Cal and Jackson sat on their twin beds at the Sasamat Lake Hotel. Jackson put his phone on mute.

“I worked twenty years at the Atascadero Psychiatric Hospital with killers and murderers. Never have I faced anything like this,” Jackson said.

“Killers and murderers are the same thing,” Cal said. “The difference here is because it’s personal.”

“l love Anna.” Jackson looked out the window at the fall trees waving in the wind all the way down to the sea.

“We should get some dinner,” Cal said. “I’ll pay.”

“She’s still talking,” said Jackson.

He turned the speaker phone back on.

“You’re cruel,” came Anna’s voice. “You’re viciously cruel. Your first wife killed herself because of you and now you want me to kill myself.”

“I don’t want you to kill yourself,” Jackson said.

“Why did you leave?” Anna’s voice rose. “How could you do this to me?”

“You told me to get out,” Jackson said. “You threw my backpack out the door and pushed me after it.”

“Everyone does that when there’s a breakup,” Anna shouted. “It’s perfectly normal. I wanted you to stay in a hotel for a few days, that’s all. But you went and got an apartment!”

Her voice rose to a shriek on the final word.

“I’ll be moving to the apartment on Friday,” said Jackson.

“You’re cruel! You gaslighting psycho!”

“I told you I needed to be treated with respect. You told me to get out.” He shifted on the bed and said, “You must feel pretty awful.”

“You have no idea how I feel, you piece of shit!”

The line went dead.

“Wow, what makes her so furious?” Cal asked. “I mean, besides you being a piece of shit.”

Jackson shook his head. “It was about the onesie. The onesie for the dog. And maybe about the honey on the fridge, and the whole plumber episode. I think it’s about bad brain biochemistry.”

“The onesie?” Cal said.

“Yeah. The dog had a spay operation and wasn’t supposed to lick the incision. We had to get a onesie; the little suit thing fits right over the dog. The vet’s office gave me a size too small.”

“So, you took it back?”

“Immediately, but Anna freaked out because she thought I disrespected her. The thing didn’t fit over the dog’s face.”

“Well, didn’t Anna know it was the vet who made the mistake?”

“She said I should have known. I shouldn’t have accepted the too-small onesie like a spineless worm.”

Cal nodded. “You know what they said at Atascadero Psych. One of the main causes of violence is perceived disrespect.”

“I just want the old Anna back,” Jackson said, “The one I met seven years ago.”

The phone rang again.

“If you leave, no one will look after you,” Anna’s voice rose. “No one will be close to you. Nobody will care what you do all day or where you are. You will live alone in your own filthy mess, hoarding piles of paper and books and garbage, eating out of packages.”

Jackson thought about how he might have responded to an angry patient back at the Atascadero Psychiatric Hospital.

“O.K.,” he said.

“You’ll be doing your laundry at a laundromat, with van dwellers who wipe their asses with wet cloths,” Anna continued.

“O. K,” Jackson replied.

‘O.K., O.K. is that all you can say, you autistic robot?” Anna yelled. “How could you do this to me?”

She hung up again.

Jackson put his phone down on the bed. Some of what Anna said seemed quite true, especially about the packages. He wondered what sort of person he was.

“Wow I guess a laundromat has its downside,” he thought.

“She’s on an all-meat diet,” he told Cal. “With lots of salad. Do you think that could affect a person’s mood?”

Cal lifted up his sunglasses. “Could be,” he said. “Let’s go eat.”

At the café, Cal ordered an oyster burger.

“That’s a great smile,” he grinned at the waitress. “Make sure you bring plenty of ketchup. That’s the red stuff made from crushed tomatoes.”

“I know what ketchup is,” said the waitress.

“I’ll have an oyster burger too,” said Jackson.

He told Cal about the honey on the fridge.

“Anna got furious with me a couple of weeks ago. The guy two doors down turned on his skill saw at 7 p.m.”

“That made her angry at you?”

“I said that maybe she could put in some earplugs.”

“Yeah, but why should she?”

“Right. I guess I could’ve gone to the neighbors and pulled out the cord. Anyway, I retired to my den for a while. I heard her running around in the kitchen. When I came downstairs the skill saw was still whining next door and there was something white all over the fridge handles, dripping, you know. “

“The honey.”

