He looked up at me, shrugging my arm off. “No, it doesn’t. I had to see my dad’s friend cry. You know how embarrassing that is? To see a grown man cry? And then to explain it’s because I thought his dog was a bear? In Kansas?”

I didn’t know what to say. He was looking at me as if I were the one who had gone into the woods and killed that dog. I wondered if he even believed I’d seen a bear. For a moment, I questioned whether I really had, or if it had been Conan all along, and I too had wanted to see a bear, to create a myth out of my small time in the wilderness with Jackson.

“I’m sorry today was so uncomfortable for you,” I said, and then I got out. I wanted to slam the door but it was too heavy. Even with all my strength it sort of just creaked shut, and even this didn’t do the job—Jackson had to open it from the inside and shut it again himself. By the time I reached my door, I could still feel his truck sitting there. Blowing exhaust.

In my apartment, I wasted no time. I made a beeline to Goldie Prawn’s tank and quickly scooped out her body with a Dixie cup. I said a few words as she swirled around the toilet bowl and then told myself to forget about it entirely. It never happened. Next, I took a wet washcloth to everything—the doorknobs, the countertops, the blinds. Whether real or in my head, the poison made me dizzy, and for a while I imagined passing out, how the paramedics would find me days later, brain damaged and foaming at the mouth. “Why was she alone for so long?” they would ask each other, confused as to how a grown woman could die the death of a flea.

While cleaning, I found an old T-shirt the ex used to wear to bed. His initials were written on the tag, as if he’d packed it for summer camp. I remembered something he said to me once, when we first started dating. “I can’t tell whether I like you or the idea of you,” he said. “But then maybe there’s no difference.”

The sun had barely set when I crawled into bed and found my sheets littered with dead fleas, their tiny corpses like a handful of commas tossed across a blank page.

Not bothering to clean them, I slept until it was Sunday.

In the morning, Maxine wanted to get coffee.

“He’s like nobody I’ve ever met,” she said, bringing a latte to her lips. She had a tendency to flutter her eyes when she bragged, and she was doing this now. She and Walt had gone back to her apartment and made love on her sofa. He’d cooked her curry—the best she’d ever had—and then taught her how to say a variety of phrases in Japanese, a novelty he’d picked up while teaching English in Hiroshima. “He can build just about anything,” she said. “And he’s been everywhere. I mean, places I’d never even heard of. Did you know there’s a country called Georgia? I didn’t believe him. I looked it up as soon as he was gone.”