Hush Hush by Gabriel Valjan

Author:Gabriel Valjan [Gabriel Valjan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Level Best Books
Published: 2021-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17: She’s Gone

There I was in my old apartment in Union Park, contemplating the disaster that was my life. I was the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Freed from her carrier, Delilah sniffed the air before she settled on a spot on the top of my duffle bag on the floor. Delilah sat there as if it were a dead body, as her reminder to me that I’d killed my relationship with Bonnie. She licked her forearm and used it to groom the side of her face. She cleaned while I talked.

“I really screwed this up, didn’t I?”

Fastidious and diligent, she ignored me, absorbed in her ritual of spit-and-shine. As I talked, I interpreted her indifference to me as I had not hit upon the right words to quantify the magnitude of my screwup with Bonnie.

“I was wrong.” Nothing.

I uttered again the line men never say but should, “I was wrong.” Nothing.

She stroked away. Lick and stroke. I observed the pink tongue and the right paw. The professor had enlightened me on an obscure fact about felines. All male cats are left-pawed, females, right. “Okay, okay. I fucked up.”

She stopped and looked at me. I had found the right words. “You don’t look at me or say anything, but you stop and stare when I say I fucked up?” Delilah had not blinked until I admitted my failure a second time with the F word.

I didn’t know what to do. That’s not true. I did.

I had to shop for the essentials. Delilah would need kibble and litter. What I meant was that I didn’t know what I was going to do about Bonnie. If I called her, it would reek of desperation. If I asked whether she was still committed to the Dawson case, it would sound as if I were using her.

Delilah’s nose twitched. The apartment was musty from disuse. Not quite the scent of old people, that odd combination of grease and grass, which Lindsey explained was the result of elderly sebaceous, or oil glands. He told me the Japanese had a word for it. Kareishu.

It was too cold to open up the windows and air the place out. My mental grocery list included Wizard or Glad air fresheners, Lysol as an absolute last resort. Lysol reminded me of hospitals, and I disliked hospitals, their odors of fear and prayers. When I’d rotated out of Vietnam, I was required to submit to an evaluation at a VA Hospital. Command was so paranoid and sensitive to the public’s perception that the US military was unleashing psychopaths and homicidal maniacs on them that it became pro forma to sit in front of some Butterbar Lou and answer his questions about your state of mind. An “exit interview” the second lieutenant called it, but we’d seen through that. If we used the wrong word or certain phrases, he ticked a box on the piece of paper attached to his clipboard. If the Separation Interview went well, you signed it. If it didn’t, the VA became your new home, another opportunity to give to your country.

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