Therapy Mammals

This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books

453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

Los Angeles, CA 90013

rarebirdbooks.com

Copyright © 2018 by Jon Methven

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:

A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,

Los Angeles, CA 90013.

Set in Warnock

epub isbn

: 9781947856851

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Methven, Jon, author.

Title: Therapy mammals / Jon Methven.

Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Genuine Barnacle Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572999

Subjects: LCSH Rich people—Fiction. | Private schools—Fiction. | Businesspeople—Fiction. | Parenthood—Fiction. | Animals—Therapeutic use—Fiction. | Manhattan (New York, NY)—Fiction. | Black humor (Literature.) | Humorous fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Humorous | FICTION / Satire

Classification: LCC PS3613.E885 T54 2018 | DDC 813.6—dc23

For Lib

Contents

Part One

Morning Drop-off

Gopa Lobby

Dead Chipmunks And Wine

Tom Pistilini With The Weather

Kidnapping An Emotional Support Animal

How To Build Suburbs

Neighbors Just Other Friendly Tribes

Backyard Lagoon Killing Fields

Giveth Us Our Daily Bread

Tug Doppelganger

Saturday Morning Chores

What Happened To Us

Navigating A Cooperative Marriage

Lieutenant Misch

Another Blackout

Polyethylene Living With Fiberglass Poles

Mornings Are For Fistfights

Economic Benefit Of Dead Kids

Breakfast With Tungsten

Sailors Lost To The Seas

Nine Out Of Ten Demographics Are Not Your Demographic

Here Comes The Fan Club

Part Two

A Walk Down Murder Lane

How To Create A Standcake

Some Kind Of Record

Cut One of Us Do We Not All Bleed?

Transgenerational Therapy With Gus

Fucking Annihilate the Pawns

Something Good This Way Comes

A Little Rain Must Fall

Little Tugger

Cold Blood Or Just Cold?

Adjusting To Our Reckoning

Forces Of Failure

Prosthetic Spoils

We Shall Know It By Its Meaning

Drinks With Parents

Don’t Call It A Comeback

Jammy With An Earthy Finish

Imperialists Of Youth And Idealism

Clint Eastwood’s Latest Rampage

Sex Lives Of Dead People

Dark Tourism

Seventy Percent Chance of Vengeance

Marriage Is A Strange Institution

Part Three

Memorials For Drug Dealers Are Like Normal Memorials

Adultery Talk, With Ray McClutchen

Juice Of Broken Dreams Makes Sad Wine

Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune

Cells Must Fuse To Grow

Break A Leg

Storms We Cannot Forecast

Ray And I On Wives

The Beatings We Deserve

Existential Weather

Video Footage The New Achilles’ Heel

Bouts Of Insomnia

Operation Touristcide

My Unborn Are Taken Hostage

Economic Benefits Of Sex Tapes

Hypocrites Anonymous

Thundersnow

Messy Commute

Pistilini-Dalton Drug Cartel

Feline Bedrest

Tragedy Abounds

Stealing Back My Unborn Children

Deliveries At The Hendersons

Red Herring

Gus Murders Millicent

If Our Peace Was Everlasting

And Many More

Do Terrorists Kiss Their Families Goodbye?

Here Come the Worthy

Cum Laude

Acknowledgments

Part

One

Morning Drop-off

Teachable moments, Toby, I say. The fundamental component of progress.

The things we do for our children. This is my predicament as I come out of the darkness to find my hands wrapped around Toby Dalton’s warm neck. The notion is residue from an earlier blog post on the Gopa website on the topic of sacrifice and commitment, my knuckled fingers a demonstration that our words as parents translate into actionable guardianship. Everyone likes Toby. He is popular, handsome. Like much of the student body, he comes from wealth, which gives him an optimistic sheen, a glorious yelp that privilege has its merits, nice hair, immaculate teeth, a dapper glow. His neck is bronzed and soft, a teenager who understands the benefits of luxury moisturizers and can afford them. I feel the restorative properties from his skin surge through my fingers as I shove his head against the cement wall. Captain of the Gopa lacrosse team in his junior year, Toby is going places.

