny didn’t even realize they were running yet. He pushed it out a little, then, when still nothing broke, strained, or tore, pushed it out a little more.
The dog ran in the grass beside the trail and Gimpy kept to the pavement. There were occasional sun bathers in bikinis lying on towels, but nobody on the trail to be concerned with. The first two minutes were always the worst. His body interpreted the need to increase the blood flow to fuel his body with oxygen as a crisis, and he had to work hard not to hyperventilate. Once everything leveled out, though, he found a rhythm and it wasn’t unpleasant.
They couldn’t be going that fast. Benny had a funny way of running, sort of loping at a three-quarters angle to Gimpy instead of facing forward. Gimpy couldn’t tell if Benny liked it or not. Gimpy had started running and pulled on the leash and the dog had just gone with it, as if there wasn’t even a reason to question running, even though there was nothing they could make into food if they caught it nor anything that could make them into food if it caught them.
Once his watch said they’d been running for five minutes, he turned around. He felt okay and Benny seemed like it, too, but continuing to push it in the heat seemed unwise. When he ran in college, he would often run longer than he should have, and he would end up with blisters. That’s how he got his nickname, which Bakes and Nizzle had kept up when all three moved to Chicago together after graduating from Kenyon. He wasn’t overly fond of the name, now that he was almost thirty. Lumi didn’t call him that, but the people at work did, thanks to Bakes asking for Gimpy when he came to work one time to return a forgotten cell phone.
They returned the way they’d gone, until finally Gimpy changed back to a walk, which he kept up until they’d gone through the tunnel, across Lake Shore Drive, and into the apartment on Addison. When they entered the apartment, he thought there’d been a break-in, until he remembered that he’d cleaned it. The way it smelled now made him suddenly aware of how it had smelled before, and he wondered how Lumi managed to tolerate coming there every Saturday night. He guessed the sex must be as good for her as it was for him. Either that, or she just didn’t want to think about whether something was clean when she was off the clock.
He was meeting Lumi at six-thirty. She liked the same date routine every week. They’d eat at some restaurant where there were specials. They wouldn’t get an appetizer or drinks. She liked to drink, but she didn’t see a reason to pay restaurant prices for it. He paid for dinner because he said he wanted to, but she still watched the bill because she just couldn’t stand to see someone spend more money than was necessary.
After dinner, if it was a special occasion, like a birthday for someone, they’d go dancing, but if it wasn’t then they’d sneak a fifth of Fireball each into a theater and get wasted while they watched a movie. Last was the L back to his place where sex seemed to still be getting hotter each week, even though they’d been together a year and a half.
He got into the shower, kept the water rather cool but not cold, because he wanted to stop sweating, but he’d heard that if you made the water too cold ,your body went into shock and you’d sweat more. He laid naked on the bed and set his alarm for a thirty minute nap. Just as he was about to pass out, Benny hopped onto the bed, curled up between his feet, and went back to sleep. Gimpy felt bad he’d forgotten to take Benny’s blanket out of the dryer and put it back in the corner, but he was too tired to do it now and it was nice to have Benny’s heat near his feet, which were sort of numb after the cool shower.
After his alarm went off, he put the blanket back for Benny before he left, and the dog went over to it, turned in a circle once, flopped down and went back to sleep. On the way to the L, Gimpy wondered how his family back in Ohio was doing. They were having a reunion this weekend, his brothers in from Tennessee and Maryland, where they had chased better-paying work. He had told them he needed to work to try to make his case for his promotion he now knew he wasn’t getting, but it had really been all about Benny. He couldn’t take him, and he couldn’t leave a dog like Benny in a kennel, not when he started a fight with every dog that got near him. He’d had to give up time with his family to keep from traumatizing his dog. Lumi had even agreed to take time off to go and meet everyone. It was a big disappointment.
Lumi was already at the restaurant and had a table. She didn’t look like she’d worked pushing a floor scrubber all day. He was afraid to even think it, but it seemed like she knew he’d gone running. He wasn’t sure why he felt that, but maybe it was because she suggested they order desert, or maybe it was just because she never asked if he’d gone running.