“Yeah.,” said Jackson. “You know, it’s good of you to come out here to stay with me at the hotel. I mean, it’s been a great help.”

“It’s like being back working at the psychiatric hospital,” Cal said. He leaned forward with a mouthful of oyster. “How did you get two women in a row with mental problems?”

“Pure coincidence,” Jackson answered. “Or maybe I’m attracted to sensitivity.” He poked at his food. “We should go for a hike round the lake.”

“Yeah, I’ve got to break in my new clumpers,” Carl said, pointing to his green shoes, manufactured in the shape of feet, complete with leather toes.

“Are you ready for the bill?” asked the waitress.

“Sure,” Cal said. “As long as we’re all still smiling.”

He tipped her twenty-five per cent.

After dinner, the two friends moved along the beach path. The full moon rose on a clear October sky, Jackson skinny and slightly bent over, looking down and moving fast from all his pent-up energy, Cal shorter and stockier, hands in his pockets, observing everything around him and falling behind.

“There’s a hawk in that tree,” he said. He pointed. “You can see the shadow.”

“Wow, I wouldn’t have seen it if you didn’t,” Jackson said.

“Always look up,” Cal told him. He gazed out at the water. “You miss a lot if you don’t look up.”

“It’s been about five years since Lisa,” Jackson said. “I’m hoping this isn’t going to happen twice.”

“You’re thinking too far ahead,” Cal told him. “What was that thing about the plumber?”

“It was his second visit in two days. He knocked on the door fifteen minutes early.”

“That was a bad thing?”

“Yeah. Anna wasn’t ready. She said he’d assaulted her the day before by moving her things around under her bathroom sink.”

Cal looked back to where the hawk was.

“Isn’t that what plumbers do? Moving things under the sink?”

Jackson’s phone rang again.

“I guess I should pick it up.”

Anna’s voice sobbed on the line “You don’t care about me. I’ve done so much for you, and you’ve left me alone. You’ve destroyed everything. I’ve got bad knees. I can barely walk up the stairs. I can’t do it.” Her voice rose to a wail. “I can’t do it!”

Jackson went to put the phone back in his coat pocket. It fell on the path. He reached down to pick it up. He looked at his fingers trembling under the moonlight.

“I really do think it’s got a lot to do with me,” he said.

The full moon shone silver across the water and over the beach stones and beyond.

“We had a lot of excellent times,” Jackson continued. “When she’s feeling right, she has a very good sense of humour. We played scrabble, we bicycled, we had dreams, we loved each other.” His skinny legs moved ahead, stretching his stovepipe pants. “Tell me a positive story, amigo.”

“Well,” said Cal, “Twenty years ago I was unemployed without any money or prospects and the government gave me a free Class One driver training course.”

“You learned some skills.”

“The course changed my life,” Cal answered. “There was a big shortage of drivers. That’s how I found work at the Atascadero Psychiatric Hospital, chauffeuring for the Sheriff’s office.” He stopped and looked at Jackson. “I have gratitude, you know, even though I’m not crazy about the government in general.”

“Yeah, I was working at the North California County Fair as a host,” Jackson said. “The hospital director came through on a tour, and I showed them round. He said they needed a teacher. The patients had signed a petition asking for a school.”

“It was all synchronicity,” said Cal, “How we ended up working with the criminally insane.”

“I thought my post retirement niche would be with Anna,” Jackson said. “But that’s gone all to hell.” He looked up at the trees ahead. “Did you like your work?”

“Loved it,” said Cal. “I remember driving the work van over the Golden Gate Bridge. I had a low security patient with me. You know, Brodie Getz. He looked down as we were driving and he said, “What would you do if I jumped out of this van and over this bridge right now?”

“What did you tell him?”
“I said he better not, because I’d have to fill out a lot of paperwork.”

“Yeah,” Jackson agreed. “That would be a lot of paperwork.” He stopped walking. “What did Brodie answer?”

“He said he understood. He was just testing.” Cal grinned.

“Maybe that’s what Anna’s doing,” Jackson said. “Testing my limits and boundaries.”

“Don’t you just love it?” Cal asked

“Yeah, it’s all about love,” Jackson walked through a tunnel formed by some criss-crossing wisteria vines. It was pretty much dark, but he could clearly see the neon sign of the hotel, glowing against the thin red sunset horizon.

