False Memory

shrapnel peppered Martie’s face. She recognized the danger to her eyes, but she didn’t dare pause to search for safety goggles. Much work remained to be done, and at any moment, the big garage door might rumble upward, announcing Dusty’s arrival.
    She threw the hedge clippers on the floor. She pounded them ferociously, until the spring popped out and the handles came apart.
    Then a spading fork. Pounding and pounding it until the wooden handle was smashed into splinters. Until the tines were bent and squashed together in a useless tangle.
    The sledgehammer was a three-pound rather than a five-pound model. Nevertheless, strength and balance were required to wield it with the desired devastating effect. Sweating, gasping for breath, mouth dry, throat hot, Martie repeatedly swung the hammer high and drove it down smoothly, with calculated rhythm.
    She would suffer in the morning; every muscle in her shoulders and arms would ache, but right now the sledge felt so glorious in her hands that she didn’t care about the pain to come. A sweet current of power flowed through her, a gratifying sense of being in control for the first time all day. Each solid thud of the hammerhead thrilled her; the hard reverberation of the impact, traveling up the long handle, into her hands, along her arms, into her shoulders and neck, was deeply satisfying, almost erotic. She sucked air with each upswing, grunted when she drove the hammer down, issued a wordless little cry of pleasure each time that something bent or cracked under the pummeling weight—
    —until abruptly she heard herself and realized that she sounded more animal than human.
    Panting, still gripping the hammer in both hands, Martie turned from the ruined tools and caught sight of her reflection in a side window of the Saturn. Her shoulders were hunched, head thrust forward and cocked at a weird angle, like that of a condemned murderess who had been reprieved but deformed when a hangman’s noose had snapped. Her dark hair was tangled and bristling as though she’d received an electric shock. Dementia carved her face into that of a hag, and a wild thing glared from behind her eyes.
    Crazily, she recalled an illustration in a storybook she’d treasured as a child: an evil troll under an old stone bridge, bent over a glowing forge, working with hammer and tongs to make chains and shackles for his victims.
    What would she have done to Dusty if he had arrived at the very moment when her frenzied hammering had been at a peak—or, for that matter, if he arrived now?
    With a shudder of revulsion, she dropped the hammer.
    25
    Having expected to be away from home past feeding time, Dusty had brought Valet’s dinner in a Ziploc bag: two cups of dry lamb-and-rice kibble. He poured it into a plastic bowl and put the bowl on the pavement beside the van.
    “Sorry about the lousy ambience,” he apologized.
    If the clinic parking lot had been a lush meadow or a penthouse, Valet would have approached his dinner with no greater pleasure than he showed now. Like all of his kind, he had no pretensions.
    Dogs possessed so many admirable qualities, in fact, that Dusty sometimes wondered if God had created this world expressly for them above all other creatures. Human beings might have been put here as an afterthought, to ensure that dogs would have companions to prepare their meals, to groom them, to tell them they were cute, and to rub their bellies.
    While Valet made quick work of the kibble, Dusty fished his cell phone from under the driver’s seat and called home. On the third ring, the answering machine responded.
    Assuming that Martie was screening calls, he said, “Scarlett, it’s me. Rhett. Just calling to say I do give a damn, after all.”
    She didn’t pick up.
    “Martie, are you there?” He waited. Then, stretching the message to give her time to get to the study—and the answering machine—from anywhere in the house, he said: “Sorry I’m running late. Hell of a day. I’ll be there in half an hour, we’ll go out for dinner. Somewhere we can’t afford. I’m sick of always being so damn responsible. Choose something extravagant. Maybe even a place where the food comes on real plates instead of in Styrofoam containers. We’ll take a bank loan if we have to.”
    Either she hadn’t heard the phone or she wasn’t home.
    Valet had finished his kibble. He used his tongue to imitate an airplane propeller, making 360-degree sweeps of his chops and muzzle, collecting crumbs.
    When traveling with