The Dog Year Page 13

  “You know the rules, Claire.”

  In an uncharacteristically weak tone Claire said, “Please, Tig?”

  Sara rushed to Claire’s side, shooting a glance at Tig. “Here, sit.” She pushed a metal chair over to her. Claire fell into it gracelessly, and Lucy watched as Sara’s usually sour countenance softened into girlish worry. “Can I get you some water?”

  Claire took Sara’s hand and said, “Honey, what I need is you right by my side, eating a pink donut and telling me about your night last night.”

  Mark was wearing glasses over the patch on his eye. He turned to the group and frowned at Claire.

  Sara said, “Last night was fine. Boring, mostly. Had to meet with my caseworker. The anniversary is coming up.” She looked at Lucy. “What are you looking at?”

  “Okay, Sara. You don’t get to pick a fight because you’re entering uncomfortable territory,” said Tig.

  “When’s she gonna tell us her stuff?”

  “Sara,” Mark said, “it took you a month and a half to tell us your name.”

  “Screw you, Troutman. Just because I don’t blab like a little girl, like you do.” She laughed and for the first time to Lucy, she looked her real sixteen years instead of sixteen going on forty.

  “Don’t make me come over there.”

  With a black fingernail Sara flipped Mark off. Claire whispered to Lucy, “It’s like watching True Grit, ain’t it? They’ve been friends a long time, those two.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Lucy. “You wouldn’t think they’d have much in common.”

  “Loneliness is the great communicator, my dear. Everybody speaks that language and understands it.”

  Lucy examined Mark from her quiet corner of the metal folding table. She pictured him alone, not drinking, no dog, no spouse. It was a familiar snapshot.

  “He and Tig work hard to keep Sara out of the system. I know she stayed with him for a short time. She moved out when some dickhead from a meeting implied a biblical relationship between them. She gave the guy a black eye, was put on probation, then took her backpack and disappeared. She’s only been back six months. She won’t even talk about where she’s staying.”

  Then Kimmy pushed through the door and silently sat in her usual spot. Taking out her knitting, she began working on a skein of yarn, examining each stitch before poking her needle into a loop. Claire glanced at Kimmy, did a kind of double-take, and said, “Kimmy?”

  Kimmy didn’t look up. “Claire.”

  “Is that a bruise on your chin, darlin’?”

  “Dentist.”

  “Y’all went to the dentist after we had dinner last night?”

  Kimmy brushed her hair forward. “Leave it.”

  Sara said, “What fucking good is this group if we can’t help our own people?”

  Kimmy looked over her reading glasses. “The meetings are good for me, Sara. They help me.”

  There was a beat of silence. Then Tig spoke up. “Lucy. You don’t have to talk about anything difficult, but maybe you could tell us just a little something about you.”

  Lucy’s heart jumped to attention and she immediately felt like the little girl in class who’s called on to answer a question about a subject she knows nothing about. If there had been a tiger in the room, she’d have been ready. Her body was bathed in adrenaline, ready for fight or flight.

  “I . . . I haven’t prepared anything.” Her eyes darted around. She looked at her hands and opened her mouth.

  “She was the smartest girl in the school. Not the class, but the entire school.”

  The group turned their attention to Mark, who still stood by the window. “For homecoming she was in charge of making a poster. Lucy and I are both townies, you know. We went to high school together. We were around before they changed the mascot from the politically incorrect Warriors to the now ridiculous Hodags. So you know most posters were pretty straight. Go Warriors! Or Hilltown Warriors are Number One. But not Lucy’s. She had this long ream of paper where she painted an Indian chief with a flowing mane of feathers and a spear poking a skirt-wearing gladiator in the butt. You know what the caption read? WE’RE GONNA POKE-A-UR-HAUNTUS. Get it, Pocahontas? Half the school didn’t even get it! It was classic.” He threw his head back, laughing at the memory.

  Kimmy stopped knitting, Claire looked between Mark and Lucy, Ron stared, and Sara, unimpressed, said, “Dude. Seriously?”

  Even Tig blinked, surprised by the view Mark had provided of the secretive Lucy.

  That’s when Lucy saw again the younger Mark of her high school days, keeping his head down, hiding his intellect quietly, appreciating a kindred square peg, while she secretly tutored the idiotic prom king, hoping he might say hello to her in the hall.

