Make Me Work Read Free Page A

evening after dinner, cleaning up at the sink, she sensed Sarge in the corner of her eye. When she turned to look, it wasn’t him. It was a mammoth raccoon on the windowsill, looking at her with his broad masked face. He was moving his pointy nose all around, smelling the pantry smells. His long, black claws hung over the edge of the sill.
    You couldn’t live in Vermont without seeing lots of raccoons, but she’d never seen one this close up, or this big. She’d certainly never seen one sitting in a pantry window, so trusting and calm. She felt, after all these unsatisfactory years of adulthood, that she might finally be in a fairy tale. “Who the hell are you?” she said. “Do you talk?” To her great disappointment, he did not.
    Jesse was sleeping on the living-room rug. Lisa stepped into the pantry, and, far from running away, Sparky—she’d already named him Sparky in her mind—came a little farther in. Quietly, she took bowls of dry cat kibble and water out the back door to the deck. Sparky waited on the railing, rising up on his hind legs to sniff the air and flex his slender hands. When Lisa went back in, he hopped down and ate the food, while she watched through the door. She had to keep the window closed from then on; otherwise, Jesse would kill Sparky on her kitchen floor, or Sparky would kill Sergeant Pepper on the redwood deck. Somebody would kill somebody. When Sparky came the following night, he scratched adorably on the glass. Lisa bumped him up to Sarge’s canned provisions—Elegant Entrée, Liver in Creamed Gravy, Tuna in Sauce.
    Beyond the town limits, they didn’t send a garbage truck to your house; Lisa had to take her own trash to the dump once a week. Between trips she kept her bags in the basement against the cool stone wall. A week after Sparky arrived, she went to take another load down, and a stench came up the stairs. She crouched on the steps with the flashlight. Every garbage bag was ripped open. She sent Jesse first and then followed him down, tiptoeing in her flat shoes around the scattered trash. The dog wriggled through the basement like a large black muscle, vacuuming the floor with his snout. Periodically, he stopped to scratch himself, and it made Lisa feel itchy, too. Her ankles bristled. Didn’t I shave my legs this morning? she thought, glancing down at the stubble there. She could have sworn she had. The light in the basement was bad, but she seemed to have hair on her feet as well. Then she saw the stubble hopping.
    She shrieked and ran upstairs, and washed her legs in the tub, spritzed her rubber boots with flea spray and went back downstairs. Jesse was still on a psychedelic nose trip at the far end of the room. In the yellow light of the bare bulb, Lisa saw the black particles of fleas rush away from her boots like iron filings repelled by magnetism. Thousands of them were flicking around the concrete floor amid piles of white dust and plaster scraps she’d never noticed before. She glanced up at the ceiling. It was all busted—holes punched through it in many places, irregular clumps of white solids dangling by threads.
    It took her a second to understand what this was. Sparky, the fat hog, had been running in the space between the ceiling and the floor upstairs, breaking through the plaster wherever it wouldn’t hold his weight.
    Milo’s musical parting shot was pure thrashing rudeness, but it gave Lisa four minutes in the record library. She arrived in the booth with a stack of CDs, put on her phones, and cued up a disc. She was supposed to do a station ID followed by spots for a water-bed store and a Chinese takeout place, but they’d wait. She pulled a slider on the console to kill Lizard Euphoria, pushed another slider open, hit the button, and— wham! —Jimi Hendrix cracked the gloom with “Still Raining, Still Dreaming,” the only song Lisa could possibly play to start a radio