Bowling for Turkeys

A “Get Out of Bed” Surprise

“GET UP.”

“Mariana, no….” Milo knew he shouldn’t have answered the phone—he knew it. Sure, Mariana Roberts was his forever bestie, the keeper of his secrets, and the sister of his heart, but… but… but oh my God , she was so much a lot!

“Mariana, yes !” she retorted with her usual terrifying determination. Mariana had been forced to drop out of college in her third year so she could help support her mentally ill sister. She’d taken a job on a hospital phone line and now made way more money than Milo did with his degree in graphic communications, and she often claimed that her major was in fixing people’s lives.

She’d managed to fix her sister’s; Serena now lived in an assisted care facility, where Mariana visited at least twice a week, and she apparently had friends and hobbies and was happy.

Since Mari was often cheerfully single—and Milo was not cheerfully anything —that left Milo’s life to fix, and sadly, he was giving her a lot to work with.

“But Mari, it’s Saturday ,” he whined, and knew it for a whine. “It’s my day to lounge around and—”

“And skip out on lunch with your bestie, you bastard,” she snapped.

He winced. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I shouldn’t have bailed on you—”

“Twice. You bailed on me twice since the breakup, and I get that I had to work overtime in September, but it’s October now, and we haven’t seen each other since your vodka-and-ice-cream pity party and… and dammit , Milo, I’m worried about you!”

Milo glanced around his duplex in a daze, noting the dead plants he’d meant to water, the laundry he’d meant to do, the dirty dishes he’d meant to wash. Hell, he was probably out of coffee, and he wasn’t sure if there was anything in his refrigerator to eat. How was he supposed to “lie in” when there wasn’t enough here to keep him alive? “Two months?” he asked, feeling stupid. Did Stuart break up with him two months ago? “It hasn’t been two months, has it?”

Her sigh was eloquent. “Yes, baby. It’s been two months. Now wake up and get out of bed!”

He did what she told him to because that was the pattern they’d established in high school. Mari made the plans, Milo carried them out. She was good at it, he thought wretchedly, trying to find a bare place on the carpet to place his feet.

“I’m awake,” he told her crossly. “I’m out of bed. Now what?”

“Come answer your door, asshole. I’ve been here for ten minutes.”

Milo’s eyes went wide, and he cast desperate glances around his once-neat little duplex in panic.

“No,” he almost whimpered, seeing the piles of dirty laundry draped on every surface of his bedroom. He was wearing his last pair of boxers, and his T-shirt was getting a little ripe. He knew without looking that the sink was piled high with dishes, his living room awash in a sea of takeout, and his kitchen table piled high with bills.

He was pretty sure his power was about to be turned off.

“Oh yes,” she said grimly. “You thought you could curl up and die that easy? You’ve got another goddamned thing coming. Now come open your door. We’re coming in.”

“Wait,” he said desperately, although the long habit of following Mari’s orders seemed to have morphed into an actual magical compulsion. He was walking. Wow, had his laundry actually spilled into the hallway? And what the hell was that smell coming from the bathroom? Holy jebus, when had he last eaten? The food on the dishes in the sink was… well, uncomplimentary colors.

The only clean thing in the place was Chrysanthemum’s food and water bowl on its little placemat in the corner of the kitchen, waiting for Stuart to bring him back. Milo almost paused there, but Mari squawked from the front door.

“Get out here, you coward! I’m not going anywhere!”

Which was how, through the wreckage of a life he’d once been proud of, he slogged, hating himself more with every step.

What kind of loser let his life get this disgusting in so short a time?

By the time he opened the door for Mari and hung up his phone, he was almost in tears, ready to confess to the sin of giving up completely and beg for her help to clean up his mess.

But Mari was not alone.

“Here,” she said, shoving a leash into his hand. “Go sit on the couch while I go get shit from the car.” She stood on her tiptoes and peered past his shoulder, her bright brown eyes inquisitive and judgy. “And it’s exactly as bad as I knew it would be. Jesus, Milo, you couldn’t have called me before it got this bad?”

“I didn’t know it had gotten this bad,” he said muzzily, staring at the creature on the end of the leash. Lean and muscular, with the head of a pit bull and the body of a… kind of stocky Chiweenie? The dog had short white-yellow hair with flat pit-bull eyes and Chihuahua ears.