  * * *

  On her usual dart-out-the-door exit of Serenity Center, she’d suggested to Mark that they meet at the Humane Society the next day, after lunch. Hardly waiting for him to answer, she moved quickly into the parking lot. By now she had almost perfected her exit: keys in hand, then ignition, then reverse. Nonetheless, Tig had caught Lucy just in time to say, “Nobody’s normal, Luce.” And then, inexplicably, “AA is serious about no relationship for a year, and definitely not with someone from AA.”

  Lucy had looked at Tig with a blank expression for a beat too long. Tig said, “Mark.”

  Lucy widened her eyes. “Mark and Claire?”

  “No, Lucy. You and Mark.”

  Lucy inadvertently covered Richard’s gift with her hand as if it were a child listening to the cursing of adults instead of a gift-wrapped box sitting on the front seat of her car. Then she said, “Dr. Monohan, you could not be more off base.”

  * * *

  It had been a full twenty-four hours since that last meeting and now Lucy waited, tapping her steering wheel while watching a group of dogs play in the side yard next to the South Central Wisconsin Humane Society. She checked her watch and fiddled with the clasp, unlocking the silver linking mechanism, locking it back, finally pinching the tender flesh of her wrist after the fourth time. It was as if the watch had slapped her and said, Enough.

  Lucy didn’t know if Mark worked, slept, or polished his guns in the afternoon. She figured the less she knew, the better. If he showed, fine. If not, she could breathe a sigh of relief, pick up an application to volunteer at the shelter, and report back to Charles. She tried to silence all the fussbudgets in her mind.

  One thing she knew for sure, though. Waiting around by herself for ten minutes in a parking lot was a whole lot better than riding with Mark and trying to make unscripted conversation with him as they drove together to the humane society. Twenty-five minutes of tongue-tied driving and self-conscious stuttering would likely undo her. She’d probably steal his pine-tree air freshener and then have to do hard time for it.

  Lucy touched Richard’s gift, riding shotgun next to her, and fished out a CD from her glove box: Speak Mandarin in 500 Words. She shoved the CD into the player. A woman’s musical voice came loudly through the car speakers, “Huaˉnyíng.”

  “Huaˉnyíng,” she said aloud, matching the woman’s volume.

  There was a rap on the window and Lucy whipped her head around. She opened the window and the voice said, “Nı˘jıˉntiaˉn? How are you today?”

  Mark stood smiling, his face unguarded, a little boy expecting a puppy at the end of the day. “How do you say ‘excited’ in Chinese?” he asked.

  Lucy shut the volume off on the CD and opened her car door. “You look like Christmas morning.”

  Mark gave her a bashful look. She’d read him too accurately. “Nah, I’m a hard-hitting cop. Takes a lot more than a dog to soften this hide.”

  “Okay, tough guy. Let’s go pet some puppies.”

  Notices for classes of all kinds papered the glass doors of the Humane Society: TEACHING KIDS KINDNESS, BIG DOG AGILITY TRAINING, and
one with large block letters that advertised placing old dogs with old dogs. Lucy stopped to read a handwritten notice on a page from a yellow legal pad. It was taped slightly askew, as if its author had been rushed—and maybe a little conflicted, too.

  FIVE-YEAR-OLD MALE GOOSE, VERY GOOD WATCHDOG, NOT FRIENDLY, NOT GOOD WITH KIDS, NOT GOOD WITH ANYBODY. JUST A GOOD WATCHDOG (GOOSE). NEEDS A GOOD HOME IN THE COUNTRY. NEEDS TO GO SOON. FREE.

  “Hey, this one looks like it’s for you! You’re kind of a watch goose yourself.”

  Mark read the note and turned to her in mock outrage. “How do you know I’m not good with kids? For your information, kids love cops. We’re the good guys. I always do career days at the elementary school. Let them sit in the cruiser. Let them feel up my steering wheel with their sticky hands. Check their parents out in the system.”

  “You don’t, not really.”

  He smiled at her. “Not the parent-check thing, okay, but the rest of it, yeah. I don’t let them wear the hat anymore, though. Learned my lesson the hard way, combing my hair for nits.”

