by Mary Miller
Layla sidled up to me and I petted her. If I could get her with two hands in the spot she liked best, she would grunt, quite like a pig. And then we went inside and she followed me to the bathroom and watched as I brushed my teeth. I’d read somewhere that you should brush for at least two minutes, though I was sure I’d never brushed for two minutes in my life and my teeth weren’t so bad. I thought I might take up smoking again. I had loved to smoke. It had been a whole activity and I’d spent a lot of time on it, had been good at it. And if I died, oh well, but that was the sort of thinking you could only afford when you expected to live a lot longer.
I got into bed and tried to get comfortable, flopped about. I’d placed Layla’s bed right next to mine so I could drape an arm over and pet her, though I worried I might step on her when I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. I imagined the sign and the balloons going up at the hands of Harry Davidson’s wife, the small pretty hands of his wife, who hadn’t been able to stand the gagging or the shedding—the hair had already gathered under every one of my tables, retreated into every corner of my house. I fell asleep recounting the details of her: sharp elbows and the lightning bolt on her leg, her pretty hands and PINK shirt, short shorts, dark bra, mousy ponytail. Walking her up and down her driveway, back and forth. Mail, no mail. Ponytail, elbows, lightning bolt, PINK, ponytail.
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Frank called at one o’clock the next day and reported to have a box of wings he had purchased all for me, not his leftovers but my own personal meal. That’s what he said, “I got you your own personal meal.”
“I’m in my truck,” he said, “outside your house.”
I knew that but I said, “Oh yeah?”
We were still on the phone, looking at each other, when he asked if I thought my dog would try anything.
“She was fine last night. Why don’t you come inside and see?”
Layla and I watched him approach. “It’s okay,” I said, holding her collar. “She’s fine, but you should let her smell your hand if it makes you feel better. That’s what we do at the dog park.”
He put out his hand and she turned away, uninterested, and went back to her bed, which I’d carried into the living room that morning. She needed two beds to be adequately comfortable, or else I’d have to tote this one back and forth forever.
“That is a strange animal,” he said. “What’d I ever do to her?”
“She’s not normal, it’s true.”
“I never imagined you with a dog.”
“Ellen had a dog.”
“That dog wasn’t anybody but Ellen’s,” he said.
“You’re right about that. Nipped at my heels when I walked. Barked its goddamn head off all day long.” Frank didn’t like it when I said “goddamn.” He was a religious man who went to church on Sundays and visited shut-ins. But the dog had complicated my view of him.
Frank sat in his spot and I took the box of wings into the kitchen: ten of them in all and the dressing untouched, celery sticks and everything. “What can I get you?” I called.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m all hydrated.”
I opened a beer and left the box on the counter. He would leave soon and I didn’t want a chill on them. I sat in my chair and turned the TV to Fox News even though I hated Fox News. I didn’t like any of the news channels. They were all bought, all selling something. I muted it. I liked Shepard Smith alright, though, a Mississippi boy from Holly Springs, even though he was gay. He must’ve gone to school up north and lost his accent and become a homosexual.
Ellen and Frank had a cousin who was gay, but Frank pretended the other lady was her friend. Ellen thought gay people were born that way, except for the bisexuals—she had her doubts about them.
“I tell you, Frank, I don’t know what it is. I guess this dog has inspired me to make some changes.”
“You do seem, I don’t know . . .” he said, “more content.” He said it like he didn’t think these changes were for the better but I also knew that people didn’t like it when other people changed, for better or for worse. They took it personally. They liked to know exactly what to expect out of somebody and if you surprised them at all it made them question themselves. I recalled the time one of Ellen’s friends lost a lot of weight. The more weight she lost, the shorter her skirts got, the more money she spent on her nails and makeup. Ellen had never been heavy and had no reason to be jealous, but they had a falling out, all their years of friendship out the window. I’d always liked the woman—had liked her the same skinny or fat and she hadn’t seemed that different to me. She brought cookies over to the house on a weekly basis, saying she’d made too many, sugar cookies laced with Red Hots or peanut butter ones with Reese’s Cups pressed into the center. That was her thing, putting candy into slice-and-bake cookies, and I appreciated it. When she was out of our lives, I asked Ellen to make the peanut butter ones but she’d refused. “You can do it yourself,” she said. “You just shove a Reese’s into a ball of premade dough and stick it in the oven. You don’t even have to grease the sheet first.”
Ellen claimed the cookies were meant to fatten her up, that they were cookies with bad intent.
