Free The Man in the Window by Jon Cohen, Nancy Pearl Page B

house during cookie season? I haven’t had a chocolate mint Girl Scout cookie in ages because of that hook of yours.”
    But Arnie wasn’t having anything to do with any “prosthesis.” Prosthesis sounded like
prophylactic
to him, which shifted matters into the realm of the sexual, a place he never liked to be in discussions with Iris.
    He rubbed Duke with his toe, thinking about Iris. He wondered, not really wanting to wonder, what she knew about sex. As a nurse, she had to know something, they take all those body courses in school, but what did she, and this made him really uncomfortable, know on her own? He came, as always, to an immediate and inevitable conclusion. Nothing. Not one damn thing.
    Iris had been an unappealing baby—and babyhood, as it turned out, was her physical high point. She went from unappealing to unattractive, and by the time she moved into adolescence she’d become undeniably homely. Even her parents, who loved her, who gave her every benefit of the doubt and then some, could not dispute the evidence. LuLu would despair, “She’s just so, just so…” “Homely,” Arnie would finish for her, because he thought it best to face the facts. “But what’s it matter?” he’d say. “In the end, who gives a good goddamn?” And then he’d think, Just about the entire male population of the world, that’s who.
    Like the boys in Iris’s senior high school class. Iris’s looks compelled them, as beauty would have compelled them in the opposite direction, toward unkind acts. During the month before the senior prom, she received a phone call every night from some unknown, and ever-changing, male voice. “Hey, Iris, how about it, you wanna go to the prom? Just get a face transplant and I’ll take you.” Hysterical laughter from five or six boys. “Hey, Iris. If the prom was a costume party, you could go as a bowling ball.” Ha ha. Click. Arnie caught the tail end of one or two of these, and when he went downstairs to comfort his ugly duckling of a daughter (who would never become a swan), she shrugged him off. “Fuck ’em, Daddy. I don’t care.” Quite a word to come out of his teenage daughter’s mouth, but he let it pass. Of course he let it pass.
    Duke groaned and shifted on the kitchen linoleum. Now that Iris had moved back in after seventeen years out of the house, not this house of course, since he and LuLu had moved four times since Iris left, she had become his burden again. When she arrived, she said cheerfully, “Well, Arnie. Looks like you’re face-to-face with my face again.” He could not pretend, as he and LuLu had tried, that away from home Iris might have some sort of luck. Seeing her every day, his bowling ball daughter, rolling around the house, made him smile at the folly of his hope, as thin as it had been.
    “She’s my burden, Duke. And I’m her burden. And you’re everybody’s burden, ain’t that right?” Duke got up and went over to his bowl and let out a low whine. Arnie regarded him for a moment, then said, “I forget to feed you? Is that right? Now where’d she get a notion we needed another dog? I can’t even feed you.” Arnie reached up into the cupboard and snared a can of food with his hook. He opened it, then dumped its contents into Duke’s bowl. Duke stared at the bowl, then gave Arnie the dog equivalent of a puzzled look.
    “What’s the matter with you?” Arnie examined the contents of the bowl, which
did
look kind of peculiar. He pickedup the can. Spaghetti-O’s. He’d just filled up the dog’s bowl with Spaghetti-O’s.
    He tried to cover for himself. “Hey, look. I thought you might like a change.” Duke stared at him, unblinking. Obviously he wasn’t buying it.
    “So I screwed up, okay?” He tossed out the Spaghetti-O’s and filled the bowl with Kal Kan. “You won’t tell Iris? It’s between you and me, right?” he said, half-jokingly.
    Spending too much time around the house, he thought. That’s the problem. You get