The restroom is located toward the rear of the school’s lobby. On the far side of the door I listen for the morning arrival, the familiar prattle of students and parents and nannies and the security guards hired to prevent this exact lawsuit, the viscera of the Gifted and Purposed Academy, Gopa for short. According to the website, we are a premier private school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side devoted to the growth and accomplishment of its student body. Toby would mark the building’s first homicide.

A Wednesday morning in April. I do not remember following him into the bathroom. I am just coming to terms with my strategy. Perhaps a discussion about the unbecoming pictures of my daughter I am told he possesses. An understanding of whether they exist and, if so, what is it they show of Iliza, and how such images might impact all of our futures. An apology, a handshake. Instead Toby stares me down too emphatically, tips his chiseled chin at an unbecoming angle, What can you do about it, old man?

I have the little shit pinned against the paper towel dispenser, his jaw pressed hurriedly upward as the motion sensor incorrectly perceives dampness and litters the floor with napkin, a subtle iniquity to my position on the Gopa Parents Think Recycle committee. A light flickers. Snot drips, balances on my lip, and pirouettes to the tile. My body is freezing, unable to control the shakes, my hands blue with struggle. Toby underestimates my pear physique, my suit and tie civility, thinking that I value my standing in the Gopa community, my career as a meteorologist. He has allowed me to strangle him with a detached coolness, that not even confused murder can deter his divinity. But he has come to terms with the rage a father feels for his children, wholly immersed in defending them against a creeping wickedness beset on the world. I am incoherent as I squeeze, a bystander to my misanthropic diligence. Blackouts, a doctor calls them in my personal infomercial, side effect of my medication along with dry mouth, dizziness, forgetfulness, and erections. The medicine mixes with the adrenaline and my inner voices causing something to break inside, pipes bursting and scattering liquids of me that I secretly loath: docility, understanding, nonpartisan approval. Let it drip.

He swings meekly at my shoulders, his sneakers grasping for tile, his voice a whisper over the squeaking rubber. Pisser, stop.

What is it, Toby? My pocket buzzes. I cannot take the call.

Listen to me. His voice is desperate breath.

You see, Toby, you have come to a point of incalculable danger, what weather nerds call the storm surge. I shiver out these words, arms shaking. A man will go some lengths to protect a daughter, abiding by societal rules, of course, principle, logic, the gist of the whole if you follow. But a creature, Toby. A tribe of creatures. Things that reside in the indentations of our bosom. They know not comfortable rules of kinship. They know only starvation and repercussion and survival.

Enter Doug Whorley, all-league defenseman of the lacrosse team and deus ex machina from the lobby. His morning dump, of all things, will preserve Toby’s life and rescue me from what would be a well-publicized jail sentence. If a grown man is strangling you in a bathroom, Doug is the friend to have. He sees our embrace, the growing hill of paper on the floor, and his fists intrinsically clench. Six foot something, the benefits of steroid use come to mind, he resembles an upright bulldog awaiting a meal. Suddenly he demonstrates his go team attitude when he realizes his captain is fading, punching me squarely in the forehead. I fall to the floor, cold and snot and laughter.

About the medication. It has been suggested that failure, in both my marriage and career, is due to a deficiency in playfulness. Not happiness, but rather an innate frolicsome that children demonstrate, an ability to cavort in spite of age and social fatigue and unpaid bills. Because of this I lack qualities that would make me a better husband and weatherman: humor, personality, a firm grasp of the female demographic. I contracted with an independent pharmaceutical representative for trial pills of Luderica intended to tap into my psyche and locate my playful aura. Side effects also include uncontrollable laughter.

My body is silly with the chortling, the slate tile crisp against my heavy face, the dispenser a paper waterfall of recycled efficiency. Toby coughs, wanders the restroom massaging his soft neck.

