Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job

“Maybe five minute. I am thinking I am now having a strain in my poop chute, so hard I am pushing.”

“Aiiiiieeeee,” came the cry from the doorway as Mrs. Ling returned, and scampered to Sophie. “Is past time for nap,” Mrs. Ling snapped at Mrs. Korjev.

“I’ve got her now,” Charlie said. “One of you stay with her while I get rid of the H-A-M-S-T-E-R-S.”

“He mean the tiny bears,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“I get rid, Mr. Asher,” said Mrs. Ling. “No problem. What happen them?”

“Sleeping,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“Ladies, go. Please. I’ll see one of you in the morning.”

“Is my turn,” said Mrs. Korjev sadly. “Am I banish? Is no Sophie for Vladlena, yes?”

“No. Uh, yes. It’s fine, Mrs. Korjev. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Mrs. Ling was shaking the Habitrail cage. They certainly were sound little sleepers, these hamsters. She liked ham. “I take care,” she said. She tucked the cage under her arm and backed toward the door, waving. “Bye-bye, Sophie. Bye-bye.”

“Bye-bye, bubeleh,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“Bye-bye,” Sophie said, with a baby wave.

“When did you learn bye-bye ?” Charlie said to his daughter. “I can’t leave you for a second.”

But he did leave her the very next day, to find replacements for the hamsters. He took the cargo van to the pet store this time. Whatever courage or hubris he’d rallied in order to attack the sewer harpies had melted away, and he didn’t even want to go near a storm drain. At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each about as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney-shaped dish that had its own little island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: “You think we’re slow? Look at that guy.” To shore up the snail’s morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

After he grilled the clerk for fifteen minutes on the vitality of the turtles, and was assured that they could probably survive a nuclear attack as long as there were some bugs left to eat, Charlie wrote a check and started tearing up over his turtles.

“Are you okay, Mr. Asher?” asked the pet-shop guy.

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It’s just that this is the last entry in the register.”

“And your bank didn’t give you a new one?”

“No, I have a new one, but this is the last one that my wife wrote in. Now that this one is used up, I’ll never see her handwriting in the check register again.”

“I’m sorry,” said the pet-shop guy, who, until that moment, had thought the rough patch that day was going to be consoling a guy over a couple of dead hamsters.

“It’s not your problem,” Charlie said. “I’ll just take my turtles and go.”

And he did, squeezing the check register in his hand as he drove. She was slipping away, every day a little more.

Aweek ago Jane had come down to borrow some honey and found the plum jelly that Rachel liked in the back of the refrigerator, covered in green fuzz.

“Little brother, this has got to go,” Jane said, making a face.

“No. It was Rachel’s.”

“I know, kid, and she’s not coming back for it. What else do you—oh my God!” She dove away from the fridge. “What was that?”

“Lasagna. Rachel made it.”

“This has been in here for over a year?”

“I couldn’t make myself throw it out.”

“Look, I’m coming over Saturday and cleaning out this apartment. I’m going to get rid of all the stuff of Rachel’s that you don’t want.”

“I want it all.”

Jane paused while moving the green-and-purple lasagna to the trash bin, pan and all. “No you don’t, Charlie. This kind of stuff doesn’t help you remember Rachel, it just hurts you. You need to focus on Sophie and the rest of both of your lives. You’re a young guy, you can’t give up. We all loved Rachel, but you have to think about moving on, maybe going out.”

“I’m not ready. And you can’t come over this Saturday, that’s my day in the shop.”

“I know,” Jane said. “It’s better if you’re not here.”

“But you can’t be trusted, Jane,” Charlie said, as if that was as obvious as the fact that Jane was irritating. “You’ll throw out all the pieces of Rachel, and you’ll steal my clothes.” Jane had been swiping Charlie’s suits pretty regularly since he’d started dressing more upscale. She was wearing a tailored, double-breasted jacket that he’d just gotten back from Three Fingered Hu a few days ago. Charlie hadn’t even worn it yet. “Why are you still wearing suits, anyway? Isn’t your new girlfriend a yoga instructor? Shouldn’t you be wearing those baggy pants made out of hemp and tofu fibers like she does? You look like David Bowie, Jane. There, I’ve said it. I’m sorry, but it had to be said.”

Jane put her arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. “You are so sweet. Bowie is the only man I’ve ever found attractive. Let me clean out your apartment. I’ll watch Sophie that day—give the widows a day to do battle down at the Everything for a Dollar Store.”

“Okay, but just clothes and stuff, no pictures. And just put it in the basement in boxes, no throwing anything away.”

“Even food items? Chuck, the lasagna, I mean—”

“Okay, food items can go. But don’t let Sophie know what you’re doing. And leave Rachel’s perfume, and her hairbrush. I want Sophie to know what her mother smelled like.”

That night, when he finished at the shop, he went down to the basement to the little gated storage area for his apartment and visited the boxes of all of the things that Jane had packed up. When that didn’t work, he opened them and said good-bye to every single item—pieces of Rachel. Seemed like he was always saying good-bye to pieces of Rachel.

On his way home from the pet shop he had stopped at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books because it, too, was a piece of Rachel and he needed a touchstone, but also because he needed to research what he was doing. He’d scoured the Internet for information on death, and while he’d found that there were a lot of people who wanted to dress like death, get naked with the dead, look at pictures of the naked and the dead, or sell pills to give erections to the dead, there just wasn’t anything on how to go about being dead, or Death. No one had ever heard of Death Merchants or sewer harpies or anything of the sort. He left the store with a two-foot-high stack of books on Death and Dying, figuring, as a Beta Male typically does, that before he tried to take the battle to the enemy again, he’d better find out something about what he was dealing with.

That evening he settled in on the couch next to his baby daughter and read while the new turtles, Bruiser and Jeep (so named in hope of instilling durability in them), ate freeze-dried bugs and watched CSI Safari-land on cable.

“Well, honey, according to this Kübler-Ross lady, the five stages of death are anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Well, we went through all of those stages when we lost Mommy, didn’t we?”

“Mama,” Sophie said.

The first time she had said “Mama” had brought Charlie to tears. He had been looking over her little shoulder at a picture of Rachel. The second time she said it, it was less emotional. She was in her high chair at the breakfast bar and was talking to the toaster.

“That’s not Mommy, Soph, that’s the toaster.”