Everything Must Go
Camille Pagán
ONE
LAINE
In the end, the dog did us in; Josh and I might have stayed together if Belle hadn’t died. She was nearly fifteen, which is about as long as a spaniel mix can live, and there was a constellation of cancer in her abdomen. The decision to put her down wasn’t, really. It would’ve been cruel to try to keep her alive.
For weeks after that final vet visit, I burst into tears whenever I thought of her. I was standing at the stove, sobbing over a pan of fajita chicken—Belle’s favorite—when Josh sidled up to me and said, “She’s a dog, Laine. I know it isn’t fair, but they don’t live forever.”
“Was, Josh,” I sniffled. “She was a dog.” Actually, she’d been something else entirely, a creature wise and otherworldly. To look into Belle’s eyes was to gaze into the soul of the Universe itself and be seen—not that I would’ve described it that way to Josh, who’d loved Belle but thought it was weird to call your pet your best friend. I’d once thought so, too, but that was before I’d learned just how disappointing humans can be. A dog, on the other hand, never said terrible things you couldn’t erase from your memory. “And of course I know that,” I told him. “I just miss her.”
I adopted Belle the year after I graduated from the University of Michigan. I’d decided to stay in Ann Arbor and had landed a job as an editorial assistant for a local magazine publisher. But after six months of employment, I’d deduced that I would never improve my command of the English language by fetching coffee for the perpetually hungover editor I’d been assigned to—and worse, the magazine’s writers were making more than I was for much less work. I struck out as a freelance journalist and discovered that I’d been right about the money—and as a bonus, I no longer had to worry about having a pencil thrown at me when I accidentally put too much cream in a cup of dark roast.
Still, all of my college friends had left town, and I was lonely. On a whim, I went to the local animal shelter on my twenty-third birthday. When I spotted a black-and-white runt huddling in the corner of the pen in an attempt to steer clear of her livelier siblings, it was love at first sight.
Belle had immediately become my constant companion. She’d slept at my feet every night; her wet nose had been my alarm clock each morning. If Josh and I traveled, Belle almost always came with us, which admittedly limited the type of trips we’d taken (well, that and our anemic budget). When Josh had told me he still wasn’t ready to try to have a baby last Christmas—even though he’d been saying “next year” for nearly half a decade and was aware that my eggs were thisclose to their expiration date—I’d reassured myself that the timing wasn’t good for Belle, either, as it’d become increasingly difficult for her to get around. She needed me.
I’d just turned off the burner when it hit me: no one needed me anymore. And if I kept waiting around for Josh to decide he was ready to start a family, no one ever would.
I wasn’t going to pressure him—not about something as significant as whether to repopulate the earth with his own genetic material. He either wanted to or he didn’t. And given the economy pack of prophylactics in the drawer of his bedside table, it was safe to say that he did not.
I looked up at Josh. “I want a divorce.”
The flicker of surprise in his expression was gone as fast as it had appeared. “No, you don’t. That’s just the grief talking.”
This wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Yes, I really wanted a baby—and I also knew, deep down, that perpetually putting it off was Josh’s thinly veiled way of saying no. But was I willing to blow up our twelve-year marriage over that? What would our families say? Josh and I had spent nearly our entire adult lives together.
I stared at him, waiting to see if he’d at least ask if this was about us having kids.
Instead, he shook his head and said, “This is nuts, Laine. You don’t actually want a divorce. I can tell by the look on your face.”
I didn’t know what my face looked like, but I was willing to bet that beyond my newfound wrinkles—which, like a brood of cicadas, had emerged suddenly and all at once—there was at least some sadness there. That January, Josh and I had gone to New York to meet my older sister Hadley’s newborn twins, Asher and Ainsley. When Hadley had placed Ainsley in my arms, she’d been so tiny and perfect that I’d started to cry a little. Josh noticed and asked if I was okay. I assured him I was fine—just struck by the miracle of life in a way that I never had been before, even after the births of my youngest sister Piper’s three kids. “I’m so looking forward to becoming a mother,” I’d explained, gazing down at Ainsley’s downy skin.
Josh hadn’t responded, and at the time, I’d tried not to make a big deal of that. Afterward, I’d almost been able to let it go; Belle had just gotten diagnosed, and I’d been so busy trying to make her comfortable that there wasn’t room for other concerns. Now I saw that his nonresponse had been the moment I realized—if only on a subconscious level—that the one thing I truly wanted for my future was the same thing he did not. And with Belle gone, there was nothing to distract me from that truth.
I met Josh’s gaze, waiting for him to say he was at least willing to acknowledge what this was really about. Because he had to know. He just had to.
“Come on, Laine,” he said. “We’re about to have dinner.” He was as lean as a greyhound and had a boyishness to him that made his frown seem almost petulant. Usually I thought it was cute, but now I kind of wanted to tell him to grow up. “And you know I’m in the middle of a launch.”
Josh was always in the middle of launching something—a new consulting company; a partnership with some purported marketing genius; or most recently, yet another phone app that was going to be the one that finally made us wildly wealthy, never mind that I would have been thrilled with markedly middle class. He identified as an entrepreneur, and while this wasn’t inaccurate, all that dreaming and scheming had yet to produce a business that made more money than it cost to run. In the beginning, I thought he was a visionary. In time, I began to have doubts—not about his brilliance but rather his ability to turn his visions into reality. Now, after a fourteen-year partnership, I’d come to believe that the four most frightening words in the English language were I have an idea.
I was not one to admit this, however. Because I loved Josh. He wasn’t a mouth breather, didn’t mind when I organized his underwear drawer, and was unflaggingly kind to waitstaff, which was to say he possessed many of the qualities I most desired in a partner. But really—I’d fallen in love with him because he believed in me; he saw possibilities for me where I did not, and his ideas for me actually seemed to work. For nearly a decade, one magazine after another had announced that it was again tightening its belt or, worse, folding. But late last year, it was Josh who suggested I harness my neat-freak tendencies and start a side business as a professional organizer. After just a few months, I was already making nearly as much organizing closets and cupboards part-time as I had working overtime as a writer. I loved the work, to say nothing of the instant gratification of a job well done and an immediate paycheck.