She was staring at him quizzically from under a cat-eared headband.

“Mari?” he called to her as she hustled out to her sedan, which sat right behind his in the driveway. “What in the hell is this?”

“Your dog, Milo,” she called back. “She’s here to replace Chrysanthemum.”

Milo glanced down at the unimpressed dog wearing the cat ears. “I don’t remember asking for a dog,” he told the dog. “I don’t remember putting in an order.”

The dog nuzzled his shin, and he bent down and fondled her ears. She gave him a tentative look of “like,” and he fondled them some more, which is what he was doing when Mari hustled past him, her arms full of grocery bags—one of which was emanating a very… promising smell.

“Now sit down, Milo,” she commanded. “I’ve got your breakfast—or lunch or last night’s dinner….” She peered at the mess in the sink with a practiced eye and then squinted at the takeout containers in the living room. “Oh, Milo,” she said with a sigh, “you haven’t eaten in days , have you.”

“Maybe three,” he hazarded. He had a distant memory of somebody putting a sandwich in his hand as he sat at his desk during his one mandatory in-person appearance at work that week.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I’m sorry I was so late. Now sit down on the couch. I’ll give you some food—you too, Julia—and we’ll have a talk before we tackle this place.”

Milo opened his mouth, and she said, “But in return you have to take a shower and brush your teeth.”

“Okay,” he said, cowed. He glanced down at the dog. “Julia?” he asked, and the dog didn’t twitch a whisker.

“That’s what the shelter named her,” Mari said cheerfully, setting the bags down before getting to work doing something bustling and organizational. “My sister’s roommate’s brother called me up to ask me if I could adopt an animal, but, as you know—”

“You have the county allotment of cats,” he said dutifully.

“I have over the county allotment of cats,” she agreed. “Mostly because Georgie has snuck me a couple of extras.” A ginormous breakfast burrito, with chorizo and hot sauce and about a dozen scrambled eggs wrapped inside with tater tots, appeared in his hand, and he doggedly munched while she went back to the kitchen.

Mari worked from home too, which gave her lots of time to clean cats and feed cats and make rugs and beds for cats and generally pour all the love in her formidable soul into the apparently more than five cats that had taken over her small house.

“Georgie?” he asked, lost already.

“Serena’s roommate’s brother, who is sort of a derpy hottie, and we may end up sleeping together,” she told him bluntly. It was a trait that had cost her more than one boyfriend, but then, Milo knew none of those guys were good enough anyway.

“You have two more cats—” Oh Lord, this burrito was everything that was right with the world. Every word he said was through a mouthful of eggs.

“Three,” she said. “He’s got a thing for cats with one leg or no eyes or tails that have been chewed off. I’m telling you, if you can resist a cat with a chewed-off tail, you’re a monster, and I want nothing to do with you.”

“And yet,” he said, watching as Julia—freed of her leash—was currently rolling in a pile of blankets that were possibly the only clean things in the duplex, “you didn’t bring me a cat, which I know how to care for—”

“A”—she said, still bustling. He couldn’t look at her anymore. She seemed to be simultaneously putting dishes in the dishwasher, cleaning up takeout containers, and stacking mail on his table—“cats need very little in the way of care. If I gave you a cat, you would feed the cat and let it crap on all your stuff and forget to feed yourself, and then when you died you’d be glad the cat survived on your eyeballs. No. A cat is not high enough maintenance for you right now.”

“And B?” he asked, watching as Julia found one of Chrysanthemum’s toys under the pile of blankets. Tentatively she shook it and was rewarded when it squeaked. Her eyes opened in joy, and she shook her head, squeaking it some more.

“Julia was found two weeks ago,” Mari said, her voice getting a little lost among a clatter of kibble in a stainless-steel bowl.

Julia stopped her assault on the squeaky toy enough to trot into the kitchen, searching for the source of that familiar noise.

“So…?” He sounded dubious—and he was—but he still watched the creature to see if she would eat and drink from Chrysanthemum’s bowls.

“See her tummy?” Mari said patiently, bending to fondle Julia’s ears as she came to eat. “See the elongated nipples?”

Milo grimaced. “I didn’t want to say anything in case it made her self-conscious.”

