Vanished by Karin Lin-Greenberg

Author:Karin Lin-Greenberg [Lin-Greenberg, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000 FICTION / Short Stories (single author)
Publisher: Nebraska

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I read once in a women’s magazine that life has three prongs: your personal life, your work life, and your home life. Home life refers only to your actual abode, not what goes on inside of it. The magazine said you could only realistically expect to be happy with two prongs of your life at any one point. I wanted to say that at this juncture I was only happy with my home life, but happy wasn’t exactly the word. I possessed a home, but I wasn’t particularly happy in it, mostly because it had fallen into a state of disrepair since Vincent left.

After I got home from talking to the lumberjack at the dog park, I bent to wipe Gunner’s and Rufus’s muddy feet with paper towels and realized how overwhelmingly my house smelled of wet dog and how everything—including the white carpet—was covered in muddy footprints. I suppose I should admit that some of the footprints were mine. Vincent had been the one to clean, had always reminded me to take off my shoes by the door, had somehow kept the carpets the color of fresh snow, had gotten the dirt and footprints off the kitchen tile, had kept the whole place from smelling like drowned dogs.

The phone rang, and caller ID displayed an unfamiliar local number. Rufus howled, as he always did when the phone rang. I thought I must have forgotten another appointment, maybe with the dentist, maybe at the car dealership to get my snow tires on, maybe at the groomer to get Gunner’s and Rufus’s fur trimmed. When I picked up the phone, I was disappointed to learn it was Dale Grommet, the chair of the English Department.

“Amy?” he said. He sounded tired, troubled.

“Is everything okay?” I didn’t really care very much about his well-being, but it seemed so strange that he’d be calling me that I wondered whether he was being held at gunpoint in his office and mine was the only number he could see from an open faculty directory on his desk. I imagined his unruly gray hair getting more unruly from stress, transforming into an Einstein coif. I pictured the armpit stains spreading on his light green polyester-blend short sleeve button-down.

“Well,” Dale said, “there’s a bit of an urgent situation.”

“Yes?” I said, feeling a spark of excitement. I was ready to drive to the college, burst into Grimwell Hall holding a shovel, prepared to beat any intruders over the head. Or, if not that, I was ready to summon Public Safety on Dale’s behalf.

“Sort of an emergency,” Dale said.

“Yes, yes?”

“You know Kayla Cooper?”

I knew Kayla Cooper. She was a senior English and business double major, philosophy and prelaw double minor. She loved telling everyone how many majors and minors she had, and she loved telling everyone, especially her professors, how she was such an incredibly busy person. She was a know-it-all, blathering on all the time, espousing her usually incorrect theories. I imagined her holding Dale hostage, demanding he change her grade from a B to an A.

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