Page 24 of Shake the Habit

We both looked at Sir, who wagged his tail.

“I’ll take care of both of us,” I informed both of them. “I’ve got this.”

Maybe Sir believed me, but Caleb was clearly working through some doubts.

“Part of this is my fault,” he started out saying, and I shook my head.

“No, I accept responsibility for everything.”

“No,” he said right back. “I knew that I should have taken him. I knew when you said that you had an apartment that it was a bad idea. I turned away instead of facing it.”

“Again, this was—”

“Can we go inside?” he interrupted. “Your neighbor and his girlfriend are at the window.”

They were. I saw their two faces peeking around the metal blinds that bent so easily when a dog pawed them. The woman, she of the extra-long orgasm, waved at me, but I ignored it. Obviously, her boyfriend had been the one to turn me in to the landlord, since that guy hadn’t driven here from Georgia to post a notice on a whim. But it wasn’t my stinky neighbor’s fault, either. As I’d told Caleb, this was all my responsibility.

But he kept arguing with me about that. “I knew it was a bad idea as soon as you lifted him into your trunk and drove away on that doughnut. I watched it happen and I knew. He knocks you down, eats your shoes, craps out piles that are bigger than you are, and—”

“He’s a good dog!”

“He’s a great dog,” Caleb agreed. “He’s smart as a whip and he’s obviously trainable. He’s also obviously not an apartment dog, not with how much you have to exercise him. How far are you walking every day?”

“It’s important for older women to get lots of exercise, all the steps.”

“Who is the older woman here? Aren’t you twenty-four?”

“I’ll be twenty-five in March,” I said, and I found it strange that someone who had an engineering degree (according to what I’d read about him) couldn’t keep straight one simple number, my age.

“When in March?” he asked, and I told him and got his birthday, too.

“Anyway, more exercise sure doesn’t hurt me,” I finally continued. “I feel better than I have in a while, actually. I don’t know why you’re disagreeing with me—I don’t know what you’re disagreeing about at all,” I told him.

He looked at me for a moment before he sat on my couch, which was infinitely more comfortable than the one at his house. Why anyone would build seating with a wooden bar that went directly under your knees was beyond me.

“I don’t want to avoid issues,” he said.

“This isn’t your issue.”

“It is, because I care about Sir and I inserted myself when I stopped to help you with your tire. You’re trying to be a person who takes responsibility, and so am I.”

I also seated myself on the couch, and so did the dog. It sagged slightly. “You don’t seem like the type to shirk. How would you have gotten so successful without hard work and a nose-to-the-grindstone attitude?”

“I mean with people,” he answered, and now I understood.

“Oh, you’re saying that it wasn’t just a lack of time that led you to be alone with no girlfriend or wife,” I said. “You were avoiding your relationship responsibilities?”

He seemed surprised. “Uh, I never thought of it that way…yeah, I guess I was.”

“How?” I asked him.

“Uh,” Caleb said slowly, and maybe he hadn’t thought about it before but he was certainly considering the idea now. “Well, speaking of birthdays, I never paid attention to those. I didn’t notice anniversaries, either. Who ever heard of a two-month anniversary, anyway? ‘Anni’ comes from Latin and it means year.”

“Did a woman expect you to celebrate that date, and you forgot it?”

He seemed genuinely confused. “Yes, and she was very upset. We didn’t go out again.”

“And you forgot her birthday, too? You have a calendar in your phone, right?” That reminded me to text Marc and tell him to set a few reminders for his fiancée’s birthday.

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