The Lonely Dinner of Keeving Pogue

Keeving Pogue disconnected the call and typed in a terse note for the service desk. He worked from his home every day, fielding customer service calls for the local satellite tv provider, a job that suited his personality and his physical condition. Keeving glanced at the clock on his computer screen and saw that it was almost dinnertime. He had never called it “lunch,” having been instructed by his late father that only damn Yankees and Californians called the noon meal “lunch,” and that good Arkansans like himself should use the proper word “dinner.” He hoped he wouldn’t get any more calls before time to eat.

Keeving received one more call before his dinner break, but it was an easy one, a customer changing her mailing address. He completed the call and clocked out on his computer. The clock regimented his life during working hours, telling him when to take a break, when to eat, when to conference-call his supervisor. He removed his headset and rolled his sturdy chair away from his desk.

Barque the tabby cat came into the office from the kitchen, having heard Keeving standing up from the desk. In the bar of sunlight thrown through the window on the floorboards, Keeving could see pawprints of litter dust behind the cat. That new and improved litter doesn’t work like they claim, he thought. It’s just more expensive.”Come on, old grouch. Let’s see what we can find to eat.”

The cat followed him into the kitchen and stood watching, tail moving in slow but impatient whips from side to side, while Keeving opened the refrigerator and examined the contents. He pulled out a foil-wrapped pair of leftover pizza slices and a covered can of cat food. He scooped the cat food out into Barque’s dish and set it on the floor. Returning to the fridge, Keeving took out a Fresca and popped the tab. He never reheated pizza, catfish, or fried chicken. The cold leftovers suited him better because they retained their natural taste and texture, if not their heat.

He stood at the kitchen counter and ate in large bites while reading from a memoir of an Alaskan homesteader. Keeving favored memoirs and autobiographies, enjoying the sensation that he was a sort of friend to the people who put their lives and thoughts onto the pages of books. He glanced down at Barque, who was eating with tiny, deliberate bites, shaking each mouthful as if to stun it before chewing and swallowing.

Going to leave me someday soon, aren’t you? thought Keeving. Old Barque was quite ill, having been diagnosed with a tumor on his liver. Keeving didn’t have the money to pay for the surgery and treatment, and his credit wouldn’t let him put it on a payment plan. Keeving had spent many evenings whispering apologies to the good-natured little creature, who had not yet begun displaying any overt sign of discomfort or pain.

Keeving’s thoughts were interrupted by the percussive thump of the stereo from downstairs. Starting up early, he thought. The neighbors down there were a large black woman with four children ranging in age from four to fourteen, and they enjoyed their music loud, mostly in the evenings when Keeving was trying to relax with a book or some music of his own. He had tried speaking with the woman in the past, but these encounters had ended each time with her staring at him through heavy-lidded eyes and mumbling about her rights, so Keeving had abandoned the idea of reasoning with her. He suspected if he called the police or the building management, the results would be less than pleasant for him, so he had resorted to using headphones, even when he went to bed.

The apartment building was old, pre-WWII vintage, and had once been a luxurious residence. Three three-story brick buildings with casement windows ringed a brick-paved courtyard where young families had once gathered for evening picnics and impromptu ball games. Now the courtyard was littered with trash and drug paraphernalia, and the concrete tables were always taken up by feral teenagers and their hangers-on. Keeving had sat in the courtyard exactly once, and never would again.

And it was just as well. Keeving was the sort of man who was naturally drawn to the edges of common areas, to the corners of rooms, to the backs of meeting places. He was drawn to people who didn’t want to talk too much.

Keeving chewed his last bite of pizza and looked down at the aluminum foil — tinfoil, his father had always called it. It wasn’t heavily spotted with pepperoni grease, so he smoothed its surface with his hand and wiped it with a paper towel, then folded the foil into a neat packet about four inches square and put it in the drawer next to the sink. Raised to be thrifty, he had always been bothered by people who threw away perfectly serviceable items.

