Opening to my novel in progress:

When Zack turned 70, his attention turned south, in the direction of his nether regions. Women—young, middle-aged, elderly, whatever—became irresistible, his body rounding toward them like a cypress bending over the road, although not as awe-inspiring.

Initially, I chalked up his conduct to the shock of arriving at an undeniably old age. He’d settle down in a few months, I told myself—at most a year. Seventy-one would be far less traumatic. From birth, ages ending in zero signify more than those that don’t push their victims into the next decade. Go figure.

Seventy-one arrived, but his recovery didn’t. He dropped the divorce bomb on January 21, 2020, the day news of the Covid pandemic broke. Two disasters in less than 24 hours. Only a female sherpa could nimbly scale that mountain of rubbish. It took me a couple of boxes of Kleenex, but I managed.

When it came to dividing up our community property, only one “item” incited rancor: Cargo, our German shepherd-collie mix. Nine years earlier, I’d found him dumped on the side of the road. I’d named him for what the jerks who tossed out a puppy believed him to be: unwanted cargo.

The moment he saw the dog, Zack said “no.” He ordered me to surrender Cargo. After more than two decades living together, he seemed to imagine his command prompted my obedience. Then he remembered who I was.

While I put away kibble and treats, he begged. He wheedled—ugh, I hate wheedling and he does it so poorly. He said I could give the puppy to a German shepherd rescue group. “It would wind up in a fine home. With people who are crazy for the breed.”

“He—not it—already has a fine home.”

“Not if one person in the house doesn’t want him.”

I said that individual could take a long walk off a short pier. Zack said the cliché was beneath me and that it had never been funny anyway. I told him I wasn’t aiming for humor; I was just trying to shut him up. He followed me and Cargo through the house, moaning, groaning, and wheedling. Around midnight, I fell asleep to his droning voice, the puppy nestled in my arms.

In spite of his determined resistance, it didn’t take long for Zack to fall in love with Cargo. Soon, whenever we watched television, we competed for that soft, warm little body. Bickering over whose turn it was became rancorous, so I instituted a roster that I posted on the refrigerator door, like a preschooler’s artwork.

Now, having jettisoned me, my insensitive goon of a husband insisted that, because he had paid for the lion’s share of Cargo’s veterinary care and feeding and had spent so much time with him, he alone deserved custody. After all, his salary had always been higher than mine, therefore—

“And why is that?”

Ostentatiously bored, he said, “Please. Not another women’s lib sermon.”

Zack went on to detail a list of his alleged contributions to Cargo’s care and feeding. There had been all the vet bills—tooth extractions, cleaning, neutering, and that terrifying surgery for bloat. Vaccinations. Annual stool test. And then there was all the equipment he’d paid for—the bed, the living room cot, the training, the leashes and collars. The toys. How Cargo chewed through toys!

“Give me a break. My paycheck went into that.”

He rolled his eyes. “You need to realize how much I’ve invested in him. I can’t just give him up. Besides, we’re buddies. He’d be unhappy without me.”

“I’m the one who found him. I’m the one who fought to keep him. And now I’m the one keeping him.” 

Zack’s face tensed into a frozen mask. “I’ll come and grab him when you’re not looking.”

“You’d dognap him?”

“You bet.”

“You really are a monster, Zack. Here I’m losing you and my home—my life for the past 35 years—and you want to take my dog? Want me to leave my cosmetics for your new love too? How about my clothes? She looks to be close enough to my size. Maybe she can ditch the coveralls. Hell, take my phone for her, why don’t you?”

He looked fleetingly uncertain, but, as always, quickly recovered his sense of entitlement. “C’mon, Gwen. Be fair. He’s more my dog than yours. You can get another dog. Another German shepherd. I’ll even pay for you to get a puppy. A pure-bred one. Cargo’s old. He won’t be around a whole lot longer. This way you won’t have to suffer through his decline.”

“People like you,” I said, tossing my dog’s food and water bowls into a box, “think dogs are like cars. When one wears out, you get another. Dogs aren’t objects. Cargo’s all that’s left to me of family. I’m taking him with me.”

“I’m warning you,” he whined.

I grabbed the box and started for the door. But before I turned the knob, I stopped. “Here’s an idea. How about we let Cargo decide his own fate?” Zack quirked an eyebrow, listening. I described an exercise I’d seen on YouTube in which a couple called their dog simultaneously out of curiosity to see which one he’d go to.

 As I knew would happen, Zack’s ego convinced him Cargo would choose him. After all, he and the dog ran together. They went to the dog beach every Wednesday, Cargo wading and occasionally swimming out after a ball. The two of them had even gone camping several times without me. With a wide grin, Zack said, “Fine.”

“But you have to agree to abide by his decision.”

“As do you.”