  “Ah, lice. The gateway STD. Show me a kid with lice, and I’ll show you a future herpes sufferer.”

  Mark gave her a sidelong glance and Lucy added, “Nah, I’m kidding.”

  “Dr. Peterman, you’re a few clicks off.”

  “You are speaking from a glass house.”

  Mark winked. “And you’re just the rock to break it.”

  A tiny thrill ran up Lucy’s spine.

  A woman sat at the front desk. “May I help you?” she asked. A tiny puppy sat on her shoulder, its eyes closed in blissful sleep. The woman wore pink hospital scrubs and long, dangly earrings resembling fishing lures. Her eyelashes were thick with mascara and her yellow-blond hair looked like it had been styled that way since high school. Lucy wondered if she’d been homecoming queen. Her nametag read MARILYN.

  Mark smiled. “We’d like to take a look at the adoptable dogs. Please.”

  “Very nice. We’re a little shorthanded today, so we aren’t giving any tours, but you can wander back in the kennel and visit our friends. We ask that you keep your fingers away from the cages, and if you have any thoughts of feeding the dogs, you leave that thought with me.”

  “No, ma’am. I wouldn’t dream of feeding them.” Mark gestured with his thumb over his shoulder at Lucy. “I can’t vouch for her, though. She’s always got something in her pockets.”

  Lucy shoved Mark. “Not true,” she said. “I follow all dog rules.”

  Marilyn frowned. “This is serious. You can’t feed them. These dogs are going through a tough time right now. Many of them have separation anxiety and post-traumatic stress syndrome. They haven’t a clue where their next home will be. You feed them something you think is no big deal”—she emphasized her words with an outrageous expression, widening her eyes—“like a Slim Jim or a Vienna sausage, and we’re cleaning up a shitstorm at two A.M.”

  Both Mark and Lucy blinked, assured Marilyn that neither of them had even the smallest of sausages between them, and walked into the doggie viewing area. “Shitstorm,” Mark said. “Is that the clinical term, Dr. Peterman?”

  “We call it a code brown at the hospital.”

  Past the front desk, Lucy peered into a room with a large picture window. Inside sat a worn, overstuffed couch with bites taken out of each foam-filled arm. A panel on the door read PRIVACY/SEPARATION ROOM. There was a chew toy tossed in the corner and a box of Kleenex perched on a small shelf. Probably all kinds of tears being mopped up in that room, thought Lucy. She felt Mark’s eyes on her and met his gaze. He nudged her with his shoulder. “Don’t go getting soft on me already. I need you to yay or nay my selection. I can’t be going home with some basket case because you got all weepy looking at an empty room.”

  “Bring it on, pal; I’m tougher than I look.” As she spoke, Mark pushed his way into the room that held the kennels, and her words were completely drowned out by barking dogs.

  They passed the first kennel, empty except for a steel water bowl. The space, lined with cement block, was clean, spacious, and shut off from the viewing area by a chain link fence. The second kennel held a ginger scruff of a dog that resembled a loofah in Lucy’s shower that she just hadn’t gotten around to throwing away. The dog stood within an inch of the chain link and let out a series of ear-splitting yips. The index card clothes-pinned to the fence read, TRIXI, STRAY, NO TAGS, AWAITING HEALTH CLEARANCE.

  Lucy pushed Mark forward to the next dog. “Keep moving.”

  The next kennel held a black Rottweiler with a head the size of a Volkswagen. He lay with his enormous cranium on flatbed paws, with his hind feet daintily canted to the side like a woman riding sidesaddle. After a moment Lucy noticed his other distinguishing characteristic. He had a penis and scrotum so large it looked like a wrinkly toddler nestled against his side.

  Lucy cleared her throat and said, “This guy’s for someone suffering from small-man syndrome.”

  Without taking his eyes from the dog, Mark said, “I’m here to tell you that we can move right along. I’m good.” Lucy tore her eyes from the dog’s package just as he gave her a trucker-in-a-stripper-bar grin and dropped his tongue in a yawn, as if to say, You just say the word, baby.

  Lucy said, “I feel a little violated.”

  Mark laughed. “So do I.”