Mister Pistilini, Doug says. I didn’t mean to—

Fuck, Pisser. Toby spits and clenches, wanders with distance, judging whether he can safely kick me in my head now that Doug is here to protect him. What are you smiling about?

In fact, I am not smiling. I am laughing, hard and urgent so that I cannot catch breath or halt considerable drool, my body repressing vomit. When I try to stop laughing it comes in lavish bursts, the dizziness from Doug’s fist, the bruise I feel welting on my forehead. A foreign cell phone lies beneath the sinks, buzzing and spinning and drawing attention. It is not my phone. My phone does not work. I need to order a new model, which I cannot do without my old one because my deft retail provider demands all purchases be made by mobile contraption. I place the contraband item in my pocket. The sound of my retching has carried into the lobby until the bathroom is filled with Gopa dads, younger kids enthralled at the massive pile of paper, a five-year-old leaping into the joy as his guardian senses filth, recycling material, parental engagement.

Now, David, was that a good choice?

Someone helps me to my feet. Toby and Doug have fled, leaving me to explain the laughter to the hovering parents. They are smartly dressed for morning drop-off, soldiers of a foreign campaign over a fallen comrade, everyone armed with hand sanitizer and cell phone. It takes a moment to transform from tribe into Tom Pistilini, failing husband, father of two, homeowner, semi-known meteorologist. A face I recognize is beside me, Josey Mateo, an administrative assistant who volunteers with the drama department.

She resets the dispenser. What’s happened, Mister Pistilini?

Nothing, I say. Just a dizzy spell.

You need a doctor. I am the victim, not the aggressor. She holds my arms, standing on her toes to peak into my dilated eyes, bony hand on my forehead, her skin littered with pen drawings of animal totems: a stick tortoise on a forearm trampoline, two emaciated pigs wrestling or fucking near a bra strap. You’re freezing. And sweating.

I’m fine, Josey, really.

Your face. She tries to hold my stare. It’s all scratched. Let me call the nurse.

That’s not necessary. A silly misstep is all.

I should mention that Josey Mateo, twenty-seven, has an unhealthy affinity for the weather, and what I believe is an innocent crush on me. Thirty-one days. That is how long she claims my consecutive streak has grown of successfully predicting the weather for Channel Fourteen, neither Manhattan’s go-to nor relevant source of news and climate condition, a stroke of wily luck that began in the throes of March and now grips Manhattan’s unpredictable April. I am an average weatherman at best, though Josey claims to watch me each morning and plan her wardrobe on my prognostications. She suggests I have the flu, more questions, a water bottle is placed in my hand as she re-rolls the towels. She studies me thoroughly, more questions, and leaves it with a whisper.

I’m a friend, Mister P. I know something happened with the little fuck.

Gopa Lobby

I am ushered back into the lobby now swollen with pre-enlightenment vigor. No one acknowledges there was an attempted murder in the bathroom, a falling out between myself and the lacrosse team that will have implications for the remainder of the season. The Gopa Worthy is favored to win New York’s private school league championship and knock off some impressive out-of-district schools from Long Island and New Jersey. Had I murdered the captain and best faceoff man in Gopa history, it would have been a blow to the offense, though possibly a good thing for team unity. Nothing coalesces a republic like tragedy, a fledgling band of athletes engaged in a righteous mission for the fallen.

Everything is normal, the lobby entrance predictably cheery; I am reluctant to believe my morning dispute ever occurred. Perhaps it was another episode brought on by the medication, which our family therapist, Devin Brenner, has cautioned can be dangerous. The lacrosse coach and my business associate, Russ Haverly, is also my dealer. I will have to decide whether to mention my morning when I see him as I know he is fond of Toby and would look unfavorably on my strangling the boy. I search the room for a platoon of lacrosse meatheads or security guards mobilizing toward me, but everything is calm.