His brother had been such a wasteful man, saving nothing, never thinking ahead to what he might need on that coming day. Kenny had mistreated him when they were boys, and the mistreatment had extended into their young adults years. Remembering their thin and strained relationship made Keeving feel low, but he tried to remind himself that Kenny himself had been mistreated later in his life. The older brother had been a conductor on a subway in a large East coast city, and the job had eroded him like sandstone beneath a waterfall. He had ended up as the only white man in his work group, an increasingly common situation in that part of the country. Kenny had daily felt hatred and hostility both from the subway patrons and from his coworkers, and he had been bruised and scarred by the sanctioned hostility from the subway’s management every day of his last working years. Every day until he had died sitting in the break room at his job. His coworkers, who saw him as the enemy and the oppressor, mocked his uniformed corpse and slandered his family name as they hooted and bellowed like spectators at a bullfight, scorning Kenny as they awaited the ambulance’s arrival and the moment when his body would be removed from their territory.

Kenny’s wife had his remains cremated and the ashes placed in a plain box. She packed the box into the moving truck along with the diminished possessions they had accumulated through twenty loveless years and returned to the bleak northern town where she had been raised, moving in with her mother and working as a bookkeeper for an insurance agent who played solitaire at his desk every noon while she ate cheese sandwiches in her car and read mystery novels. The box containing Kenny’s ashes had been soaked during a hard rain the first spring after she moved in with her mother, and Kenny’s widow had buried it in the backyard in a spot next to where she had buried her cat when she was fourteen. She placed no marker, no stone, not even a brick atop Kenny’s ashes.

Keeving bent to pick up Barque’s dish and stroked the cat, noting the sharp knobs of the backbone and the fence of ribs beneath the thin coat of fur. He rinsed the dish in the sink, listening to the thud of the bass from below his floor, watching a lone dove outside down in the courtyard. She walked with cautious steps, looking about for her missing mate, unaware that he had been run down in the street a short while ago while pecking at the angle where asphalt met concrete. Keeving watched her for a minute, wishing he could go down and sit at one of the tables and coax her to him with a handful of crumbs. But he just turned away and went into the front room, glancing as he went out the window beyond the dove and at the trash dumpster and the recycling bins near his parking space, number fourteen.

He sat in the club chair by the front window, the television screen blank and black before him. A book was at his elbow, but he wasn’t moved to try and absorb himself in the plot with a mere fourteen minutes remaining on his dinner break. Barque trembled into the room, greeting him in a quavering voice. Keeving leaned forward and beckoned the cat to him, and the cat came and allowed himself to be picked up and settled on his lap.

I’m sorry you don’t have a companion of your own kind, he thought, running his hand down the cat’s sharp vertebrae and feeling the rumbling purr coming up through the unwell body. He looked up at the bookshelf and the photographs there. More than one friend had chastised him for keeping photos of her.

He had been married, but the joining had been short and unhappy. His wife had left him for a Haitian guard who worked at the prison where she worked as a nurse. The brief union did not produce a child, and Keeving wasn’t sure if this should be a source of relief or regret. But he had loved her once, or at least believed he had, and he could not consign her photos to a box in a closet to be forgotten and destroyed by time’s intrusions as his brother’s holy ashes had been. Dear was dear, and he would not give it up to cold ravages when the dearness gave him some glimmer of warming memory on those nights when he hid between his headphones and waited for Barque to tell him that it was time to go lie down and sleep until morning.

He glanced at the clock and saw that he had exactly one minute before he had to clock back in. He went back to the kitchen and drew a glass of water from the tap and took a long drink, then washed his hands. The cat brushed against the backs of his calves and Keeving smiled down at his friend. He went back to his tidy little office, put the headset on, jiggled the mouse to awaken the computer, and signed back on. Dinnertime was over.

“Hello, thank you for calling the Customer Support Unit. My name is Keeving…how may I help you?”

And Barque lay at his feet, his soft belly just touching the toes of his shoes.

~copyright 2023 by S.K. Orr