Free The Dwelling: A Novel by Susie Moloney Page A

heard Dan move from their room to the bathroom and the clunk of the toilet seat being lifted up. She smiled into the dark. Paused to hear the splash of his stream. Thought of his penis. Realized it really would be okay. Maybe she even wanted to, a little.
    Maybe it was a phase. She didn’t let herself think any further than that.
    She grabbed the doorknob of his studio and turned and pushed. The door didn’t open. She sighed, disgusted. Tried without effort once more. Gave the door an unenthusiastic little shake. It stayed closed. She looked down at the floor, at the light spreading over the toes of her shoes.
    Fuck it.
    It was almost funny, or should have been. Like a sitcom moment. Lucy trying to open the door that Ricky opens without effort time and time again, a vaudevillian act played out in silence with large-eyed, pursed-lipped mugging for the camera and “ Luuuucee—” It should have been funny. But it wasn’t. It was annoying.
    Before going upstairs to make (dutiful) love to her husband, she gave the door a little surreptitious kick. Not hard. But her foot bounced back from the door. She moved back in surprise.
    The door had resisted. It had felt, distinctly, like it had kicked back.
    Eyeing the full length of it, she stepped sideways away and into the hall. With one last backward look over her shoulder, she mounted the stairs.
     
    Becca was taking her husband into her mouth, to his great delight, when downstairs the light sneaking out from under the door to the little room under the stairs spilled out into the hall.
    The knob turned (easily) and the door slid open wide, coming to rest against the wall. It stopped just before hitting the plaster and stayed put.
     
    Dan woke up briefly at nearly four in the morning, still half drunk, but awake enough to feel the pounding in his temples. The room was dark, the only light coming through the window from the streetlamp outside. The window was yet uncurtained. He shut his eyes against it and thought about getting up and taking a couple of aspirin.
    The thought passed, I’ll still have the headache in the morning, and he settled his naked body against the warm, naked body of his wife, the smell and memory of their sex still lingering enough to make him smile as he put his head on the pillow and began to fade.
    Just drifting off, he thought he heard a car pull up outside. Footsteps. Somewhere distantly, a door closed. She tugged at him.
    Downstairs?
    Then music, tinny and low, something jazzy, from another time. He moved his body, eyes lightly shut. His face buried into Becca’s hair. He smelled her. Soap and skin.
    After you’ve gone and left me crying…
    An old recording. A record player, or the sound of one.
    Sounds like someone’s having a party, he thought, and fell into the dark fog of sleep.
     
    Victoria Warwick had woken up on Sunday morning with a hankering for potato latkes. But there was no sour cream in the house. The only thing to do was to pack her old bones into a sweater and running shoes and walk herself down to the grocery, only five blocks from her home. She was eighty-eight years old and sure to remind anyone who crossed her path of the fact. “I’m eighty-eight years old. I still do my own cooking and, goddamn it—” she would at that point wave her cane high enough in the air, so that whomever she was speaking to was, literally, taken aback “—I’m still doing my own walking!” Often as not, she had with her a yellow mesh bag, a gift from a planet-minded granddaughter, for carrying the few groceries she could manage. Her son Donald did the major shopping every Tuesday afternoon. Recently, Donald and Victoria had stopped talking; it wouldn’t last long, it rarely did, but came about regular as clockwork every few weeks when Donald tried to get Grandma, as she was known, to live with him.
    “I’m eighty-eight years old, and I’m still able to do my own cooking!” was her invariable reply, thick with indignant anger. The fact