Toby is a friend of Iliza, an ex-boyfriend perhaps, although I have been cut out of my daughter’s romantic entanglements. He is arrogant but maybe someone I do not hate the way I thought I did moments earlier. The photograph rumors likely originated with the nannies, known locally as our nanny chain, but they do not always get it right. They once conjured an affair between Howard Willis and Monica Rhimes, a rumor that was untrue until it brought the two families together to discuss it, which initiated the actual affair.

We have been without a nanny since the accident in January, which gives Laura and I a disadvantage when it comes to gossip. All our friends have domestic help. Nannies guard their employers’ children against malicious gossip. They offer up overheard rumors about other families without being prodded. If there was any truth that Toby Dalton possessed photographs of Iliza, we could validate the news much faster if we had an insider on the payroll. As it is, I may have murdered our nanny with a claw-tooth hammer in the backyard, staging it to look as though she tripped and slammed her head into the stone patio before drowning in the Jacuzzi lagoon. The 16-ounce titanium claw-tooth hammer retails for a $189 on VillageShop.com. Our former nanny was stealing from us. It is conceivable she made off with my hammer prior to her accident.

I feel better now that I am among my people—a stinging in my forehead that I could be imagining. I enjoy the morning drop-offs, the coming together of the Gopa community as we bid our children goodbye and greet one another with tender affinity that is somewhat fake and bearably genuine and maniacally envious. We share similar habits, what might have passed for smoke breaks in another era—hand sanitizers, eye drops, moisturizer, hair gel, sunscreen, bottled water, a series of liquids with which we douse our children so they are disinfected and hydrated following the morning commute. We barely listen to one another, the same conversations, all of us communicating our own agendas and feigning interest in other families’ plights. Yes history and Bushel nearly took her first step the Hamptons this weekend did you know about Tuesday the kids have homework I hate your son irrationally.

The line of SUVs and taxies is orderly today. The Gopa flag floats haughtily, drifting in a persistent waft so I am never able to read the Latin wording. We bask in the heavily armed security that covers the front entrance governed by Lieutenant Misch, former NYPD who oversees bygone soldiers and SWAT officers and one Navy SEAL, trained killers lured into the private sector of defending children of wealth while they learn arithmetic and yoga. There is free coffee near the elevators. A dog barks toward the southeast, from where we can expect a mild breeze for much of the morning and into the evening commute.

Our community fosters a fairly intense population of animals—therapy dogs, security dogs, remedy Chihuahuas riding inside handbags not to be confused with miniature dogs that ride in handbags as accessories and not for their healing value. They all hate me. A rough estimate, forty percent of Gopa families own therapy creatures; the rest get their therapy in inorganic form. I represent the human version of fireworks, distractions that spook bestial sensibilities. When I am near an animal they yip and pant and cause their owners anxiety, which is why I stand off to the side and watch the morning activity.

All the kids, even the parents, are on phones catching up on text correspondence and the popular website, Lustfizzle. Iliza and her best friend, Tungsten Sedlock, hover over devices. In her junior year, my daughter is an aspiring actress, starring in the spring production of Our Town. Tungsten, her understudy, sports a bandage on her left hand that I do not recall from a week ago but could be a fashion statement instead of a compression. I wave to Iliza but she ignores me. This morning she is playing the part of cunty teenager who does not know the lengths her father will go to protect her innocence. Gus, my twelve-year-old, chats up a security guard. Foreseeably, he is dressed as an elderly woman, Millicent, fallout from the January death of our Tilly.

Since the accident Gus has taken it upon himself to cover the former nanny’s chores, doing the laundry, cooking, even shopping for decorative pillows he claims complete a room, one of Tilly’s signature skills. Gopa is the type of community to foster my son’s strange identity crisis and help him through a failed set of standard tests, which via the nannies has become widespread banter with the other parents. Everyone here is politically correct. Everyone is progressive and understanding and has experienced the fortune in life that they do not pass judgment on another family’s tribulations.

