Free Husbands And Lap Dogs Breathe Their Last by David Steven Rappoport

thirteenth birthday. Matilda came into Cummings room and said, “Ask your father about your dick.”
    He nodded. That was it.
    When Cummings was thirty-seven, a bus hit and killed Matilda in front of a Boston hotel. She had gone to Boston to see a hockey game.
    Some years after her death George met Orchid while visiting Cummings, who was living in Maine at the time. Cummings considered her an emotionally vacant know-it-all, but she was a good match for George. They both lived in a universe in which the human body ended below the brain. Cummings kept in touch, which mostly meant responding to his father’s incessant requests for assistance with word puzzles. Beyond this, he visited when he could.
     
     
    Horeb, founded 1762, current population 2,612, was never a particularly fortunate place. The village on Merrymeeting Bay has grown in the last twenty years. It recently exceeded its previous population peak — 2,382 — achieved in 1850 as a result of Maine’s then-thriving seafaring economy.
    The Civil War, in which two hundred thirty-seven Horeb men served and more than thirty died, as well as changes in the shipping industry, eroded the town’s fortunes. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the town became again what it was originally, a small, agricultural community. It lost more than a third of its population by 1900. Major fires in 1902 and 1904 destroyed what was left of Horeb’s two blocks of downtown.
    In 1910, with local dignitaries, one of Maine’s U.S. senators and the marching band from the Maine Maritime Academy in attendance, the final ship built in Horeb was launched. As the procession moved toward the water, the ship fell off of its launching platform, skidded down Massachusetts Street and broke in half on the banks of the Carlisle River.
    In the 1960s Horeb changed from a stolid farming community to a hippie carnival. In the years since the town had regained balance. Still, Horeb continued to be a rather eccentric place. It was now home to an array of cottage industries: weaving, soap making, organic lamb, pottery, heirloom vegetables and handmade Windsor chairs. There was a town arts center that held exhibits of local painters and sculptors and housed an avant-garde theater company. Next to it was an even more renegade establishment, the Maine Ephemera Museum. The Museum sponsored periodic exhibits of toothbrushes, paper clips, painted flowerpots and other detritus, and it had a permanent collection of umbrella covers from around the world.
    The town’s location at the approximate midpoint between three prominent towns — Augusta, Maine’s capital; Portland, the state’s largest city; and Lewiston-Auburn, the state’s second largest urban area, known with geographic hubris as L.A.) — helped Horeb to reinvent itself as a small bedroom community. Horeb’s residents were dispersed among thirty-four square miles of woods and farms, and former woods and farms, inland from the village proper. The population of the village itself was about two hundred fifty. Its main road, Massachusetts Street, ran about two miles from the Horeb exit on I-295 until it dead-ended into Water Road, otherwise known as Route 240, a small state highway. In between there were a handful of streets that ran perpendicular or parallel to Massachusetts. There were perhaps six streets in all. Horeb had one traffic light — flashing yellow only — a gas station, a diner and a small market.
    There were no commercial lodgings in Horeb, though there were bed-and-breakfasts in several nearby villages. Cummings had an open invitation to stay with Ernestine.
    As he drove into the village, Cummings was surprised to discover that he felt a certain odd attachment to the place. He assumed this reflected his feelings for Ernestine rather than his love for Horeb.
    Ernestine lived in a Greek Revival house built in 1835. It had four Doric columns, double-hung, twelve-sash windows, and square openings for windows and doors adorned