“Definitely. I’m just making sure.”

He smirked. “Scout’s honor.”

We went outside and sat Cargo down, moving away from him and from each other.

I intoned, “One. . . two. . . three.”

Slapping our legs, we shouted in unison, “Cargo! Come!”

My boy loped straight to me.

As I hurtled north in my decrepit VW Bug, wiping my eyes, I fumed. The woman who replaced me, one Danielle Bickle, was at that moment—I was sure of it—making herself comfortable in the house I had called home for half my life. Zack had inherited it from his grandmother before I came along, and, therefore—unfortunately—it wasn’t on the skimpy list of our community property. Lovely. I was homeless and that night the woman my husband cheated on me with would sleep next to him in my bed.

Zack followed in a rented pickup with the bed from the guest room and other odds and ends I thought might prove useful, items he bestowed on me with the self-satisfaction of a generous benefactor. We were headed to a vacant apartment—the Terrace—in Fort Bragg. The Advocate-News had listed only one vacancy available immediately. It said nothing about pets, which I took for a good sign. Fort Bragg has a reputation for being dog-friendly.

Nothing in my no-longer-home town, Mendocino, could house me immediately. Pretty quickly I dispensed with the idea of looking there anyway. Pending vacancies specified no dogs, especially no large dogs. And then there was the thought of running into Dani or Zack (or, worse, the pair of them) at the grocer’s, which would be about as bearable as ingesting a bowl of spit. I could easily envision my life and Cargo’s shrinking if I stayed in that town. Zack would probably get himself another dog and he’d take over my boy’s favorite dog park. No. I couldn’t live near them.

Maybe Fort Bragg wasn’t far enough away. They might come up for the abundant fresh produce at the yuppie Harvest Market. But I told myself I’d be all right. Fort Bragg is much much bigger than Mendocino. So, for now, it would have to do.

The Terrace Apartments stood on the corner, bereft of terraces and charm. At the corner of Morose and Tragic, a salmon-pink stucco stub jutted up from whiskers of brown grass. Zack pulled up to park behind me. I got out to tell him I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in that eyesore. We had decided that, if this didn’t work out, we would put everything in storage and I’d take a room in a motel until something better opened up.

Before I could tell him I’d changed my mind about The Terrace Apartments, a woman pulled up in a dowdy beige sedan. She peered hard at me and then hard at Cargo in my car. His snout poked through the passenger window as his solemn brown eyes reflected as much enthusiasm as I felt for the view.

She looked about sixty, with long straggly gray hair. Her body couldn’t be discerned beneath a bulky brown coat, but her feet were in slippers. Puffy ankles suggested the reason for this wardrobe blemish.

“You here about the apartment?” I nodded, but she shook her head. “No dogs. You should’ve said.” She sounded cross, having driven some distance to meet me. I suspected the slippers weren’t giving her the pain relief her swollen ankles needed.

Even though the look of the place depressed me, especially given my pre-existing sub-basement mood, I found myself putting up an argument. “He’s not a problem.”

“A German shepherd? What do you take me for?”

“He doesn’t bark.”

“But does he bite?”

“Never.”

“I’m sure he poops and pees.”

“I pick it up.”

“Right.” Her expression didn’t soften from the one I’d expect had I asserted that Cargo and I were fresh off the mother ship from Mars.

 “Look—Mrs. Oberon? I’m desperate. My husband took up with a younger woman and I haven’t got anywhere to go. He kicked me out.” That wasn’t true and I could imagine Zack’s horror at my representing him as that sort of monster. Leaving immediately had been all my own idea.

Apparently, however, I had given Mrs. Oberon a tearjerker that touched her because her face softened, or at least it became less hard. Perhaps she too had dealt with a cheating husband. Putting a hand on her arm to up our new-found intimacy, I promised, “If anyone complains about Cargo for any reason, I’ll move out. Scouts honor.”

She pursed her lips. I gazed up at the grim box. Why was I begging to move into that casket?

“Can I put that in the lease?”

“Absolutely.”

She nodded and gestured for me to follow her upstairs. The apartment, happily, was in far better condition than the building. Although small, it felt cozy rather than cramped. Of course, the absence of furniture helped to enlarge it.

Recently painted with bright blue unsoiled wall-to-wall carpet, the place smelled surprisingly fresh, not musty like our house when we’d been away for a week. Maybe the former tenant had just moved out.

The tour took about forty-five seconds. All the walls were painted fog gray, which, given the weather on the northern California coast, seemed more than appropriate. The living room opened onto a dining area and, from there, into a short galley kitchen. The kitchen appliances had seen better days, but she demonstrated their reliability by turning on the stove’s burners and opening the refrigerator, inviting me to ice my hand in the freezer.