Like any community, we have our cliques—and within those, sub-cliques, and within those, tighter cliques, and within those, two-person cliques, husband and wife—battling for the limited resources we believe life affords. One resource, in particular, has hung over our dealings the entire school year, the Extended Cultural Immersion, or ECI, a pilot program that has taken hundreds of hours and dozens of applications and is open for the first time to next year’s senior class. There are eighteen spots available for a class of a hundred and fifty. We all wish it for our children, which indirectly means we do not wish it for other children. We care about each other and loathe each other. We are on our best behavior, still sharing hand sanitizer but in ever-smaller squeezes.

Our community is broken into three tribes: Manhattan parents, typically the wealthiest; Westchester and Brooklyn and New Jersey, who commute to Manhattan for jobs and Gopa; and myself and other parents from Slancy, a manmade island off the coast of Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, who view the Westchester-Brooklyn-Jersey clan as the true imposters. We Slancy inhabitants bond on the shuttlebus, which leaves each morning at a quarter past seven. The only exception being Ray McClutchen, who bikes through Red Hook and over the Brooklyn Bridge, just to make a point about global warming and exercise.

Gopa is not all cliques and walls. In the end we want the best for our children. We appreciate the camaraderie. We support our impressive drama department and sports teams. We volunteer for inconsequential committees. We have a growing Asian community of which we are proud. We even have one mother, Sharon Li, who dons a prosthetic leg that none of us think is strange or creepy or stare at too long as it taps away during morning drop-off. She is peppier than most moms, playful and sprightly in a way I find irritating and impossible to maintain. She has a son, Whisper, also a junior, captain of the chess club, which I have forced Gus to join. Whisper’s ethnicity and nerd power ensure he is a shoe-in for ECI.

Hey there, Pisser. It’s Grant Wheeler, father of Crenshaw, eighth grade, and Amen, whose gender I cannot recall. What’s on tap for today?

Death. Agony. Some fetid hell the most imaginative Hollywood scriptwriters have not thought up yet. I shove my hand into his sweaty, unsanitized palm. Nippy this morning but should give way to a beautiful afternoon. Some fair clouds out of the south will resemble vapor trails from missiles our government will launch at our enemies, and our enemies’ children, so that our children can grow up without the constant worry of foreign terrorism. None of that will make the news to bother you.

Like to hear it. Good day for a round.

It’ll be a cold round. Still only April. People are starving right here in this country, some just down the street. I think I’ve come down with the flu, but I’m playing this afternoon because I’m avoiding going home to see my family. See you there?

Might happen. Sorry to hear about the test trouble Gusser’s having. He slaps my shoulder. The nannies? The comment section of the Gopa website? Anxiety’s a bitch. He’ll get his head around it. Don’t worry.

I’m not worried. Say, Grant, did I hear Amen had similar test anxiety?

I wouldn’t know.

How’s that?

We don’t talk about it.

Why not?

Grant has located his hand sanitizer and is scrubbing away my aura. Might give the impression there’s something to talk about, something wrong with Amen, which there isn’t. Amen is an excellent test taker. Always has been as far as we’re concerned.

This is how we communicate. But can you confirm that some kids do have test anxiety. Maybe not your Amen, I say, hands up, letting him know that Amen’s testing ability is off the table. And that with a sympathetic tutor and proper confidence instilled, they get better at test taking?

He shrugs uncontrollably. Wouldn’t know, partner. He slaps my chest. See you on the course. By the way, you look like shit, Pisser.

This morning everyone talks around the typical issues. Some parents would like the children to have thirty minutes of phone time in the middle of the day. Otherwise they are gluttonous when they get home. A rumor that the ground beef served during last week’s Burger Day was not sourced locally has sparked a gathering of concerned moms, a potential committee that none of us believe in but would do well to join since we could take partial credit for locally sourced meat. The big lacrosse game is approaching, as is the spring play. The bunny epidemic has worsened. During a yearlong lesson of the life cycle for the first graders, the science department bred two Angora rabbits. Angoras being tiny fur balls, everyone fell in love with the photographs that were circulated (pre-breeding) on the Gopa website. The actual bunnies were born different. Aggressive was mentioned. Mentally challenged was bandied. They are constantly turning up dead, or fucking uncontrollably when it’s time for the six-year-olds to nurture them. A decision has to be made—euthanize, allow the sophomore biology classes to dissect. No one can agree and the longer the rabbits await judgment, the faster they breed, increasing the problem.

