“Get a cat,” people say when I tell them we have mice in the house.
“I don’t need a cat,” I say. “I have a wife.”
Except, for going on three weeks, I haven’t had a wife. Ruth’s been on a long business trip, leaving me to find the mousetraps (weren’t they under the sink?), bait them (why doesn’t cheese ever seem to work?) and position them (in the drawer under the oven or on the kitchen counter?).
And should a mouse be so unlucky as to actually take the bait and spring the trap, it’s down to me to dispose of its little corpse, something Ruth is really good at. In fact, I tell myself it’s a job she likes doing. As she sits in her Paris hotel room, the Eiffel Tower visible from her window, Ruth is probably jealous of all the fun I’m having back home, doing all the dog’s walks, taking out the trash, picking up the farm-share vegetables, putting out the kitchen scraps for the compost people and hunting the…
