Nights were the hardest for Louise. During the day, she could pretend that she and Jake were still together. When she was at work there was hardly any difference at all. No one mentioned Jake's name. No one brought up the fact that Jake had left her for some girl he'd met on the internet. During the day, life was small town, Virginia normal. Louise liked it like that. Too bad she couldn't keep it that way.
Louise wasn't bad looking. She sometimes overheard men commenting on "her rack" with approval. Her hair was medium brown and her eyes were hazel. People said she looked like her mother and she thought her mother was pretty. She wasn't hard to get along with . . . why had Jake left her?
Jake and Louise Sample had been married for a little over 18 months. They'd bought this big monster of a house 7 months ago. It had been badly in need of repair and infested with fleas. Louise's father had said it was too big a house for them. Eight rooms , two floors and an attic, maybe he had been right.
Bang! Something fell in the attic. Louise lay in bed and stared into the darkness. The house was alive with sounds that wouldn't bother a person if someone else was in the house with them. But at three a.m., alone, she heard every creak and bump. No wonder people believed in ghosts.
Louise couldn't handle this house by herself. She couldn't even handle the flea infestation. Jake had bought the flea foggers: 8, one for each room. Then he had sent her to her parents for the day.
"It's very dangerous," he said. "You can't go into the house for two hours and you have to turn the pilot light off in the kitchen stove and blah, blah, blah."
She hadn't bothered to listen because she'd thought Jake would always be there for things like that. Now he was gone and she had 8 more cans of fogger under the bathroom sink and you were supposed to do that again after 6 months. It needed to be fogged again. Now she would have to get her father to help her.
Bump!
Something was alive in the attic. She knew it. Jake had said he found a dead raccoon under the house after they fogged the place. Maybe it had been living in the attic and they'd killed it with the foggers. What if there were a raccoon in the attic right now? Could that happen? Would a raccoon live that close to people?
Creak. Creak. Thump!
Sometimes she lay in bed at night, worrying about raccoons in the attic and thinking about her life in general. How can you give up on 18 months of marriage for a woman that might not even be real? Perhaps Jake would get to California and discover a group of college kids invented her as a cruel joke.