Harriet became insanely jealous whenever he would talk about Amanda and the dog. Living with Morgan in the trailer was sometimes nice but most of the time, trying. Whatever she did, she could never compete with Morgan’s past. The pit of which he always spoke was somewhere, about fifty miles to the southwest—no longer there, the site of an all night mini-mart. Evidently they had used it to bury the large gas tanks to fill the cars and trucks that ran along the new interstate.
Morgan had taken her there once, but because of his frustration about how the place had changed, and her frustration about not being able to comprehend the change, he has never gone back—pretending that it still existed as it did so many years ago.
Morgan did absolutely nothing these days. His time was spent between watching the Spanish station on TV (the only one that their small antenna would pull in) and long walks in the desert.
Harriet had long ago stopped asking Morgan about his walks. He would deny it, but she knew that he was out looking for the dog. He had given up looking for Amanda years ago, but the dog still obsessed him; even thought it had been so long and the dog was surely dead.
“I’m nothing without the dog,” he would mutter to himself sometimes. He would scream in the night, in his sleep, about being buried alive and would spit as if his mouth were full of dirt.
Harriet wondered. She had thought about leaving Morgan, but what can you do when you’re ninety-one years old and have outlived all your children? You get used to having someone around and you get used to the extra Social Security check.
