I let him out the patio door and went outside, across the lawn, and lay down in a quiet spot back in the woods. Ripley came around the long way and took a piss in the pine needles two feet from my head. I jumped up and yelled, “Get out of here!” and kicked him in the ass, and he ran over behind a bush and stared at me. We were never mean to our dog, and he didn’t know what I meant by it. But I didn’t mean anything by it. I just kicked him.

We used to be a team, Linda and me. We shared an apartment for eight hundred bucks a month. She worked. She cooked spaghetti. No weekly food-delivery service, no personal trainer, no aromatherapy, no bond portfolio, no unborn-student college fund, no self-published recipe book, no invisible hair replacement, no eight thousand magazines flung at our door every month. I’d never been happy on the dole. I went over to the dog. He started to tiptoe away, and I grabbed him by the collar. “Stay, you fucker!” I said. He dropped to the ground in a submissive posture, and I leaned over and put my knee behind his head. His tongue went out, and he hacked and choked and kept trying to back up. I put my hand through his collar and twisted it, cutting off everything. He yelped. “Go ahead, you crybaby,” I said. He tried to lick my hand. I heard a door slam—they were back. With one final shove, I pushed myself off him and tried to break his neck, both. The dog jumped up, hacking and spitting, and took off into the woods.

When I got to the house, it was obvious that something was wrong: Barbara wouldn’t talk to anyone, and Phil wouldn’t look at her. Linda went past me into the kitchen with some bags. She didn’t ask why, on a Monday at noon, I was home. I said, “What’s going on?”

She said, “It started at breakfast.” Phil had on a U.S. Navy baseball hat that said USS NIMITZ CVN-68 stitched in gold. He circled the island counter in the kitchen and pushed the thing on the refrigerator door to fill his glass with ice cubes. He looked over into the living room at the back of Barbara’s head and said, “Keep pouting, Princess. Go right ahead.” She didn’t move. “You’re making a spectacle,” he said. Barbara got up and picked up her sunglasses and closed the guest-room door behind her.

Linda looked at me. Her eyes were yellow. She said, “I can’t cope anymore.”

I said, “Oh, really? That’s fucking unbelievable,” and stared right back at her. I wanted to smack her face.