Fiction
Patty Contaxis
They passed a law over a decade ago in our state permitting us to marry, but we never did. To my Liza, marriage, organized religion and hypocrisy are human institutions to be abhorred. I was buttoning my shirt this morning, contemplating the peculiar technology of the button and wondering at its history, how it evolved and such, when Liza came in to kiss me goodbye. She hesitated a moment, taking in my contemplative aura. I told her what I was thinking and she commented it was going to be that kind of day. She was letting me know that I felt out of reach. In a certain frame of mind, I have a tendency to turn inward, not so much away from her, but that is the effect. She could say things like that with such affection. In the years we’ve been together I’ve learned to relax and enjoy myself under another’s gaze, not something I knew about before.
I drank my coffee on the couch with Shookah, the elder pit bull, at my feet. The other two lay beside me on top of one another. They took up more than half the couch and I was pushed over to the edge where I sipped my coffee and listened to them breathing and to Liza paging through the Times at the table where we eat our meals. She was driving down to the city to meet her sister and then on to visit their mother for lunch in what the old bird referred to as “the home”. She had a place up in river country, as well as an apartment in an upscale desert town outside of Los Angeles, and she still drove back and forth among all those places and others visiting friends, so it was a pointed humor, some kind of admonishment, that thing about “the home”, even if she moved in there herself for her own reasons with no counsel from her daughters. I was not invited to today’s get together. She didn’t like me much. She hadn’t had a drink in about thirty-five years but you always got the feeling that the next thing she might say could have that disemboweling vigor mean drunks seem to get away with. There was just something of the hovering and lying-in-wait about her. It made Liza’s kindness all the more astonishing coming as she did from this type of mother. We may be shaped by the parenting we receive, but some of us — and Liza is a shining example of this — take the damage as a cautionary tale and become people who will never perpetrate like that again. She’s a buck stops here kind of gal, my Liza, one of the many things I love about her.
The pit bulls and I kissed her goodbye and watched her trundle down the long driveway. Then we headed out for our morning walk. For most of the fall I had enjoyed taking the steep climb up to the ridge and then walking along the spine to the gap and that’s what we did. The rains had made a mess of the cut that got us up the first half of the slope and we had to pick our way through the eucalyptus grove and then cross a shallow gully that had become a good size stream. The dogs took the occasion to drink and I worried for a moment about giardia, but decided that we