"I know," she whispered. "I know."
He hung up. He drove to his sister Denise's house on the east side of town, where the porch light was always on and the spare key was still under the ceramic frog. Denise opened the door in sweatpants, took one look at her brother in uniform with a thin German Shepherd and a duffel bag, and said, "Oh, baby," and pulled them both inside without asking a single question until Marcus had eaten something and Shadow had drunk a full bowl of water and fallen asleep on a folded blanket in the corner of her living room.
That first night, Marcus lay on Denise's couch and stared at the ceiling and replayed the apartment scene until it frayed. Babe, I'm home. Shadow? Here boy. The empty bed. Jasmine's face. The door slamming. If that dog is gone… we are gone. He had meant it when he said it. He still meant something like it. But meaning it and knowing what to do with the meaning were different problems.
Denise came downstairs at midnight with two mugs of tea and sat in the armchair. She was older by four years, a nurse, divorced, practical in the way people become practical when they have held too many other people's crises.
"She took him to the shelter," Marcus said, because saying it out loud to someone who loved him made it real in a different way.
"I figured, when you showed up with him looking like that." Denise sipped her tea. "You going to leave her?"
"I don't know."