Chapter 2
June pulled the boning knife from its woodblock and contemplated its razor-sharp blade.
Her “Happy Songs” playlist was already blaring from the portable speaker on the counter, a necessary distraction any time she had to hack through the raw meat of a once-living animal.
Tonight, it was a Flintstone-looking chunk of rib-eye steak.
“I’m sorry and thank you,” June whispered to the poor cow that gave its life to this meal, then took the cold flesh in hand.
The sensation of cutting through the meat was awful, terrible, but so much was good.
She loved her kitchen, how spacious it was, how it shined.
It was three times the size of the one she had growing up, where she and her sisters would bump elbows while serving as their mother’s sous chefs, slicing garlic, dicing onions, fighting over who got to use the good knife.
They really did only have one effective chopping knife.
Even today, if she opened that kitchen drawer, it would be there among all the other crappy ones, also still there.
Here and now, all of June’s knives were good. Silas had given her the same kind professional chefs carried with them in leather satchels, and she was thankful—truly, she was—to have all this and to live such a blessed life.
The blessings were what she continued to focus on as she felt her way against bone, peeling meat back as she worked her way across it. It didn’t even take much effort. She just let the blade do all the work.
From the living room, June heard the ecstatic clang of Willow’s ID tag knocking against her collar as she shook off her nap. A moment later she galumphed into the kitchen, wagging her long fluffy golden-retriever tail and sniffing expectantly.
“Do you smell something delicious or something disgusting?” June asked.
Willow sat and offered up her paw, which was her go-to way of saying Can I please have some of whatever you have?
June took comfort in the simplicity and predictability of her dog’s desires. “This is for Daddy,” she said as she cut some excess fat from the steak’s edge. “But I bet you’re ready for your dinner.”
The word dinner alone could send Willow into hysterics.
Color it with a note of enthusiasm, and she full-on lost her mind, panting and jumping for joy the way a person might if they won the lottery or the World Series.
It was hard to believe Willow was nine years old.
She still behaved like a puppy. Every single night, this much excitement.
Over kibble! And every single night, June got to enjoy witnessing it.
To stretch out the fun, June made a game of it, scooping the kibble into a clean bowl but not setting it down right away.
Instead, she tossed pieces, one by one, across the kitchen and living room floor while yelling “Find it!” It was half entertainment, half training exercise, and a useful method for preventing Willow from wolfing down the entire serving in two mouthfuls.
But tonight’s fun came to an abrupt end when Silas stepped through the front door just as Willow charged in that direction, a runaway happy train with no brakes, pummeling him against the doorjamb.
“Really?” Silas took off his jacket and made a show of checking it for dirt, or June didn’t know what, exactly.
“You’re home early.” She set down Willow’s bowl.
“Would you like me to leave and come back later?” Silas draped his jacket onto a hanger and placed it in the foyer closet.
On nights Silas came home with his floppy hair chaotically tousled, and his necktie knot yanked halfway down his shirt, June knew there was no use taking his harsh tone to heart.
Eight years of marriage had taught her to grant him the time he needed to release whatever aggravation he’d brought from the office.
For a man who claimed to love his job, it mystified June how miserable and stressed he seemed just about all the time, but what did she know? She had never worked behind a desk. If she did, maybe she too would be a short-tempered grump.
“I just didn’t have a chance to tidy up yet,” June said as she made a quick visual sweep of the house.
There were three items out of place: the muddy pair of sneakers she’d kicked off in the entryway and failed to return to the shoe rack; the dog leash she’d tossed onto the credenza instead of hanging it upon its hook; and—most egregious to Silas—the empty mug she’d left on the coffee table since mid-morning.
As expected, Silas went right for the mug.
June often wondered if he had always been so particular about his surroundings, or if it was something that worsened over the years.
Was he this cranky when she chose to spend the rest of her life with him, or had he kept it hidden?