Only the bedroom had interior walls, but, had my arms been slightly longer, I might’ve stood in the middle and flattened my palms against two of those. The double bed would all but fill it. I’d have to opt for a very small dresser. The closet, however, looked adequate.

In addition to no terrace, the apartment offered no view. The bedroom window faced another building. The one in the living room looked out at the walkway from which we’d accessed the door. I’d have to keep the drapes closed for privacy, a significant drawback for someone like me who craves lots of light. Oh well, I told myself. At least 300 days a year, only faint illumination would’ve seeped inside through omnipresent fog. I wouldn’t be missing much.

You’d think that, after spending more than half my life in murk, I’d have acclimated. You would’ve thought so, but you’d be wrong.

“We’re only about half a mile from the beach,” she said as we descended the steps. I did not say the beach held little attraction for me, all that gritty sand whipped into my face by a tempest more persevering and violent than any Shakespeare could’ve imagined.

Mrs. Oberon led me to a door at the back of the laundry room. “We keep this locked. Your apartment key will open it, but be sure never to leave it unlocked. Not even for a minute.”

 Before her warning I had never heard that this backwater burg was a hotbed of thievery. I’d have to keep an eye on my purse.

The door led to a patio, a concrete slab triangulated by three bay laurels. In the middle sat an unpainted wooden bench. To one side, a small picnic table with four rusted chairs completed the amenities.

Mrs. Oberon seemed inordinately proud of that sad little space. “Doesn’t get the wind,” she lied as the leaves on the bay laurels danced. Like Mendocino, Fort Bragg serves up gusty winds that should blow away the murk, but that never happens.

“If I see dog poop down here,” Mrs. Oberon warned me, “out!”

“No worries.”

“I’m not worried. You need to worry.”

This will be great, I thought. As the Brits say, this will be brilliant.

To buy furniture, we had to go to Ukiah, which was more than an hour away. Spending time in that truck with a man I didn’t want to speak to seemed an all but intolerable price to pay for having a fully furnished place to live. But my Beetle’s accommodations were sufficient only for Cargo, me, and a small clock radio.

I told my boy to get in the truck. Like a traitor, he instantly began mauling Zack, the dog’s weapon of choice being his tongue. 

As my soon-to-be-ex drove, I mentally reviewed my wish list. If we couldn’t find everything used, this shopping excursion would prove disastrous to my rapidly thinning funds. Even used, my wants would have to be pruned. I’d just shelled out the first and last month’s rent, the cleaning deposit, and the $100 pet damage deposit Mrs. Oberon thought up at the last minute.

“I’ll buy whatever you need,” Zack said, ruffling Cargo’s fur. A long marriage turns everyone into a mind reader, I thought, although it didn’t take a mathematically proficient psychic to calculate the depth of my financial abyss. But I had vowed he wouldn’t buy his way out of looking up at me standing on higher ground. “Look,” he said. I get it. “You’re mad, but don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.”

I rolled my eyes. “Already? Watch out. A year or two with bubbly Miss Oshkosh and you’ll be gushing cliches like an Iowa farmhand.” Part of the glue that had kept us together for so many years was our mutual appreciation of language. “Remember our fight over keeping Cargo? When he was a puppy?” Why was I dredging that up? Wasn’t I in enough pain? “I’m talking about when—when I told you—when I said you should take a short walk off a long pier?”

“You’re mangling it. “ He loved catching me in any kind of verbal mistake.“Do you hear yourself?”

“No. I’m not listening to either of us.”

“I’m paying and that’s that.”

“Fine. Pay then. If all it takes to make you feel good about destroying my life is a few dollars for some crap furniture—great.”

“Who said the furniture would be crap?”

“I did. Because it will be.”

He shrugged. “Whatever’s your heart’s desire.”

“Oh, that’s a good one,” I snapped. “Considering.”

We didn’t speak again until we reached Ukiah. Then we drove from used furniture outlet to used furniture outlet without locating anything more salvageable than an end table. Finally we decided we’d have to buy new.

In Gordon’s Furniture Mart, I trundled through like someone in need of a bathroom, pointing to objects that got tagged, toted up, and placed in the bed of the truck. Zack had the decency to keep the total from me as he paid it.

On the drive back, we wisely chose to revisit silence. Together we carted the furniture upstairs. He assembled the bed while I tried out various arrangements in the living room. None seemed to make elegant use of the paucity of space.

“Thank you,” I said as he started for the door.

“No problem.”

“Indeed.”

He turned, frowning, and I wiggled my fingers in a mute goodbye.

I sat on my new couch brooding. How had this happened? I felt like someone who had been invited to a party and was hustled out the door holding my first drink. My inner critic reminded me that Zack and I had actually been married a long time following that first drink. Nevertheless, I sniffed, he’d shoved me out. Into the cold. Barefoot. With red wine spilling down my best dress. Well, it was metaphorically true, I told myself. And then croaked out a laugh.

