Chapter 4
The smell greeted him as soon as he opened the door. Perhaps it had been there even before he left, but he had just gotten accustomed to it. But now, with his lungs full of lakefront autumn air, the smell of urine and feces festered in the tiny studio apartment.
This wasn’t going to work. He had to take her back.
An image of Mavis eating part of a hamburger someone had discarded on the ground sprang, unbidden, into his mind’s eye.
He couldn’t take her back. Some bonds were made swiftly with quick-drying emotional cement.
Becca sat up in bed, her red hair tangled and sticking up in front. If it weren’t for her overly developed bust, she would have looked like a child in her dinosaur pajamas. “It stinks in here,” she moaned.
“No kiddin’. Has she come out from under the bed at
