“Anyway, my mom and dad split about ten years back and about six years ago she remarried. Rodney. A whole thing, I won’t get into it. Jesus, when I went back for Christmas and I saw that gun cabinet in the living room, I thought it was a second fridge. Anyway. Okay. Dog incident. Rodney had a dog and my mom had had a dog. Both mutts, mostly labs. Neither had been fixed because they had both got their dogs the same way, some dog has puppies, they ask people if they want them, they scoop one up. I mean, they took them to the vet. They weren’t monsters. Well, they have puppies. By this point Mom and Rodney are living in an apartment closer to St. Louis. They don’t know what to do, Rodney’s adamant about not keeping any. He goes to get his dog fixed during the whole thing. But the other dog’s still pregnant. My mom told me she called a bunch of people and no one wanted to deal with it. She said she waited until the dog was about to pop until she called Dad.

“But of course Dad don’t answer. He loses his cell phone, turns it off, or just don’t pay attention to it. If you call him he usually gets back to you within a day or two. Last time I tried to call him he called me back at one o’clock in the morning the next day. He just slips through time out there. It seems sad, but he seems okay. I don’t know.”

“That seems sad,” someone chimed in.