Looking for Heaven

Chapter Eight

"Justin!" shouted Susan. There was no answer.

"Justin!" she shouted again. Still no answer.

"Justin!!!"

"What?!" shouted Justin back as he swung his door open, one headphone still in.

"Come down here and help me move this," she answered.

"Move what?"

"The goddamn couch!"

He rolled his eyes so far back he saw his own brain. But he supposed he had to help her, so he put his phone (on which he was listening to The Carpenters) down and went down the hall into the sitting room.

Susan was sitting on the couch, face flushed and arms spread out in the universal symbol of exhaustion. The couch had been moved away from the wall slightly, but it was such a bulky, heavy thing it would take two or even three people to move it. When he walked in she held up a finger to give her a minute. Finally she pulled herself off the couch.

"You grab that side," she instructed him, indicating the end nearest him. "And just slide it out."

"Okay..." he said with a raised eyebrow. "But...why?"

Her eyes twitched and her lips pursed in annoyance. She shot him daggers as she snapped: "Because I barely get a chance to clean beyond an occasional dusting and the house is dirty as all hell and we need to move the couch so that I can hoover under it and get all the dust and hair and God knows what crap rolled under there! That enough of a reason?!"

Justin said nothing. He just stood awkwardly at the end of the couch, eyes wide open. His first instinct was to say something sarcastic like: "Well you deserve an Oscar for that." But... he felt that perhaps that wasn't what this current situation called for. They stood in steely silence for a few moments, Susan looking like she was in the mood to kick ass, Justin randomly tapping his fingers on the arm rest.

With a sigh Susan hung her head and shook it a few times. She stood back up and ran her hands through her hair several times. She seemed to calm down considerably.

"I'm sorry, it's just... Been a really shitty day."

"Oh," said Justin. "You wanna talk about it."

She sighed again. "Sure. Beats moving this shitty couch." She sat down on the shitty couch and Justin sat beside her.

"Where to fucking start?" she said with exasperation. "Well, this morning in the vet, we had a woman who couldn't understand why we couldn't just 'fix' her dog even though we tried to explain that that dog has a severe kidney infection; then a bird someone found in a hedge yesterday died and a cat was put to sleep and it was just horrendous.

"Then my car blows a tyre – which I had to change because there's no phone service there. But of course service wouldn't have helped because somehow I lost my phone. It was in my bag when I left work, but not when the tyre went, so I lost it between the car and the door. I went back to look – no sign of it. So now I need to get a new phone if I can't find it – and there were so many pictures and memories on that! Damn it!"

She stopped talking and took in a few deep breaths. Her shoulders seemed to loosen up and she slid down in her seat a bit. She looked at Justin and added sarcastically: "That's all."

"Wow," Justin said quietly. "Not what I was expecting."

"I'm sorry I snapped, it's just been off-the-charts ridiculous."

"I can understand that," he assured her. "And you're cleaning why?"

"To try and take my mind off it," she explained. "But I think it's just after pissing me off even more."