“How very kind,” Mari told him, and she may have rolled her eyes at him, but she was continuing to pet the dog, so Milo couldn’t see. “But yeah. She’d had a litter, and she mourned her litter for her first week and a half, and Georgie said she was getting depressed, because maybe she got dumped because the puppies were cuter and everything she loved had just gotten, you know….”

“Yanked away,” Milo said, suddenly desolate. Because that’s what it had felt like when he’d gotten home that first week in August to find that Stuart had taken all his stuff, including his ugly table lamps and his weird art on the walls and the half-grown cat Milo had gotten them to celebrate their first anniversary three months earlier.

“Yeah,” Mari told him, suddenly bending over the back of the couch to hug him. She dropped a kiss in his greasy hair, and his eyes were blurry for a whole other reason besides hunger. “Just like you,” she said softly. “And that’s why I brought her.”

Milo took a gulp of air, hoping he could maybe not cry. “Why the cat ears?” he asked.

“Because you’ve never had a dog before,” she told him. “I thought maybe they’d make it easier to adapt.”

Milo nodded and felt another sob coming on. “Oh Jesus. Mari, can I go cry in the shower?” Because he really needed the shower.

“No,” she said softly. “You acted so together in August. I should have known you weren’t. You cry right here.”

And he did, Mari’s arms around his shoulders, until Julia, still crunching on kibble, jumped onto the couch and rested her chin on his knee.

EVENTUALLY MILO stilled, wiped his face on his filthy shirt, and managed to struggle up to excuse himself to the bathroom.

When he got there, he flushed the toilet (which helped with that awful smell) and scrounged up a towel that wasn’t mildewy before jumping in the shower.

He had to wash his hair with hand soap because he was out of shampoo, but at least he still had toothpaste when he got out. His beard tended to be scraggly and patchy anyway, so the electric razor took care of that, but unfortunately all that self-care forced him to look in the mirror.

Ugh. No. His face was thin to the point of gauntness, his cheeks sunken, his eyes—which were usually an attractive almond-shaped brown—also sunken, his skin practically green.

Yeah, he wouldn’t want to shag himself either.

Out in his kitchen he heard Mari, still clattering, and thought of how busy her life was, and how she’d taken a special day here to wade through his trash and do a wellness check on her jerk of a friend who had blown her off for a month.

At his door he heard a tentative scratching sound, and surprised, he opened it.

Julia was sitting there, staring up at him with those oddly shaped flat eyes, her cat ears still firmly in place. He couldn’t tell if she was reproachful because he’d locked her out or irritated that he’d gone somewhere she hadn’t, but something told him the two of them were now bound inextricably in the mutual endeavor to make sure Mari hadn’t wasted her time.

“Well, old girl,” he said softly, bending to scratch her behind the ears, “I think we’re about to become a thing.”

She snorted and walked toward his bedroom in a slow, stately gate unlike any Chihuahua or Chiweenie he’d ever met. He didn’t even want to look to see what he had clean.

“OH MY God,” Mari said when he emerged, carrying a load of laundry. “I can’t… I can’t even….”

“Bella Vista Broncos,” Milo said grimly. “I swear to Christ, they’re the only clean things in my drawers.”

“Who keeps their gym clothes from high school?” she demanded. “Milo, you’re twenty-eight years old .”

“They were almost the last things in the drawer,” he said. “Everything else was from before my growth spurt in eleventh grade.” He glanced down at his bright blue sweats, grimaced, and in a conspiratorial whisper, added, “I’m going commando.”

Mari put her yellow-rubber-gloved hand over her eyes. “Oh my God.”

He scowled defensively. “Remember those times in college when I carried you over my shoulder to your dorms?” he asked. “You’ve puked on my ass, Mari. Puked on my ass .”

She took her hand off her eyes and grinned at him. “That’s my Milo,” she said, and he could swear she had hearts in her eyes. “I knew you were here somewhere. Good. Now I’ve already got a load of your bathroom stuff in, so set that down on the washer and go through your bills. Jesus God, I can’t even believe you held down a job in this mess.”

Milo tried not to groan. “Well, God bless working from home,” he said frankly before going through the connecting door to the garage and doing what she’d suggested with the laundry. When he’d climbed back up into the kitchen, he surveyed the mess again and let out a breath. “Believe it or not, I think I’ve gotten a few promotions.”

