Her socks didn’t match.

You could tell because she was wearing a skirt; each calf was a different shade of green. And she wasn’t all clean. Not in that punkish way. She didn’t even look like a girl who listened to music, and she looked at you too slowly to be from here and her arms were a bit thick, I mean fat. I mention her arms only because I liked them so much. They were the first part of her I couldn’t stop thinking about.

She was the kind of girl whose grandmother wouldn't let her get her hair cut until her sixteenth birthday, whose mother wouldn’t let her wear pants to school or jewelry to church. A girl who wore her hair in thigh long, carrot colored braids, who didn’t know how to clean a coke dispenser until I taught her. I was frying burgers when we met; still waiting to get my acceptance back from the army or college. We moved in together and neither of us had any money so I get a second job at a second hand appliances store and she waited tables at the diner, breakfast, lunch and dinner six days a week. She told them after her first day that she couldn’t work on Sundays because it’s the Day of Rest and they laughed at her, I mean they really sat down and laughed and then they felt bad because her cheeks turned red all the way down her neck and her lips got a little spittle around them, and J. Leon Tyrone put his hand over hers and said she could have breakfast and lunch off on Sundays if she could work dinner a couple of times a month, and she said okay!, and yanked her hand back. Take that.

So one morning a week we ate cold chicken on Styrofoam plates in bed and watched church on TV. I tried to get her to listen to the radio, but she didn’t like funk, and she didn’t like blues, so I kept turning the knob until I hit the scratchy bar at the end of the dial. She didn’t have any friends in Blowing Springs yet, except me, and I saw the ad for Piggy in the Sunday paper and I called her the next day, between her shifts.

“She’s only fifty dollars and I’m here.” “Here?” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.

“Just outside of Memphis.”

“How are you gonna get to work on time?”

“Don’t think about that. Look, this must be love!” I said, raising both hands in the air, with the phone balanced against one shoulder, until I remembered she couldn’t see me. “You always wanted a pig, and Here She Is.”

“Do we have fifty dollars in our account?” I was nineteen and Chloe was seventeen. I hated those days, and they aren’t gone yet. The ones where neither of you knows whether or not you have fifty dollars in your account, so you have to call the bank to find out. She did, and then she called me back to say she would deposit the eleven dollars in change on the dresser after work, so we would have just enough. “But it costs me a dollar and a half on the bus to get to the bank,” she said. So I let her know about five more I kept in a paper bag behind the ice trays, but after all that I was late getting back to work, and the check bounced because she had to work late that afternoon, and it wasn’t the last time that one would bounce over that pig, either.

* * * *

Somewhere, that pig deserves her own song. One where she left the comfort of life on the farm, and went to live in our dark, lamp-lit apartment with the green mildewed mushroom wallpaper in the hallways, and the carpet that smelled like the golden retriever who had lived there once; where we had to keep the shades in the living room drawn because our street was not zoned for pigs. She drank from her own bucket in the bathroom, and ate from her dog dish in the kitchen, and slept on the laundry pile, dirty or clean, that sat beside the old washing machine. The washer’s heat and vibrations made her lean up against it when it was moving, closing her eyes, in happiness. She ate all day and loved everything edible, especially loved the small tomatoes I picked from the vine.

For a girl who grew up loving pigs, Chloe didn’t bond right away with the little boarder. Her family wouldn’t let her keep a clownfish, let alone a pig as a child, although she had told me many times how she dreamed of having one. “I never liked horses,” she had explained. She had showed me eleven albums that she had filled, by the age of ten, with cut-outs of pot-bellies. But she complained frequently that we didn’t have much business trying to take care of a pig when we couldn't afford our utility bills.

Things got worse when Piggy ran out of the front door one summer morning just as Chloe was getting ready for work. Piggy got one of her feet stuck on a rusty nail in the neighbor’s yard, and we had to get her shots and a minor surgery to remove it. Within the first six months we discovered that she had glaucoma in one eye, and early onset arthritis and bursitis in her knees.

Worse, she developed a mysterious terror of the TV set, and every time I turned it on she charged into it until one day she broke the glass with her head, cutting herself in several places.

Piggy had to go back to the vet, and the TV went into the trash. When I brought home a used one a couple of weeks later, I put a lock on the bedroom door so the pig couldn’t find it.