They got their Fireball at a Walgreen’s and headed to the movie. It was a romantic comedy with two older actors Gimpy’s mother knew better than he did. It wasn’t good, which was fine, because it gave them a reason to get drunker faster.
“Shawn?” Lumi whispered.
“Yes?”
“It’s okay you didn’t get promoted.”
“Thanks.”
“No, I mean really. It’s okay. You don’t have to feel bad about it.”
“Thanks. I don’t right now.”
“I mean ever. You don’t have to feel bad ever.”
“Shhh!” someone said.
They kept watching. The movie was still bad, but now there was a dog in it. It was one of those adorable idiot-looking dogs, the kind with the ears that point up so it looks like it’s always hilariously confused by something humans have just said or done. Gimpy understood the impulse. You put a dog in anything and it seems better.
“Shawn?”
“Yeah?”
“Would it be so bad if you didn’t work there?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to pay my rent.”
“I mean forever. You could do something else.”
“Like what?”
“You tell me.”
“Shhhh!”
They sat in silence again. The dog was gone and the movie was trying to be serious. The woman had a miscarriage or something. Lumi worked quietly in the dark at his pants until she pulled his dick out and worked it over a little bit. She did this sometimes, but not all the time. Not if the movie was good. And she didn’t finish it in the theater. It was just for effect, and just to prime him for later.
Shawn liked what was happening now, so he didn’t talk any more. Lumi drank her Fireball until it was gone and then put her hand out for his. He wasn’t going to say no. They didn’t even wait for the credits to start rolling at the end to head out for the L to his apartment.
He loved this date. They timed it perfectly every time so they were drunk on the L and still buzzed when they started to make love, but not so buzzed it lowered performance. She was a genius, and he didn’t care if she knew he thought so.
“You’re perfect, you know. You’re magic.”
She snorted at him. “You white people. We’re not all magic.”
“I’ll have you know, you’re the second major relationship with a person of color I’ve had in my life, and I didn’t think the other one was magic. So I know you’re not all magic. I know you don’t all have the answers. For all I know, just you do. But you do. Have them. All the answers. I know you do. It’s okay if you don’t know it. Maybe it’s better that way.”
“But I don’t know everything. I don’t know what you ought to do about your job. I know you’re not happy with what you’re doing, but I don’t know how to help you. So I don’t have the most important answers.”
He liked the Red Line. There was a panhandler on it who had a good pitch. If he were here now, he’d have given him money. That panhandler should be working his job in advertising. He had a knack for sales. Instead, they reeled off the L together at Addison and held each other down the street.
Somewhere between stepping over what looked like urine at the bottom of the stairs and pushing his way out the turnstile, he had the answer. He knew. He knew and she didn’t. He could see what he would do. He wouldn’t find a new job. He would start a business, like she had. Chicago was at the top of every list of friendliest cities for dogs, but that didn’t help dogs who weren’t so friendly themselves. He would help. He would start a kennel for dogs, and he would specialize in the ones who had a hard time with others. He’d find an abandoned building somewhere, get a grant, and set up as many separate rooms as he needed to give skittish dogs a little space. Your dog snaps at people he doesn’t know? Not a problem. Those are the dogs for us. He already knew it would work, and that he would put this moment up on a sign somewhere at his business, the way every business put its boring origin story somewhere conspicuous but still nobody read it. He didn’t tell Lumi yet, though, because he wanted to enjoy knowing something she didn’t know for a little while longer.
After they were done, which took a while, because it was ferocious that night, they were laying back together on his bed, and they were laughing because they were trying to refer to something from the movie but they’d both already forgotten what it was they were trying to refer to. They were kissing through the laughter when Benny came nosing through the two of them.
His teeth were bared and Gimpy jumped up, afraid he was going to bite Lumi.
“Benny, no!” he said.
But the dog wasn’t biting anyone. His teeth were out, but he wasn’t growling. Whatever he was doing, the effort from it made him sneeze, then sneeze again. He pushed his head into the sheets, ruffling them up, then he rubbed his head against Lumi. If Gimpy didn’t know how anthropomorphic a thing it was to say, he’d swear Benny was smiling and congratulating them on their sex.
Hand to his chest, he’d swear the damn thing was smiling.
Omotola Ajibade, “Ocean Grove”, photograph