“Aw, my poor little graphic artist,” she chided. “Did you get all lost in your head to avoid your broken heart?”

“I’d tell you to go to hell,” he said, although they both knew he wouldn’t, not in a thousand years, “but….” He glanced around his duplex, thinking about the carefully chosen area rug and the leather furniture, the bright contrasting tiles on the floor, and the big holes in the wall where Stuart’s hideous “art investments” had been.

“I don’t know, baby,” she said with a sniff. “You’ve been here for two months. How’s the view from hell?”

“Boring,” he said, thinking about the artwork. He had his own in the garage. He should put that on the walls tomorrow. He resolved to do that. By himself. “Lonely,” he admitted, sitting at the table with a sigh. She shoved his empty recycling bin next to him in a helpful manner.

“You want some music?” she asked. “Or a movie for background noise?”

“The Star Trek reboots,” he said promptly.

“Three comfort movies coming up,” she said.

They knew the dialog by heart.

MARI COULDN’T stay over on his couch that night because, in her words, she had eight furry food-vacuums she had to care for. Apparently two of the new ones needed medication too.

But by the end of the day, he had clean clothes for a week and more in the laundry, a clean kitchen, a bedroom he could walk through, and groceries.

And a dog.

Julia had followed them both throughout the day, watching them with interested, calculating eyes, and accepting their shows of affection with a sort of genteel grace.

It wasn’t until they sat down in the evening, both physically tired from cleaning and emotionally exhausted from hauling Milo inch by inch from the quagmire of his depression, that she showed any real personality at all.

“I’m sorry, Mari,” Milo said as she leaned on him and they watched the sun set through his newly fluffed and aired curtains. “I didn’t mean to suck up your time. You barely have enough as it is.”

“Shut up,” she mumbled, digging in. She wasn’t tall or wide, but she had a sort of weight about her that was, he suspected, entirely muscle and determination. It probably didn’t show up on a scale, but when she nestled, she nestled . “I should have seen it in August. I was busy, and God, Milo. You’re such an easy-care friend most of the time. I’m the one who needed the trip to rehab in college. I’m the one who needed her hand held at the abortion clinic when Calvin the creep bailed on me. This isn’t a sorry. It’s not a you-owe-me. It’s me being your Mari and you being my Milo, okay?”

He swallowed. “You’ll always be my Mari,” he whispered.

Stuart hated her. Milo remembered all the times he and Mari had met for lunch or gone to the movies, and Stuart hadn’t known he’d been with his bestie. Had never suspected either. One or two cutting remarks about, “Your little phone- clerk friend,” had made Milo simply… not involve Stuart in his life outside of Stuart. Thinking about it now, about how Stuart hadn’t liked Mari, hadn’t understood the two of them, their bond through high school and into college, through life changes and beyond—that should have clued him in, shouldn’t it?

It wasn’t even that Milo had lied, it was that Stuart had made him. Milo had told Stuart that he and Mari had come as a matched set, and Stuart had laughed and said sure, any friend of Milo’s was a friend of his.

And then Stuart hadn’t approved of her, had asked Milo to blow her off, had made whiny punkass bitch noises when Milo had said, “Okay, I’ll hang out with her. You don’t need to.”

And Milo had found it very easy to not involve Stuart with this part of his life.

Which was ironic seeing that Milo’s relationship with Mari had gotten so tight because that’s exactly what Milo’s parents had done to Milo . Just… just not involved themselves with Milo’s life.

“We understand you feel compelled to live this lifestyle, Milo, but don’t expect us to be involved in it.”

So they hadn’t met Stuart, hadn’t approved of Mari either—something about her father working as a garage mechanic—and had mostly sent him birthday cards and invited him to Christmas dinners they’d been relieved he hadn’t attended.

“Milo?” Mari said softly. “Why did Stuart leave? You never told me.”

He sighed, remembering their last terrible fight when Stuart found out Milo had been giving money to help her keep her sister in a good care home for mentally ill adults since she’d first found the place.

“And I never will,” he said now, holding her tighter. “It’s not nearly as important as you coming here today.”

She might have pressed the matter then—he knew it—but they both heard the noise at the same time.

“What the…?” Mari said, peering into the kitchen and frowning. “Julia, quit that with the dog bed. What are you…? Oh.”