  The card on the next fence read, BELLA. RELINQUISHED IN HOME FORECLOSURE. NEUTERED, CLEARED, READY FOR ADOPTION. Inside stood a full-grown dog with a tennis ball in her mouth, holding it up as if waiting for her owner to come and play. Her tail was in full wag, her throat stretched and accommodating as if to say, Here, let me get this. She might have spent her lifetime posing this way, waiting for the loving approval of her owner. Lucy’s breath caught.

  “This one would drag you from a fire, call 911, and give you CPR until the ambulance came.” She dropped her gaze and noticed a bandage on her dewclaw. “Oh, she’s got an injury. What’d you do to your paw, Bella?” She glanced at Mark, started to speak, and then looked more closely at him. His eyes had a special brightness to them—a misting before a sun shower.

  “So, I’ll go tell Marilyn this is the one, huh?” Mark nodded. Lucy tugged at Mark’s sleeve and said, “This one’ll break your heart a hundred times before Sunday. If you like that kind of thing.”

  Mark smiled and said, “Turns out I do.”

  15

  Stop, Drop, and Roll

  In her Subaru, following behind Mark’s car, Lucy reconsidered her impulsive acceptance of a sandwich and new-dog orientation at Mark’s house. She’d been swept up in the love story of dog and man, his ease about the decision he’d made to take Bella. But it was too late now. She’d already agreed. As she stepped out of her car in front of his house, Mark said to her, “So you signed up to volunteer at the Humane Society.”

  “The days get kind of long when you’re used to working. I’m thinking it will keep me out of trouble.”

  “Sublimation. A good strategy for a lot in life.”

  As they approached his Cape Cod, Lucy noted the brown-striped awnings that resembled long eyelashes on the dormers, giving the house an “Aw-shucks, who-me?” kind of look.

  “This is your place? I expected, I don’t know, something more policelike.”

  “What, with bars on the windows and a Harley in the driveway?”

  “Actually, yeah.”

  “It was my granny’s place. I inherited it, and have been restoring it for the last eight or nine years.” As he spoke, Bella walked through the front door with the tennis ball still in her mouth. Then she dropped the ball, trotted to the couch, and fell asleep.

  Mark raised his eyebrows. “Apparently being adopted from a dog shelter is exhausting.”

  “Little Dog did exactly the same thing. Canine life must be terribly taxing.”

  Lucy looked around. Next to a brown sofa, a h
uge flat-screen TV was mounted against the wall. There was little else in the room besides a recliner, a fireplace, and an intricate Persian carpet.

  “This place screams boy-bachelor,” she said.

  “Better than girl-granny. That kind of puts the ladies off.”

  Lucy felt the comment in her chest. Ladies. She swallowed and realized where she was. In a man’s home. A not-Richard man.

  “Lucy, I’m kidding. I couldn’t resist the ridiculousness of me and ladies. It’s the funniest punch line I could come up with.”

  Lucy tried a breezy smile. She took a step back and inadvertently kicked a rubber wiener in a bun. It was when it squeaked that she noticed a large basket filled with colorful ropes, rubber squirrels, bones, and balls. There were collars, leashes, and an impressive assortment of hard and soft dog toys.

  “You having a party?”

  “Obviously not, or I would have hidden my obsession.”

  “Rubber squeaky toys?”

  “And other important dog-intelligence stimulators.”

  “What are you training him for, the CIA?”

  “You need a lot of teaching materials when you homeschool. I need someone to do my taxes.”

  “Seems like you picked the right dog for that. As soon as she wakes, she could put in a good ten minutes before the next nap.” Lucy laughed and impulsively touched his arm. Mark turned; they made eye contact and held it just long enough to be too long.

  Lucy blushed. She looked at her feet, started to move away, but instead turned and opened her mouth to speak.

  Mark touched a curl of her hair, then placed a sure hand on her waist as he guided her face toward his. It was the sureness of his movements, his ease and decisiveness that jump-started something inside her. Something that said, Yep, I remember.

  His lips were soft. He touched his tongue to the center of her lip and she opened her mouth. He slid his hand down her forearm and pulled her toward him. Lucy, unable to stop herself, reached around his waist. She felt the leanness in his body, his lithe, muscled back through his T-shirt. He gently guided her back and against the sofa. She touched the bristle of his dark hair, felt his bare neck, and tugged him closer.