look on his face, like a toddler who had dropped his ice cream cone.
“Babe, I don’t think this is working.”
I could feel a drop in my chest, but I actually laughed a little at how ridiculous I was being. He was right. Our relationship was basically dinner and sex—we didn’t have much in common after that. Marriage seemed to be more about what we were supposed to do, what others wanted us to do, rather than what was right for us.
Still, sitting alone in the dog park, I wondered what he was doing right then.
Probably making red sauce for one.
The benches for humans at the EDP were formed in squares, with cypress trees shooting through their centers, making them very strategic for eavesdropping. In an attempt to distract myself from thoughts of Jack, I listened to Gatsby. Even though I was facing away from him, I could hear every word he was saying, which was how I realized that “Barkley,” as he referred to himself, was gay. He was confirming a pedicure for that evening, which some straight guys clearly do, but the clincher was when he called the person on the other end “Doll.” As he hung up his phone, the Scottie decided to vaguely sniff the vicinity of my legs. I was wearing a skirt that had shrunk a little on its first wash. If there was one physical quality of mine that stood out, it was my legs. In my teens, they scored me goals. In my twenties, they got me into clubs. In my thirties, at least for now, they stood the test of time. It was my life that needed a makeover.
How did I get to be thirty-four? I had been in DC for two months, and when I first got there, I went out a lot at the insistence of Brady. But then I started to avoid social gatherings, as the first question was, “Are you married?” Then: “Do you have kids?” Then: “Do you have a job?” I felt like saying, None of the above! I’m a loser, okay? Now tell me about your doctor husband and your honor roll kids and your cottage in Nantucket. Then after that you can complain about your housekeeper. Honestly, why was everyone so fixated on marriage and kids? Half of the parents Jack and I knew in New York were miserable. Their marriages had deflated after producing offspring. When we first started dating, we bonded over our slight disdain for kids. Cute for an hour, we agreed. Little did I know, Jack basically was a kid.
I reached down to pet the Scottie, and he dashed away as if he wouldn’t dare be touched by a woman wearing a skirt from JCPenney. Barkley came over to my section of the bench, smiled, and said, “That’s Sumner. He’s not very social.”
“Neither am I,” I said. “Being social is overrated.”
He looked at me then, really looked at me, like I was somebody. Not single, not jobless, not aging, but maybe a person who had something to bring to the table, something worthwhile, and he wanted to find out what that something was.
And then he asked, “So where’s your dog?”
CHAPTER 2
HASHTAG GET OVER YOURSELF
I grew up in a WASP-y New England town where Labradors were like furniture—a fixture in everyone’s home. Our first Lab puppies were a black and blond pair of cherubic beauties named Ringo and Paul after my dad’s favorite Beatles. One Christmas morning he opened the kitchen door and they burst into the room, jumping over the presents, shredding the bows. From that moment on, I was a dog person.
Sumner began barking uncontrollably, which thankfully allowed me to avoid answering the why-the-hell-I-was-at-a-dog-park-without-a-dog question. Barkley snapped on Sumner’s collar and apologized, yanking him away toward the exit, waving a quick goodbye. I waved back a little too enthusiastically.
What would I have told him? What would I tell the other people in here if asked? Why was I so nervous about being caught without a dog? I was sick of being an outsider. I just wanted to belong. I looked over at a tall, waiflike woman with an Italian greyhound who wore a wide-brimmed hat that made her look like a human umbrella. Her dog had the same terrified expression that was on her own face. They were both clearly hyperaware of their surroundings. I imagined she was a CIA agent, or a former assassin who was trained to kill within seconds (I obviously had been binging too much