“I have something I wanted to talk to you about, actually,” Frank said. “Something Ellen asked me to bring up.” Just then the bird banged into the window and Frank turned his neck toward the sound. The bird came in the mornings, and sometimes in the evenings, too. The middle of the afternoon was out of character.
“Does she want the house?” I asked. “She told me she didn’t want the house.”
“No,” he said. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s not about Ellen, exactly. It’s more about Maxine. Well, I guess it’s about the both of them.”
“Spit it out, Frank. Jesus Christ.”
Layla was looking at him now, too, had positioned herself a few feet away from him and sat, focused. He said the dog was making him nervous. I said he was making us nervous. The bird banged again. Layla thought nothing of the bird, acted like she didn’t see it or hear it. Of course the bird had been banging into the window when I’d brought her home so she must’ve thought it was part of the deal.
“Listen,” he said. “It really isn’t my place. Why don’t you give Ellen or Maxine a call and talk to them?”
“Talk to them about what? You’re the one who came over here with some wings as a pretext to tell me something, so how about you just say it?”
“I think you should talk to Maxine,” he said. “She should tell you directly. It’s really not my place.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” he said. “Though she says you’ve been avoiding her.”
“I just talked to her the other day, to thank her for the cheese. How’d you like the cheese, by the way?”
“Just call her.”
“I’ll call her,” I said. “Tell me what it’s about first.”
“It’s about the lawyer.”
“Did that son of a bitch die?”
“No, he didn’t die. What the heck is that bird doing?”
I threw my hands into the air and we sat in silence for a while, the dog still steadily watching him. “It likes to run into the window,” I said. “Who knows why? This is an unusual time for it, though. Usually comes in the mornings, sometimes in the evenings, too. I’ve gotten used to it.”
“You can do something about that, you know,” Frank said. Then he said there was one other thing, one other matter of business—Claudia wanted to know if I’d come for Thanksgiving.
“That’s a long ways off.”
“Less than a month.”
“I don’t know. We may go out of town.”
“We, who?” he asked.
“The dog and me, me and the dog. I think we might travel around, see the country.”
“You don’t travel.”
“I didn’t used to travel, but I’m retired now. A lot of people take up traveling whe
n they retire.”
“You gonna take a lot of pictures and make people look at them when you come back?”
“It’s possible,” I said, and I chuckled to try and lighten the mood. My father and his new wife—he’d been married to her for twenty-five years when she died but I’d always referred to her as “new”—had traveled after his retirement. They’d take hundreds of photographs wherever they went and then throw dinner parties where they’d project the pictures onto a wall before feeding their guests. They had done other things that had been odd, like they were always on the phone with you at the same time. You couldn’t just talk to one of them. I tried not to think about my father, but it was harder now that he was dead.
“Well, if you’re around we’d like you to come. Claudia wants to see you.”
I seriously doubted that. Claudia didn’t like to see anybody, so far as I could tell. There she was, curled up on the couch with her book. She probably read romance novels and talked about the characters like they were real people. “How is Claudia?”
“Same old Claud,” he said. “She’s started cooking a lot more, though. All sorts of things—soups and stews, mostly.”
“But you’re still eating out for every meal.”
“I didn’t say she was any good at it. She’s been baking, too. But she’s always substituting one thing for something else so nothing ever quite turns out.”
“Will Ellen be there?”
“She’ll be with her new friend.”
“Her boyfriend?”
“Yeah, with Rick’s family. Somewhere in the mountains in Tennessee.”
“Well, I hope they’re happy together,” I said. I hadn’t known his name, hadn’t even been certain the man existed. Ellen must have told him to tell me, insisted he tell me. Just let it slip out. Mention his name.
“Where would you go? If you traveled?”
“I have some places in mind. We went to Alabama yesterday. Maybe we’ll buy an RV or a little pop-up camper and go out West.”
Right about then, Layla started doing her gagging thing, which was embarrassing. She looked at me like she would’ve held off for Frank to leave if she could’ve. “She just gags sometimes,” I said, and found myself doing Harry Davidson’s bit—a hand at my throat making palsied movements that struck me as birdlike, a birdlike fluttering. She made a beeline for the back door and I let her out so she could frantically eat leaves. The leaves made the gagging worse, but it endeared her to me, this attempt to cure herself even though the cure was all wrong. I got myself another beer and called her inside. She was still gagging, but she managed to bare her teeth at Frank.
“I don’t know what it is, but this dog really hates you. She’s so meek she won’t look anybody else in the eye.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been hated before,” he said, and he smiled, and I smiled, and I walked him to the door.