Milo looked too and was surprised.

“What does she have?”

Julia trotted back to the couch where they sat, very pleased with herself, and Mari started laughing.

“Oh,” she said, clearly surprised. “It’s… see, I got sort of a new-dog bundle? You’ve got a plastic container of food and a list of vet’s appointments and a bed and blanket for her, and I put that cat toy she liked and a few other dog toys in the bed, and it was under some stuff, and she dug it out. Wow.”

“Wow what?” he asked as Julia began to gnaw at the bright yellow, soft-plastic thing in her mouth, her movements getting more and more gleeful as it made more and more noise.

“I’ve never seen a dog that into the squeaky toy. I mean… look at her!”

Shake-shake-shake-shake-shake! She was growling and shaking, and then to Milo’s delight, she rolled over to her back and pawed the air, the squeaky still squeaking as she indulged in an ecstasy of “kill the squeaky!”

“Julia,” Milo said with authority. He’d never owned a dog, but he assumed they responded to their names. “Julia, come here. Give me the squeaky!”

She did.

Mari burst out laughing, holding her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God! Lookit her! Throw it!”

The living room had a little bit of length on it, but with a turn, he could get the thing down the hallway from where they were sitting. He put a bit of spin on the thing, and it bounced off the hardwood floor in erratic loops as Julia—

Vroom!

“Wow!” he laughed. “ Wow . Julia, wow !”

She was so fast and muscular and happy and excited to chase that wobbly, oddly shaped squeaky piece of rubberized plastic. She brought it back to him, and he went to take it, but she growled playfully and shook her head. He tugged on it, and she tugged back, and in a moment they were wrestling over the squeaky toy like they’d been wrestling buddies their entire lives.

“C’mon,” he begged. “C’mon, girl. Give it back. Give it—”

“Drop it!” Mari commanded with authority, and Julia let go immediately, then sat back on her haunches, gazing hungrily from the squeaky to Milo’s face and back again.

Milo turned for the windup, Julia got into position like a race car, and he threw it again.

Their sad, tired conversation forgotten, Milo and Mari threw the squeaky toy to the joyful dog for the next hour, until she didn’t bring the thing back but simply dropped it in the middle of the living room and stretched out at their feet.

“Wow,” Milo said, staring at her.

“I’m saying,” Mari echoed. “I-I mean, I had dogs all my life, but I’ve never seen one so… so dedicated to the squeaky toy.”

Milo stared at her and smiled. “She’s got a one-track mind,” he admitted, but that was fine. He felt like he already knew this dog.

He felt like they could be friends.

MARI HAD to leave shortly thereafter, but not before they both ate leftovers and she wrote out a schedule for him so he could take care of the dog and then come back and work and then take care of the dog and himself some more.

“She’s going to ruin your stuff,” she warned. “She’s going to chew on your coffee table, your shoes, your rugs, your furniture. You are going to have to figure out when to put her outside to poop in the backyard, but go out with her first or she might escape.”

He held his hands to his heart. “Escape,” he breathed. “But she just got here! I want her here. How do I stop that from happening?”

“Take her out on the leash at first,” Mari said patiently, “then take her around and look for hazards. Where can she get out? Where’s the dirt soft? Where are there gaps? She’ll probably tell you where the worst ones are, but use your imagination. Pretend you’re a dog whose sole obsession is a squeaky toy, and that uses up your walnut-sized brain.”

“Oh…,” he said uneasily. “Mari, my brain isn’t much bigger.”

She smacked him. “Oh my God, Milo. You are so much smarter than that. That’s your problem. You could never see why you were better than Stuart on any given day. He never deserved you.”

“He was rich, he was handsome, he was—”

“A fucking putz,” she said viciously. “Stuart was a fucking putz. Screw him.” She scowled. “He was your first big relationship postcollege, and I get it. He was your Calvin.”

Milo scowled back. “I still maintain that man would have looked a lot better with a price on his head.”

She nodded, her short black curls dancing around strong features and snapping brown eyes. “ Now you’re seeing my side of the Stuart equation.” She stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek, and because she was Mari, she didn’t bother to wipe her lipstick. That was her claim to Milo right there. He was hers for life.

Then she was gone, leaving him alone with Julia, who stared at him with the same sort of interest he was showing her.