“Tell me,” said Cal. “Why did she put the honey on the fridge?”

Jackson’s cell rang again. He put the phone on speaker. This time, Cal and Jackson heard only wailing.

“Are you okay?” Jackson asked. “Please, say something.”

The sobbing continued, higher and longer.

“Talk to me, Anna,” said Jackson. “Please, let me know what’s happening.”

The sound continued, out from the phone and into the night, across the parking lot and on and on into the sky.

“Talk to me,” Jackson repeated.

The sobbing sounded longer, louder. Some people going by turned their heads. Jackson turned the speaker phone down. The line went dead.

Cal and Jackson stood outside the hotel lobby.

“Maybe you should contact the police,” Cal said. “Have them do a wellness check.”

“I did that last week,” said Jackson, “They checked and told me she appeared perfectly fine. She went ballistic about it though, phoned me eight times telling me how I’d destroyed her, shamed her in front of the neighbors by sending over the cops.”

Jackson held up his left hand and looked at the ring round his third finger.  It shone under the fluorescent light of the hotel sign. “I haven’t ever taken this ring off,” he said.

Cal and Jackson trudged into the hotel and sat back on their separate hotel beds. Cal talked to his girlfriend on the phone. Jackson thought of the good times he had with Anna, when they rented the cabin at Big Sur with the huge Redwood standing thick and strong right outside the window giving faultless feng shui. Anna painted upstairs, and he wrote in the kitchen with the sun streaming in and the sound of the waves on the perfect round beach rocks. Then he remembered Anna screaming and ripping up her picture because she’d dropped blue paint in the wrong place and he told her, “It doesn’t help to lose your temper, maybe take a break and try again later,” which in retrospect was the worst possible thing he could say.

“I should have let it go,” he thought. “I should let everything go.”

He checked his phone, went to the messages and read Anna’s message from that morning.

“Nobody else will ever try as hard to take care of you and understand you, Jackson, like I did,” he read. “Without me, you will have no purpose in this world and your life will have no meaning. You will just be a footnote in other people’s lives. You are an aging man alone, and you will be alone and that’s how the rest of your life is going to be.”

Jackson turned and spoke to Cal.

“You know, the clues were there early on, but I chose not to see them. I mean, nobody’s perfect.”

“I’d like to know more about that honey incident,” Cal replied.

“We had such good times,” Jackson said. “Before all the upsets. Can you tell me another story?”

Cal laughed. He didn’t say anything for a time, then he began.

“In the early eighties I worked a summer job as a landscaper. I drove a truck that hauled several twenty-foot trees at a time. It had a crane on the front so I could mechanically lift each tree into the holes dug along each street. I worked twelve, fourteen hours a day planting those trees all summer around Sacramento. This was just after I got my Class One license. I must’ve planted thousands of them. Then, a couple of years ago, I went back to where I’d planted all those trees and took another look, saw all those trees grown big and middle-aged, and I walked beneath them, under the summer shade, hiked hours along those streets and wore out my runners.”

Cal lifted his foot to show his green form fitting five toe finger shoes.

Jackson nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “Especially the part about wearing out your runners.” He bent his leg, rubbed the bottoms of his own shoes.

“I did everything I could for Anna.,” Jackson went on. “I rented the cabin by the sea, gave her money for art supplies, paid all the bills, bought her a dog, a computer and an electric scooter.”

“You can’t please everyone,” said Cal.

“The thing is, I liked eating toast and jam in the mornings. Sometimes – although I didn’t know it – Some jam got on my fingers. I’d open the fridge to get the milk and I’d make the handle sticky.”

“Yeah, that can happen.”

“I tried wiping the handle off every time, but sometimes I forgot. She always had my messiness to deal with. That possibly sticky fridge.”

“The final straw.”

“That’s right. She took a whole jar of honey and smeared it over everything, the cupboards, the freezer, I guess I’d been guilty of stickiness in those locations also.”

“She sure was screaming in that last call.”

Jackson looked at his phone. He wondered if he should call Anna back. Would she be okay?  If he didn’t call, he might not ever know.

He switched the device to “Do Not Disturb.” Then he put it in his pocket.

“I’m not a killer,” he said to Cal.