The new woman in Zack’s life, Dani, as he called her, was about 35, although she looked closer to 16. She sounded like a talking squeaky toy and her every sentence ended in apparent indecision. My single encounter with her convinced me that my husband’s olfactory nerves were failing. She reeked of bergamot.

My husband. If marriage consisted of more than a piece of paper, he was no longer my husband. He was now just a man I’d shared more than half my life with, a man who now belonged to Dani.

Since he was well past his mid-life, this dalliance could be seen as a dotage crisis. If so, would I take him back when he recovered? Maybe. Maybe not. I understood nothing. Whether to resume life with my cheating husband lay beyond my feeble stabs at clarity. His enchantment with this particular younger woman made zero sense to me since no one would characterize Dani as arm candy. Maybe he’d been looking for a home health aide for fast approaching decrepitude. From what I saw of her, Dani could serve in that capacity. She had arms like a lumberjack and hands that could close comfortably around a basketball. Dumpy and slue-footed, she amplified her zany appearance with denim overalls that, in my admittedly less than objective view, transformed an adult woman into a gargantuan toddler. Perhaps repressed pedophilia pushed Zack into abandoning me.

Ugh.

My brief exchange with Dani suggested IQ did not make up for her corporeal deficits. She apologized to me in tones suggestive of someone who had broken a knickknack that, after all, wasn’t especially valuable. When she gushed that she’d always admired the independence of unmarried older women, I excused myself to hide out in the bathroom until she left. 

“Was that,” I asked my husband after she was gone, “a courtesy call?”

Other than thinking her a fool, I only hoped she’d have just enough sense to wear a mask in public and wipe down the groceries before Zack touched them. All in all, I was dubious.

In spite of her less than dazzling appearance, I tried to imagine her schmoozing with my husband over crudités at faculty functions. She was a chatterbox, I got that. Chatterboxes make better party guests than morose old women. Of course, there were no faculty parties, not in my lifetime, but I wasn’t in the mood to wrestle with reality. In the realm of possibility, Grover Harrison High School would never host anything for retired faculty. And the school principal, Mr. Homer Vaughn, wouldn’t know a crudité if one were rammed down his throat. I say that because Zack had occasionally fantasized doing such a thing. Well, not with a crudité. He probably couldn’t identify a crudité either. And he’d probably had in mind something less palatable, like a wad of administrative notices.

Okay, I told myself. Enough wallowing. Eat something.

 I’d just dumped a can of soup in a saucepan when someone knocked. A woman in her early seventies flashed me one of the most beatific smiles I’d ever seen. She had a cap of curly gray hair, and amazing green eyes. “Are you busy? I’m Bonnie. I live right under you.”

 “Not a bit. Come in.” I went to the stove and turned off the burner under the soup.

 “Oh. You’re about to eat.”

I shook my head. “Not really. No appetite. I was going through the motions.”

“I wouldn’t know the feeling,” said Bonnie, whose round body validated the remark.

I hovered between the kitchen and the living room. Well, I hovered in the dining room, although calling it a dining room gave it grandeur it couldn’t aspire to. Maybe dinette area.

“Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you something? Coffee? Tea? Wine? I think I have some.”

“Wine sounds great.”

“I could use some myself. But I can’t vouch for its palatability. I’m no connoisseur.”

“Me neither. Michaela knows everything there is to know about food and drink. She used to be a gourmet chef. Well, she still is. Just doesn’t get paid for it anymore.”

“Michaela?”

“I jumped ahead of myself. Sorry. She lives downstairs. South of the laundry room. I’m north.”

I brought in the glasses. “So who’s on this floor?”

“Nearest to you is Eva Toffe. Believe it or not, she’s heir to a family fortune. Why she chose this dump, I’ll never know. We call it the ‘Spare Us.’”

After sniffing the merlot for sourness, I poured each of us a glass and sat down. “Spare Us, eh? That’s cute.”

“No. Not cute. Just—well, spare me. On the other side of Eva is Karin Thor. She’s Swedish, a bit of souse, but don’t tell her I said so.”

“So it’s all women, is it? I mean in the building.”

“Mrs. O doesn’t rent to men. And she doesn’t rent to young women. She doesn’t even rent to middle-aged women. Mrs. O rents to old ladies. That’s it. It’s a wonder she let you bring in your dog. She won’t even let children visit. Of course, she doesn’t necessarily know anything about it. She lives in Comptche, so she’s not here all that often, thank god. Michaela sneaks her grandchild in whenever her daughter will condescend to bring her, but we keep that a secret.”

 I wondered if complaints to California HUD had ever been filed