Chloe could be many things at once, but she never was a romantic. She kept track of Piggy’s expenses in a little green notepad she called Pig’s Book. “Two hundred and three dollars and eighty-three cents,” she read to me one night, while we were watching The Facts of Life on TV. She shook her head, “and that’s only the month of September.”

I dreamed that night she that kept another little green notepad on me, called Harry’s Book, and the news in that book made her shake her braids in the same sarcastic, eye-rolling way.

* * * *

I never believed the adage, you get what you pay for, or as Chloe learned it, you get what you pray for, because it’s not always true. Sometimes you get more! I bought Piggy for a song because she was a full grown pig when I brought her home. She didn’t get cancer right away, but she did develop an infection in one leg after the surgery to remove a tumor, and she started to gain weight after spending most of the winter lying on the floor by the radiator.

I applied for a third job delivering morning papers to help pay the bills, and partly because I felt guilty when they found a cancerous node alive in her throat. Chloe and the vet blamed me for the state of Piggy’s lungs. “Second hand smoke affects animals too.”

I tried not to get into it when she pointed her finger at me. I smoked a few packs a week outside when the weather was good and through the kitchen window when it wasn’t, so I couldn’t see how that much smoke could swirl its way into Piggy’s sensitive lungs. She also accused me of calling her Piggy when it wasn’t her real name.“Her name is Trudy,” Chloe voice could be lower, when she argued, by nearly an octave.

“How can it be Trudy? My aunt’s name is Trudy.”

“Your aunt’s name is Else.”

“Some people call her Trudy.’”

“Our pig is not named after Aunt Else! And don’t you think it hurts Trudy’s feelings to be referenced by her generic species instead of by her particular self?”

Where was she getting this?

“I don’t like Trudy. Why not Boscoe?” I asked, rumpling the rough fur on the top of Piggy’s head, “or Buster?” I felt irritated. “And how do you think our Piggy feels about Pig’s Book? Why don’t you use her name on the book? Is it because you don’t want to hurt her feelings?”

Chloe refused to answer questions she considered sarcastic or argumentative or borderine shouting. She flipped her hair behind her head instead and walked away. Later that night when I saw her sitting with her back against the washing machine, with Piggy half in her lap, brushing Piggy’s hair with her soft, horse-hair brush, I knelt beside her to apologize. “Let’s marry,” I said, stroking the soft skin that I liked so much on the underside of Chloe’s arm. “Pig raising can’t be done with just any old one.”

She agreed, and later the same night we decided to burn Pig's Book. Although I’m not sure we ever got around to it.

* * * *

We married outdoors that early spring. Piggy attended, wearing a hollyhock necklace and a red leash and collar. We wanted a live band, but the only band we knew who would play for cheap, cancelled at the last minute because they all came down with the measles. We ended up with canned music that Chloe picked out from a CD she had ordered on TV. We served a cake we had baked ourselves the night before, and frosted with sugar, Crisco and yellow food coloring.

Chloe wore her hair piled up on top of her head. She had sewn a delicious yellow satin dress with a pale blue knitted bodice and sleeves. As she walked down the aisle, Piggy got off her leash and ran over the feet of two bridesmaids, who started giggling and could barely stop for the rest of the ceremony. I had to coax Piggy into my arms and carry her back to the kitchen where my father took her and when I got back up to the front Chloe had tears in her eyes, and I think were both glad Chloe’s mother had talked us out of including Piggy in our vows.

As we drove away from the church I could see where Piggy had struggled in Chloe’s grip and nearly ripped off one of the knitted sleeves, and there was a hole in the bodice so that one of Chloe’s breasts had become almost exposed. I tried to shield it with one hand while we drive away from the cheering bread-crumb throwers on the sidewalk, and Chloe thought I was making a move so she leaned in against my shoulder. I thought I would die of shame and happiness: I could hardly wait to begin my new life as a married man.

* * * *

Turned down by the army, but accepted by college, I decided to study international business and French, which Chloe didn’t consider practical, although I told her I wanted to get a job overseas so we could travel together. She got a job at a department store, quit the diner and started taking night classes at the local college in accounting.