Morning, Pisser. Someone I do not recognize slaps my shoulder. Without thinking I offer him sanitizer, which he accepts expectantly. Heard about Gus. We’ve got a great tutor. Have Laura call Janie. We should do dinner. Go see a doctor.

Definitely, I say, bumping fists.

Dead Chipmunks And Wine

Tonight is a wine tasting for Gopa Parents for Trees. It is a sign of social standing to sit on a Gopa committee board, and because I am a meteorologist people think I know more about global warming and tree preservation, which I do not. But it feels important to be involved, to have a hand in the four large, potted trees, which were assembled in the ballroom, and into which we have deposited members of the Gopa administration. It was my idea to harness them to the structures to prevent injuries since they also are consuming wine, the fundraiser an invitation to get slightly tipsy without judgment. Each time we raise $10,000, a ladder is procured and we hoist down one of the administrators. For now, Heather Pace, head of the school, and the others sip and wave to constituents. I consider how pleasant it would be to watch someone plummet to the floor and splatter, a giant bag of pinot.

Parents kiss and reintroduce themselves and sanitize. Like marbles of different sizes shaken through suitable perforations, soon we wander the ballroom until we are among our preferred sect. I grip hands and triple kiss cheeks of my fellow Slancyites, a tight-knit group of four households: me and my wife, Laura; Ray and Olivia McClutchen, who I only pretend to like; Jason and Jackson, our next door neighbors; and Harry and Allie Sedlock, who look perfect and behave perfect, whose children are also perfect, and who because of their perfection have raised the profile of Slancy families within the Gopa community.

Together we are inhabitants of the city’s first, fully functional artificial borough, which when we are not present everyone describes as gaudy and stripmall-ish. We know each other’s children. We socialize together. We have invested our savings into the Sedlocks’ startup, and one day we will all be wealthy together. These are my people and I love them. Except for Ray McClutchen, who I believe fakes his optimism to sell motivational books. This evening they stare, pitying me, preparing to make jokes at my expense, which serves as our bonding ritual.

What happened to your face? Olivia McClutchen is Indian, jeweled, attractive skin if not always bunched into a judgmental scowl. She has a fake accent she did not learn growing up in Long Island, which disappears when she experiences emotion. You look like you’re dying.

We’re all dying. I touch my face to feel the numbness. I’m not well, no.

It was a dog, wasn’t it? Jason references the scratches, the welt on my forehead. They shouldn’t be permitted anywhere. It’s unsanitary.

It wasn’t a dog, I say.

Harry Sedlock steps forward, commandeering the examination. You need to put something on that, Pisser.

My wife stays out of it. Laura is tired of me, tired of my grumpiness and insomnia, tired of everyone feeling badly for me ever since I returned from the retreat in February. I have conjured a reputation of perpetual injury, a man forever on the cusp of destruction. Somehow, impossibly, she knows as I do that the conversation will turn to the chipmunks and the steps I have taken to keep the little fuckers out of our backyard. They all think it—that I lost a fight with a chipmunk—and any minute…

It was a chipmunk, wasn’t it? Olivia brightens, the accent fading as she delights in this misfortune. One finally fought back.

It wasn’t a chipmunk. A stray cat got me.

It’s in the homeowners agreement. You cannot kill the wildlife. The land belongs to them.

