She had a serious case of the babbles. She was always pretty chatty, way more talkative than me, but never like this. I’d never seen anything like it—she was talking ten thousand miles a minute about the most mundane possible shit: the weather, her feeling on her new toothpaste, whether or not to repaint the kitchen cabinets, lamenting the situation with the water pressure, Julia Caesar’s slow transition away from nitrates. All the while, she was rushing around her room, opening drawers and rifling through the closet. Each piece of clothing she put on covered up that perfect body—first a pair of stretchy exercise pants that hugged her just right but hid her tattoo. Then a pink sports bra that made her cleavage look double-hot but covered the nipples I’d bitten. One tragedy after another. She was like a whirlwind, and she wouldn’t let me get near her. I took a step toward her, and she staggered back against the closet. I reached out for her, and she scurried over to the mirror on the wall and began braiding her hair. Babble, babble, babble. Deli turkey. Lead paint. Something wrong with the lock on the back door.

“Rosie.” I reached out to pull her toward me, grazing the side of her abdomen with my fingertips.

She yelped and put a rubber band in her hair, even though the braid was only half done. She still had fucking sheet marks on her cheeks, for God’s sake. There was no part of this that made any sense. I wanted to get inside her. Again. This morning. At least three times before lunch. “Get back in bed with me.”

She swallowed hard, and her eyes darted from the bed to me and back again. She shook her head fast, as if I’d just asked her if she wanted to go see the large beetle display at the Maine Botanical Gardens. “I’m gonna go for a run,” she said, producing a pair of new-looking tennis shoes that I’d never seen her wear, ever.

“A run?”

“Yes, it’s very good exercise. We’re not getting any younger!” she chirped, like ten notches too loud. “People in their thirties are supposed to get thirty to thirty-five minutes of good solid cardio a day! Two and a half hours a week! I saw it in Cosmo!” She added a Tony the Tiger cross-body fist pump. It’s grrreeeeeat! And then she trotted out of the room. I noticed a white tag poking out like a tail where it should’ve been smooth spandex.

“Your pants are on inside out, beautiful.”

But she’d already put in her earbuds and acted like she didn’t hear me.

* * *

I waited for her for a while. A long while. She wasn’t a runner, and I was banking on her coming back to me in a matter of minutes in this heat, but she didn’t. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Thirty. I made her bed, I sized up the plaster situation—it was like we’d rocked the foundation. I fixed the lock on the back door. No sign of Rosie anywhere.

In the kitchen, Julia was waiting for her breakfast, lying on her side in a patch of sunshine on a rag rug. I gave her furry stomach a scratch, and she purred, nuzzling her nose against my foot and stretching out her legs to full length. I’d always liked Julia, and I’d told Rosie about six million times that cats aren’t like dogs, sure, but they’re smart and loyal, and they probably were shy around her because they could “smell her fear,” which was always met with a wide-eyed stare that said, Why would anybody want a pet that can smell fear?

Point taken, but Julia and I were on the same level. Usually. Except I wasn’t going to enable the SPAM addiction. At the same time, I wasn’t about to put a twenty-year-old cat through the horrors of figuring out what to do with something called Fancy Cat Slow Stewed Beef in Gravy with Peas or whatever. To me, canned salmon seemed like the best compromise. I found some on the bottom shelf of the pantry and got a can opener out of the drawer with about sixteen rolling pins. Totally normal for this place where shit only made sense if you said to yourself, Where would I have put something if I were ninety-five years old, blind in one eye, and gave no fucks?

Put the can opener with the rolling pins, obviously.

I put the blade of the opener on the rim of the can and broke the seal. Julia made figure eights around my legs, but way down at the end of the driveway something caught my attention. Rosie, sort of power-walking, not running at all. Her skin was shiny with sweat, her hair looked like she’d just been in a tussle with some wildlife, and I was pretty sure I saw some mud on her leg. But as I made a move to go help her—was she limping?—she seemed to realize my truck was still parked where it had been last night. When she saw it, she stopped short and clapped her hands to her face. She pivoted and scampered into the woods, hurling herself into a row of rhododendrons so that the only evidence she’d ever been there was the huge shiny leaves shimmering in the sun.

I finished opening the can. “I think she’s avoiding me, Julia.”

She rammed her face into my calf and purred.

Yeah. Thought so.