When she went back to school, Chloe started dressing differently. She cut her hair to her shoulders and curled it with an iron. I didn’t want to say it but it didn’t so much make her look better as it made her look more like everybody else. I guess that’s what she wanted. Funny how people sometimes want to cover up those parts of themselves that help you to find them out of a crowd. That make you proud to know them.

Pig’s Book was gone, but I didn’t realize then her spot-on memory for numbers. “Three thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three dollars and fifty-eight cents, grand total,” she said to me one morning as I was putting on my blue striped tie to go to my new job at the car dealership, “including food, medication, breakage and blankets. And we’ve only had this pig for a year and a half.”

The numbers only climbed from there, especially since between working and school we were never home, so we had to get a neighbor’s twelve year old to come over after school every day to spend time with Piggy, and soon our sofa, Chloe’s red plaid curtains in the living room and everything in the bedroom smelled like reefer. We arrived home one night to find Piggy sacked out in the hall closet where she had thrown up after eating a bag of potato skins, including the bag. The next kid was more responsible, but also charged twice as much. When we went out on the weekend, Piggy greeted us with grief when we returned. Barricaded in the kitchen she tore up one corner of the linoleum and then barricaded in the bathroom she chewed up Chloe’s jade plant, a wedding gift, that was supposed to bring us luck.

That first summer, Chloe was laid off from the department store after a fire broke out in kitchen wares and they closed the entire store. While she was looking for work she decided to grow an herb garden so she returned home with a sack full of seeds with names like nasturtium, licorice mint and lemon verbena, but unfortunately none of them saw more of the world than the patch of sunshine above the kitchen sink. They grew stale and dry in their half pint jelly jars until I finally had mercy on them and threw them away.

While she was unemployed, on Thursdays Chloe would drop me off at work and drive Piggy to obedience school in Chattanooga. Chloe learned to speak firmly in a low, clear voice, but whenever she became incensed the pig still sensed it and went charging through the house. I wasn’t much good at telling Piggy what to do either. Not enough like I meant it. Chloe claimed I let myself get walked all over.

“It wears me out, telling that pig what to do,” she said, pacing until I thought she was going to wear her new shoes through the bottom of our carpet. “But someone needs be a leader to this pig!”

But, although Piggy was fond of Chloe, Chloe didn’t return all of the affection. One night I arrived home to find Piggy kicking a hole in the wall by the bedroom door, trying to get into the room where Chloe had locked herself away with the TV set.

“You can’t force it,” I told Piggy later, after I patched over the wall with the cardboard from some old cereal boxes. I sat down on the sofa and Piggy jumped up and put her head in my lap and I stroked the skin behind her ears that made her close here eyes with contentment. I’m not sure holding back is a thing pigs can learn.

That night I fell asleep to the sounds of the talk shows coming out from beneath Chloe’s bedroom door.

* * * *

At the end of September we finished the last of Piggy’s radiation treatments and the car broke down on the way to the vet’s office for a check-up. We had to have it towed, and then shop told us we would have to replace the carburetor. We arrived at the vet’s office an hour late, and without enough cash or credit to pay him.“Please, let’s get this over with,” Chloe begged him until he agreed to a let the billing wait. “I never had any pets growing up,” she told the woman at the front desk, with tears in her eyes and one running down one cheek, “and I’m starting to see why.”

The young woman kept writing in the appointment book with a pen with a blue, plastic daisy attached to the end, looking up, and then running her hand through her shaggy curls. “They never watched Star Trek or the Superman franchise either,” I tried to fill the receptionist in on other peculiarities of Chloe’s birth family, but the woman’s eyes had already fallen on Chloe’s too firm, rounded belly beneath her loose fitting, blue polyester blouse. She raised her eyebrows but she didn’t ask, and Chloe started crying harder, although quietly, and didn’t stop for hours and hours, after we arrived back at home, and after we had finally stopped arguing over what we should do.

* * * *

The vet had given us the name of a halfway house for pigs. Chloe, when she read the prices, called Pig Hamptons. We left Piggy in a beige, stone building that might have been a church, a jail, or a dental office. She lived there for several days while we tried to think what to do. Chloe said it was too much to bring a sweet-smelling infant into an apartment that “smells like pig.” I tried to take into account her delicate chemistry, especially with the pregnancy, but when I suggested that maybe we weren’t yet ready for children, she began crying again, this time her eyes turning coal-like and volcanic. “Too late!” I thought at first she was going to throw something at me, but instead she picked up a photo of Piggy wearing a blue dress like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz on Halloween, and threw it against the bedroom wall.