In fact, the land belongs to Laura and I, an insurmountable monthly mortgage that makes us nostalgic for our West Village days and the tiny one-bedroom above the bakery that smelled of warmth and poverty. Specific to the claim of chipmunk ownership, the actual land consists of tons of dredged material arranged into ninety-five acres of artificial real estate that crooked developers learned too late could not support skyscrapers, onto which an ecosystem was introduced of earthworms and warblers and picturesque chipmunks that were bred in a laboratory with immaculate features. They were placed in Slancy by our homeowners association that thought they would drive up property values, which they might. But they are impossibly stupid or brave, venturing into my Jacuzzi lagoon as if it is their own water source. Our chipmunks have no history. They have no parents or children, which means they have nothing to worry about but swimming and drowning and getting stuck in my filter.

A cat, geezus, Jason says. In the neighborhood?

Near work. An alley cat, I guess.

Olivia again, And stop feeding them nuts. Our chipmunks have nut allergies. You’ve already desecrated their hibernation routine with that lagoon. They think they can stay awake all year and be warm next to your deathtrap.

That Olivia McClutchen has researched the life cycle of laboratory-grown chipmunks strikes me as pretentious. She chairs Slancy’s preservation committee, which includes two men who only joined so they can take photographs of the warblers in neighbors’ backyards without seeming odd. I concentrate on not smiling which makes it impossible. I burp out a laugh and think of Gus and the standardized tests and the old woman glasses and I cannot control myself.

It’s not funny, Pisser. She pronounces it Pissah as the accent wanes. I found a sick one last week. Wandering, drowsy. I know it was poisoned.

I laugh into my glass. Now, dear, Ray says. He rode his bicycle to the event, a tricycle actually, which folds into an efficient carry-on, a nifty product that retails for $600 at VillageShop. Ray wears his fold-up trike on a strap over his shoulder as he sips wine. I have a deep need to crush his cheek with a wine bottle.

How do you know it was poisoned? asks Jackson, coming to my defense. Unless you ran it over and then performed an autopsy?

Olivia, you cannot run over chipmunks and cut them open to see why they’re not sleeping. We all pretend to laugh at Harry’s joke, which diffuses the tension.

Olivia again, no hint of inflection, the accent gone. It isn’t funny.

Seriously, Pisser, stop killing them, Harry says. Allie found one on the doorstep the other day.

Allie Sedlock, flawless and sensitive, smiling innocently that the dead carcass was no bother, no bother at all. She is dressed seductively for a parent event, makeup on and hair pulled back in a graceful ponytail. She gives a fast curtsy and shrug, which means nothing, though we all come out of our shoes at this gesture.

A waiter pours more wine. What about the gun? Olivia asks.

Let’s just drink wine and stop being dramatic. Laura takes my side, finally says something, anything in defense of her idiot husband who is only protecting their property from the creeping sophistication of Designer Rodentia. It’s a BB gun. And he couldn’t hit a moving car much less a tiny rodent.

I am somehow grateful for my wife’s attack on my manhood, the insult to my innate frontiersman, the evening has turned into a coming together of our marriage. Everyone knows about the BB gun, but not about the crossbow, nor the scythe, and certainly not the titanium-handled hammers or the chainsaw. Jason and Jackson know about the bow because it was delivered accidentally to their house after it was delivered accidentally to the Hendersons. When you have a rodent problem like I have, you never know how much firepower you might need. My intention is only to scare the chipmunks, not have the BB projectiles lodged in their fur and kidneys and soft brains, which could lead to blood clots or slow bleeds. I would use a high powered air rifle if I wanted clean kills, or the crossbow that sits in its packaging in the attic.

I only fire warning shots so they don’t get close to the water. Otherwise, they drown. I perform a public service for the chipmunks, I say. Imagine a chipmunk paddling its tiny paws for hours, trying to stay afloat. Eventually it gives out to exhaustion, drowns, and gets caught in the filter. That’s the problem—the filters are expensive.

You should have thought of that before you installed a Jacuzzi in their habitat.

For chrissakes. Laura again. It’s our property.

You all enjoy taking a dip, I say, to which Jackson clinks my glass.

Not since,