Either way, somewhere along the line, he had given up trying to at least appear a little lighter when he was in a dark mood.
Silas picked up the forgotten mug, examined its insides, and placed it quietly into the kitchen sink. Sometimes he would call her names or connect her poor organization to a lack of intelligence, but tonight his silent countenance of disappointment spoke for him.
June also refrained from saying what she was thinking. So what if the coffee cup gets stained brown on the inside? It’s a COFFEE CUP. That is its intended purpose in life!
But she understood that, to Silas, the staining was a mark not only on her character, but on his. If a guest were handed that cup, say, and saw its blemishes, it would be a shameful revelation of laziness and imperfection that exposed him as a man with poor habits, unclean and unconscientious.
The part that really baffled June was that it wasn’t just Silas’s self-consciousness that made him this way because, on the flipside, if he were a guest at someone else’s home and given a stained mug, he would react similarly.
Would you look at that, he might say to June later, He doesn’t have it together enough to control his own home; how could I trust him to run an entire department?
June had to remind herself that in the larger scheme of awful things people dealt with in their marriages, where one stood on mug rinsing was a minor issue. On the important stuff, she and Silas were of one mind, right?
Well, June wasn’t so sure. This big fancy house, for instance, their luxury cars—in truth, June had no desire for any of it.
She dressed up on occasion because Silas liked her to, and because he often bought her dresses that he wanted to see her in, but she actually preferred simple, practical clothing and couldn’t care less about jewelry.
Even their basic worldviews differed, when June really gave it thought.
Silas was a striver who saw the world in black-and-white, made up of winners and losers.
More than anything, he needed others to view him as impressive, while all June wanted was a humble, quiet life surrounded by animals and maybe, one day, a kid or two.
But what was June supposed to do about all these discrepancies now? After she had already invested so many years and made so many sacrifices. And anyway, she believed wholeheartedly in making the best of things.
While Silas went upstairs to change, June sprinkled some finishing salt onto her side dishes and flung together a quick arugula salad doused with oil and vinegar. Then it was time to face the steak.
The sizzle of raw meat against hot pan brought Willow back around the stove. June avoided her curious snout while holding her own breath as best she could to keep the scent of cooking flesh from her entering her nostrils.
She urged her thoughts elsewhere to the unexpected novelty of the day.
Not one, but two new people at the dog park.
The first, Val, seemed friendly enough, maybe a bit too cool in that motorcycle jacket and those tough-girl black boots.
She was probably pushing forty, a good five years older than June, and yet she seemed younger.
Maybe because she was on the short side, or because her jeans were fashionably ripped, as if she were a surly but style-conscious teenager.
Regardless, she’d lost all her edginess getting run around in circles by that high-strung little Griff.
June hoped they would return tomorrow, Val and Cash. They were the most amusing development to hit the park since the lady who showed up with her tabby cat on a leash and tried to pass it off as a Shiba Inu mix.
Silas returned from upstairs just as June slid his crackling steak from pan to plate.
They sat down to eat.
It was the same as always. Silas held his steak knife in his right hand and his fork in the left.
He made a deep cut in the middle of the meat to observe its color on the inside and determine its level of over- or underdoneness.
With a satisfied nod he then proceeded from the middle, slicing against the grain of the flesh, one bite at a time.
The string beans and potatoes were an afterthought.
The salad wouldn’t be touched until after he wiped every trace of bloodlike grease from the plate with a potato.
For herself, June had warmed up some leftover vegetarian chili from yesterday. She asked Silas the usual questions about his day, which was like winding him up with a turnkey and watching him go.
June understood the basics of his job at the EPA, but she had long lost track of who was who above and below him, the allies versus nemeses.
She took it as flattering that he assumed she could follow the chemical names that rolled off his lips—a complex, multisyllabic nomenclature of similar prefixes and suffixes—when she couldn’t even remember if Bill was friend and Brian was foe, or if it was the other way around.