Thwack.

I agreed to take Piggy to a no-kill shelter, but when I arrived, I took one look at the Siamese kittens mewling in the corner, the thin daschund growling by the door, the parakeet beating his rumpled feathers against the bars of his cage and realized I could no more abandon a pig here then I could leave a child or amputate a leg.

I could almost see Chloe shaking as I drove back to the apartment with Piggy on my lap. “One hundred and forty seven…a week at a Pig Hotel, and I’m not…we don’t have…; I’m…” she couldn’t finish a sentence.

I shook my head.

She pointed to the pig. “We weren’t always,…but look …” In the time she had spent with us, she seemed to have entered middle age prematurely. The radiation had made skin sickly and grey and for all we knew she still might have a tumor or two hidden behind a patch of thin, pale skin. Yet it was Chloe who had appeared harder than she once had been, more pinched, darker, as if she had emerged one morning from her cocoon, but not as a butterfly. As a crustacean. Or a mastodon.

In movies when two people fall in love, there are almost always the same two actors through the whole show, wearing wigs sometimes, but still themselves underneath all the pancake makeup. What I didn’t know at nineteen was that in life you can sometimes trade out actors before the end of the flick, or even before a scene closes. It’s hard to believe we lose every inch of our skin every seven years and even after death the cartilage on our noses and ears keep growing. It might not look like the same face looking back at us with the same teeth. Even eyes, I heard recently, can be taken out and transplanted.

“We can put an ad in the paper, to look for a family with children,” there was a new look on the face of the angry young woman who was also Chloe, “or we could end all our worries with a burlap bag and a few sturdy stones.” It was only then her tears completely stopped.

She may have been only be joking and I hoped she was, but in the end it was me who stopped being able to pick her face out of a crowd.

As they say “if you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss will stare back into you.” In November, Chloe moved back to her mother’s house and four months later the baby was born.

I still couldn’t believe we couldn’t see eye to eye on the pig. You can’t just abandon a pig!

I couldn’t picture our pig living anywhere else now that she’d grown used to her tomato omelets and the place behind the dyer where the vent blew warm air over her ears while she slept. And how could I trust the stranger who would take a bald, eighty-seven pound pig with a cancer history and joint pain? I couldn’t even take Piggy back to the farm because the owners had since sold their property to a farming conglomerate that preferred pigs as bacon.

I had a terrible dream one night about my Piggy being lost in the wild, searching for Chloe and me in the wetlands of east Tennessee.

Chloe’s mother, as a joke at Christmas, sent me a present of pink towels that she had embroidered in spidery lettering, “Some Pig!”

I hung them up in the bathroom where they cheered me up for a while.

Piggy was inconsolable when Chloe didn’t come back. Day after day, she kept watch at the window, even losing her interest in tomatoes as she paced between the door and the TV set in the bedroom, which she at last, sadly and too late, had grown accustomed to.

“Here, over here,” I called her into the bedroom where she reluctantly sat on my lap and we watched church on TV and she ate chicken off a Styrofoam plate. I smoked cigarettes one after the other, not even bothering to crack open a window for air. I just flicked the ashes into an old coffee mug with a broken handle and a picture of a pig in a chef’s hat with a red scarf around its neck. A gift from Chloe who was still, in a word, my wife.

* * * *

When I finished school, I set up my own trucking company based out of Montreal. Chloe didn’t talk to me much anymore. She had remarried and they lived together under her mother’s roof. In the end, or six and a half years later, I had to find another home for Piggy.

My son and I brought her to my grandmother’s house in the country one icy December afternoon, to a heated shed at the end of a swampy acre she called Sherman’s field, where she had agreed to let Piggy retire. She reached down to pat the pig, and I had to turn my face away.

We walked away, after a while, through the half frozen red Georgia mud, where the bottoms of our shoes sraped the ground, back to my truck outside the gate, and when we got inside, I opened the window, turned on the radio, and smoked for a few minutes, flicking the ash from my cigarettes out of the truck and onto the white frozen grass where it landed like tobacco flavored dust.