Sheila walked the dog early, while Keith was still home and the kids weren’t up yet. It was her favorite time of day. The college across the street rose up on a hill. She knew all the paths where she could let Rocky off leash, but this little clearing, off trail, was her favorite and she went there every day. She could see her house from there. and there was a small stone bench to sit on, dedicated in loving memory to an alumni no one remembered.
She watched the early morning smog rise over downtown L.A., brown and probably toxic. She made goals for the day, they often included leaving Keith and the boys and going off somewhere nice where they take dogs. Just her and Rocky and a million dollar mansion on a cliff on the North Coast of California is that too fucking much to ask. Thought about friends, about work Tried to gin herself up for both marriage and work with affirmations and other bullshit things.
Sometimes she sang to Rocky and to herself. She didn’t have a great voice, as Keith often reminded her, so she tried not to sing within his earshot but here, in the peaceful aloneness of the small clearing she softly crooned to her heart’s content. “Hey Jude” much too often, “Just the way you are…” “Yellow Brick Road”.
Yeah, okay, she thought, there is sort of a theme. But yearning, if that it is the connection, is part of all the great songs, she declared in her head. A leitmotif, as Keith would say. Keith sang well. He had a decent tenor. But Keith loved opera and ‘decent tenors’ don’t cut it there. You have to be bigger, better and something about Keith, no matter how tall and toned and talented he was, that was eternally, ineluctably small.
Sheila felt that on some level, he knew that about himself. That fundamental, as it turns out well-founded self-doubt was a secret he tried to keep even from himself but when he saw it in Sheila’s eyes and heard it in her voice no matter how hard she tried to repress it, he detested her and he couldn’t let the feeling go.