Yellow Puppy
A close up of a small, yellow, puppy sitting on a sidewalk.
By. Deana Nantz
She left Leo in August. I picked him up in December, almost dead from despair.
My first dog chose the coldest night in January to birth puppies. We found them ice-speckled and arranged them on a sheet like store-bought biscuits in front of our wood burning stove. Miniature mouths made muffled cries as blood pumped willy-nilly to the surface, stinging their limbs back to life. The yellow one, an emulation of her golden mother, rolled over on her back and shot up a paw. A sign I thought, signifying victory.
If those puppies survived, so could my lanky lover: a giant, soft-spoken middle-aged man, who looked thinner and grayer than the pictures of him and his ex-wife hanging on the wall. By February, he’d taken down her portrait but left the empty frames suspended in dust, giving off a cobwebby ambience in every room once holding their union.
Espoused for twenty-four years, his grand marriage, or at least that is how it appeared via social media, made my four-year stint to a younger man (whom I blocked from all Internet contact) feel insignificant. Seemingly, Leo had known the reciprocity of love. On Facebook, the missus smiled as big as Leo’s six-foot-seven frame, hovering over her like his watchful bullmastiff. She played a part in his family portraits, always encased in his arms and always imparting the same Olan Mills’ smile. But there were no photos of him with her family. She supported his gun hobby and even posed in a sultry, shirt-off-the-shoulder shot, cradling his favorite assault rifle, something I could never be forced to do.
One spring evening, we sat on their padded Adirondack chairs and sipped bourbon while he scrolled through Instagram on his phone. Spirited and feeling ignored and slighted that he had yet to delete her from his social media, I asked, “Why do you think she left…I mean…divorce is usually a two-way street. What did or didn’t you do for her?”
He put his phone down immediately, sat up militantly straight, and folded his large hands in his lap, an indication of his irritation that I had disrupted what I imagined was his daily dose of social media stalking. “I took care of everything. I did nothing wrong,” he shot off. “She cheated, and that’s it.”
I said nothing. He picked up his phone again as I stared off into the beyond where my current companion like a violent storm had whooshed me off into a painful river of rumination: my former spouse, a non-cheater like me, loved sports and could have cared less about weapons. We did not have guns or make a show of ourselves online. We did have financial stability and, at times, fleeting moments of joy. Nevertheless, my ex spent most of his time at the gym training for marathons, and I spent many nights alone holding a book and a bag of resentment, which eventually caused monthly interruptions of hellacious fighting, breaking me in a way that I did not begin to process until being with Leo, twelve years my senior and the extreme opposite of my indefatigable ex-husband, who is two years younger than me. A constant contradiction, leisurely Leo loved the cold killer steel stored under his bed; however, on top of it, he transferred the tenderness intended for her—onto me, the imposter. Apparently, body heat keeps grief on the perimeter, so I tried to be a healing, human sleeping bag, providing shelter from episodic attacks of pain that I thought were only his.
Leo’s wife had found someone else but kept many of her belongings in what was now his house even though she doubled his salary and could afford to hire a mover. Anytime Leo left me alone in the outdated A-Frame to walk his obedient dog up the hill, I snooped through his drawers full of pay stubs and tax returns. He had insisted on keeping the house. Now finding himself in a cash bind, he had little money for dating and felt awkward about me paying. “Why didn’t the two of you sell the house and split the money?” I asked when he wanted to stay home and eat in on another uneventful Saturday night. I knew that her name had been on the mortgage.
“I designed the house. I chose the location and picked out the colors and décor. It’s my house.”
“Why didn’t she have a say in it?”
He equivocated. “She took my—our money, the savings,” he said.
Coming by when he worked out of town, she’d pick up clothing or a kitchen accessory such as the coffee maker that he finally replaced with a cheaper version—for me. I never met her but thought I understood her method. In case she needed to return, she left her ghost, which put him in purgatory and me in the middle of emotional sabotage. She refused to take her wedding band. He could not part with his. I’d pawned mine as soon as finalizing paperwork, a year before meeting Leo.
One May morning I noticed two worn gold bands on the white wainscot ledge outside of his shower. Purposefully placed inside of his, Leo knew she’d see them on one of her gatherings. He did not care if I saw them. He never considered my feelings at all. Those crusty, tarnished together bands were a reminder of what she’d freed herself from and what she could stick herself to again, which made me freeze—milk yellow—until finally sucking up enough air to blow out of there before dying of shame.
Close up of Deana, sitting, wearing an embellished, asymmetrical, black shirt, blue eyes, a close mouthed half smile, and shoulder length, straight, blonde hair. A white bookshelf and picture of tulips is behind her.
Deana Nantz's poetry book, Wood, Glass, and Girl was released by The Main Street Rag in May of 2020. She published a chapbook, Fits of Wrath and Irony, (Finishing Line Press 2013) prior to being named Fiction Southeast's finalist for the Editor's Prize in flash fiction. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Kentucky University's Bluegrass Writer's Studio and an MA in American literature from EKU where she teaches. She and her family live in London, Kentucky. Follow her on twitter (@deana_nantz); visit her website: deananantz.weebly.com, and check out her Amazon page.