His eyes dart over to the freezer. “You didn’t eat any cookies, did you?”

“Pot cookies?” Sensing an opening, an opportunity to divert attention from my sling-problem to his pot-smoking problem, which started innocently enough a few years ago as a medically prescribed solution for extreme anxiety but has, in the past few months, gotten completely out of hand, I shake my head slowly. “Seriously. You can’t keep pot cookies around: we have an actual teenager in the house.”

He opens the freezer, finds what he’s looking for—a small tinfoil square in a nondescript Ziploc bag marked DOGGIE SNACKS—then leans back against the counter. He looks at the dog and then at me, his relief at finding his stash safe already turning to disappointment: If pot cookies aren’t the reason for my bizarre behavior, then what is?

“So, how long have you been carrying her around like a baby?”

I’m about to lie but again, we’re so beyond that now that I can’t come up with a reason why I should bother. We’re separated. Sort of. Technically. None of this is his business. I have nothing to lose. In fact, the more estranged we are, the easier it will be when we can afford to actually split up.

“A few days. A week. Maybe more. Does it matter?”

“Wow,” he says, then shakes his head. “That’s sad.”

I straighten, feel my chin jut out and up. I might be an increasingly strange, increasingly invisible middle-aged woman, hiding an ever-expanding perimenopausal body in boxy sweaters and boyfriend jeans, but clearly I’m not the only one who is struggling. “Said the dude who vapes one-hits out the window and eats pot cookies.”

“They’re called edibles now,” he says, patting the dog’s head inside the sling and then, with affection, mine, too, on his way to the basement.

* * *

Wearing the dog is ridiculous. An act of desperation. I know this. I know that the strain of a twenty-pound animal hanging around my neck in a cloth sling, no matter how well constructed or convincingly it guarantees to “distribute weight and swing evenly on the shoulder, back, and hip,” isn’t good for me, physically or mentally; I know that it will become a bad habit I’ll come to love and then have to give up, like cigarettes, like falling for a married man. No good will ever come from this; this will never end well. Going in, I know I’m doomed.

But there is the loneliness. The aloneness. How I startle awake in the dark, panicked, full of dread, floating on the night sea on a tiny raft surrounded by all that vast blackness. I see myself from above. The light from the moon guides me nowhere. I’m connected to nothing and no one, lost, and certain only that I’m destined to die broke and alone from one of the swift lethal cancers that took my parents in their later years, without getting another chance to turn things around. Even before Gary starts sleeping in the snoring room, when the marriage already feels like a suffocation, his florid debilitating anxiety disorder having turned my desire into maternal concern years ago, I wake like that, worried about the short run, the now, the present: How will I get from this moment to that moment? Where is the vine that will swing me to the other side?