“You ready to explore the backyard?” he asked dubiously, but when he picked her leash up from the kitchen chair, she trotted right to his feet, ready to do just that. He grabbed a roll of poop bags and headed for the sliding glass door, ready to embark on his new adventure.

Stuart, he thought grimly, would have hated this dog.

He was pretty sure he loved her already.

A WEEK LATER, he knew he did—although he was also sure she was trying to kill him.

Following Mari’s carefully made schedule, he’d been taking her walking at the nearby park in the morning. The first day he’d had to stop every ten feet because apparently your body didn’t forgive you for going to bed for two months and not getting up. The second day he’d hurt even more, but by the third he’d figured out that Julia had a… glitch.

She was fine, sort of. She didn’t mind the leash, but she didn’t understand it. She’d race behind him to sniff from the retaining wall to the grass or to scope out what was on the side of the walkway that looped around the park. Once she’d almost castrated him when she’d been behind him—and he’d had his arm behind his shoulder to accommodate that—and she’d seen a squirrel cross his path on the walk.

And then right when he thought he had a handle on how to get her to walk by his side, the leash would fall gently across her posterior, and she’d stop. Just stop, like a game of freeze tag with rules only she knew.

Milo tripped on her once and went sprawling, and she’d huddled abjectly under the leash, looking like she expected him to whip her with it.

He’d sat in the middle of the sidewalk and pet her until she stopped shaking, and then, unmindful of the blood on his palms or the holes in his old high school sweats, he’d picked her up and carried her the rest of the way.

So he was a little desperate the next day. For one thing, he wouldn’t be able to take her walking the day after. It was the in- house day at his ad firm, and while he’d bought a sort of dog box and put a dog bed in it, which she seemed to take comfort in when he was home and could leave the door open, he wasn’t sure she’d be so comfortable locked in the thing for an eight-hour day. He was contemplating barricading her in the kitchen with the dog-box cage thingy so she could maybe do less damage to the couch and the coffee table, but he still didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone. Should he maybe leave the television on?

So whatever he was going to do, he needed to make sure today was a good day. Which was why, as he walked around the completely empty park, he had an idea. He took her to the middle of one of the soccer fields first, hoping that if this went horribly wrong, he’d be able to get a head of steam on her and body tackle her if he needed to.

Then he unhooked her lead.

She sat there untroubled and gazed at him, waiting for further instructions.

Then he wandered down toward the walkway, and she… well, wandered with him. She was fine. She’d run up ahead a little, then stop and smell the flowers or the sticks or the other dog’s pee, and then wait for him to catch up. It was… pleasant . It was blissful . She was so good .

And then the most magnificent thing happened. The park had several sections, all of which were looped by the walking/riding path. He and Julia wandered the whole of the loop, from a rise on which picnic tables and bathrooms and a child’s play area were set up, down past the soccer field, around a little wooded area, and around and back up the rise. On the other side of the rise was another soccer field, bracketed by a tennis/pickleball area way down the parking lot.

On this day as the sun leveled itself on the misty October field, Milo topped the rise by the picnic area and was confronted with, of all things, turkeys . A good two dozen of them!

At first he was amused. Oh my God, lookit the lot of them! Then he was horrified. Oh no, Julia!

Frantically he grabbed for her collar as she buzzed past his shins and onto that calm, strangely bucolic field of oblivious wild birds.

“Julia!” he called frantically, charging after her. Oh no! She’d eat them! Or they’d eat her! Or—oh God, oh—

“Oh my stars,” he breathed. “Lookit you go !”

She never caught one. She wasn’t even trying. She just raced from turkey to turkey, barking until the birds scattered, running from one end of the field to the other. She was so happy !

Milo stood, helpless to stop her, and watched a creature absolutely in her element, and while he should have felt bad for the turkeys, all he could think was that his dog was happy. So happy.

Without warning, a laugh snuck up his body, shaking his stomach until it ached, and he howled with it, feeling as happy and as free as his idiot dog—and for all he knew, as the turkeys, who once they stopped running, didn’t seem particularly bothered by her.

He laughed until she slowed down and trotted to his side, panting happily. He put the lead back on her, a day late and a dollar short, perhaps. But still….

He’d forgotten how drunk you could get, how intoxicated, how shitfaced silly and oblivious, all by another creature’s joy.