1976, I was living with this woman who let me live with her for free, if I worked as a sort of maintenance man. I’d have to crawl under her house and get rid of the animals who dragged themselves under there to die. In the winter, I’d be under there relighting the pilot light, after the pipes froze. I could hear her screaming through the floor. 

Sometimes she’d ask me to have sex with her and I always hated that. She’d say, “Nobody loves me.” She would watch me sleep through the crack in the door. 

I got caught rifling through her medicine cabinet one night, and where I thought I’d be chastised, she reached in and grabbed a bottle. 

“This is what you want. Go ahead. Take a couple.” 

I’m not sure what those little yellow tablets were, but I found myself nodding off like never before, with my head nearly in between my legs, drooling like a lobotomized dog. She repeated phrases like, “Thaaaat’s it…” and “Don’t choke yourself, now” and “You still breathing?” 

Stumped on a crossword puzzle, she asked, “What’s another word for disengage?” I didn’t know the answer. 

I tried to leave when the smell got to me, making up some half-truth about going to the rehab center, but she just stood up and said, “What do you want, a fucking award? I just want the dead to stop rotting underneath me.” 

So now, I go on night drives and kill the headlights. I wonder when I’ll hit one of the animals that would eventually crawl under her house.