Say You'll Remember Me(69)

“Hell no. That’s a big decision though. A lot of guys would leave if their partner couldn’t have kids.”

“I never understood that,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because if you were my wife you would be my world. Everything starts with you and ends with you. Anything else is just the stuff that happens in the middle.”

She peered at me. This time hers was the contemplative gaze.

She cleared her throat. “I’m going to run to the bathroom. Look at my new Murkle’s post while I’m gone, it’s a good one.”

I went to Instagram. A new graphic was up. It was in Christmas colors with text that said:

DM us so you can tell your friends a mustard brand left you on read.



I clicked the message box and sent the word Hey to a mustard company. I got an instant auto reply:

Thanks for sliding into our DMs. Click the link below and order a bottle of our mustard with free shipping. Do it. You’re messaging a mustard brand, it’s not like you’re having a lit Saturday night.



I cracked up.

No, my parents would never know her. They didn’t deserve to.





We left In-N-Out and drove to the grocery store. The Dart was baking, as usual. We parked and went in.

“So we split up courses and I drew appetizers,” she said, walking into the produce section. “I want to make these jalape?o popper things I saw in a video.”

“The fruit is so much better here,” I said, looking at the oranges.

“It’s not traveling as far. Do you want to have a garden? To go with our menagerie of rescue animals?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know how to garden?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said, walking behind her. “But I will do whatever you need me to.”

“You’ll till my fields?”

“I’ll plow whatever you want, as vigorously and as often as you’d like.”

She cackled.

As she bagged the peppers she needed, I watched her quietly, smiling.

I liked that we were talking about the future. Even if it was just about our fantasy garden and our fantasy pets. And I liked this day. Napping and eating burgers and just going to the grocery store together. It was so mundane, but I wanted the mundane. I craved it.

You think that it’s the big memories you should be chasing—and it is in a way. Birthdays and vacations and special occasions. But the small memories are the fabric of your life, the ones so inconsequential that you don’t even remember them. You just remember how you felt when you were making them.

I would be content just following her around a grocery store in exchange for nothing more than the moment that I wouldn’t even remember later. I’d just remember it had been a good day and that I’d been happy.

She got what she needed. I paid and I was carrying her bags out to the car. We were almost to our parking space when I happened to glance and see something in the front seat of a beat-up Camry.

A pug. It was panting.

“Uh, is that car not on?” Samantha said, seeing it the same time I had.

I walked around it. No, it wasn’t on. The windows were cracked half an inch. It was eighty-five today. I set the bags down and tried the doors, they were locked.

The dog collapsed on the seat.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Call 9-1-1,” I said.

I ran back to the Dart and grabbed the tire iron from the trunk. When I got back to the Camry, Samantha was on the phone. “Hi, yeah, there’s a dog locked in a hot car and my boyfriend’s about to break the window. We’re in the parking lot at Vons on Glendale Avenue.”

I started hitting the window in the back seat.

It shattered in a hailstorm of tinkling glass and I put my hand in and unlocked the passenger side door and dove in.

“I need water,” I said, lifting the limp dog out.

A few people had stopped to watch. One of the women ran back to the grocery store.

The dog’s tongue hung blue from the side of his mouth. His eyes were open.

I set him down in the shade on a planter and put my ear to his chest. He was alive but barely.

I was calm. Pissed off, but calm. I was always calm in a crisis. I had a lot of experience with it, my whole childhood had been a crisis. I had my parents to thank for that, the one thing they could take credit for.

The water arrived and I started pouring it over the dog, trying to get his core body temperature down.

A man pushed through the crowd. “What the fuck? You broke my window?”

I ignored him. I was still working on my patient.

“Yeah, we broke your window,” I heard Samantha say. “Your dog was dead in the front seat.”

Another woman’s voice joined in. “It’s ninety today, and you locked this dog in a hot car?”

“I cracked the windows!”

“How about we lock you in a hot car with cracked windows?” someone else said.

A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot in my peripheral vision. I kept working.

Someone ran from the store with a second sloshing kitchen bowl of water. I put my ear to the dog’s chest again, then checked his gums. My jaw flexed. I took the water and poured it over the animal, paying special attention to the pads of his feet.

There was a kid in the crowd. I wished someone would get him out of here. He didn’t need to see this.