As we watched him go, it occurred to me that Frank might be an imposter. I thought of a friend I’d had as a young man named Jim Matheson, a boy I’d played ball with for years, and how he’d become convinced I was the shell of Louis taken over by a stranger. He approached me in the library one day after lunch, his voice becoming louder and more insistent, shoving me with one hand, and I’d been so confused I’d just stood there. I hadn’t thought of him in years, supposed he was dead. His mother called me that afternoon to tell me Jim was sick, cried as she’d asked me to remember Jim as he’d been, as my friend, but the whole episode had terrified me. For a long time after, I wondered why he’d singled me out. Who is Louis McDonald, Jr.? I’d ask myself. It was a strange thing to think about—if you were acting like yourself, if a disturbed person could pick up on something you hadn’t, know something you couldn’t.
I opened the box of wings and dug in.
“Can you handle chicken bones?” I asked, dangling a small one. “Are they too soft for you? I heard somewhere that chicken bones are bad for dogs, they splinter or something.” Layla jumped, rolled over, danced on two legs. “I think you can handle it, but sweet heavens to Jesus if you start gagging again today I’m gonna have to leave you outside for good.”
Standing over the counter, I ate the meat off the bones before dropping them to the dog. And for a moment it seemed we’d all been sold a lie, that we didn’t need anyone else. I was fine, just me and the dog and we had all we could ever want. No, we had more than we could ever want. We could spend our lives eating chicken wings and cruising the beach. Looking at pretty girls. I could embrace this feeling—I could be free and happy on my own. And then I wanted someone to witness it.
Once all of the wings had been eaten, I cracked open another afternoon beer and checked my account balance. It was a paltry sum now that everything was going out and nothing coming in. When I’d first spoken to the lawyer he’d told me these things took time, sometimes six months, perhaps even longer with estates like mine. But more than five months had gone by and I was growing increasingly anxious. I thought about the day I checked my balance and what it would feel like when there was a preposterous sum, a shockingly large sum. I wanted to look at myself in the mirror as a rich man. The money was mine—I was the rightful heir with my mother gone and my stepmother gone and my brother, there was no one else.
I called Lucky. His secretary said he was in court so I left my name and number, insisted on leaving my number. He was never just sitting in his office waiting for my call—I always had to leave a message and then wait for him to call me back days later only to tell me he was working on it, I’d have to be patient for a little while longer, sit tight, and then I’d get off the phone feeling bad about myself. Had these feelings of shame begun with Jim Matheson? Jim Matheson accusing me in the library, shoving me in front of my friends and teachers and Linda Rafferty while calling me a fake and a phony. Telling me he wanted Louis back. What the fuck had I done with Louis?
I poured the rest of my beer into a cup and put the dog in the car, shotgun. We drove the same route to Harry Davidson’s house. Harry Davidson’s wife—I loved Harry Davidson’s wife, wanted to marry Harry Davidson’s wife. I would marry her. I had never spoken to the woman and these thoughts surprised me. They just popped into my head. She could be missing half her teeth for all I knew. I could buy her new teeth, though, a whole new set of the good kind, implants, that would be like real ones. If I had to buy her, so to speak, it might be okay—an arrangement where everything was clear, so long as she liked me well enough and had warm feelings toward me, so long as she could put up with certain things without seeming like she was just putting up with them.
Layla was happiest in the car—so much to look at, the smells changing frequently. She never gagged in the car. I cracked our windows and then lowered them halfway knowing she wouldn’t jump out.
“Trust,” I told her, “is Tampax. There used to be a commercial like that, I think, or Maxine said that to me once when she was saying things to offend me. You don’t have to worry about that, though. You’re fixed. Wouldn’t have to worry about it, anyhow.” I looked over at her; she had no idea what Tampax was. I could literally say anything.
At a stoplight, there was a black Ford pickup with a license plate that said CONVICT. People loved their personalized license plates but I’d never seen one like this before. I imagined the man asking for this particular plate, the back-and-forth exchange, how he’d paid extra and waited for it to come in the mail. I wanted to take a picture so I got out my phone and clicked the image of the camera. I held it up and tried to stop my hand from shaking, tried to get it perfectly lined up and centered. Then I pressed the button again. Easy. Now I had three pictures: two of my freaky grandchild and one of a truck. I imagined calling the cops to report a crime and telling them the man in question had a license plate that said CONVICT.
We stopped a few houses down from Harry Davidson’s, not as close as we’d been the previous day, and turned off the car. His truck was gone, but the blue car was there. I wondered if I might knock on the door and pretend to be selli
ng something or handing out religious pamphlets, anything to get a foot in. What did the inside of the house look like, smell like? Was it messy or clean? Harry Davidson’s wife did not look like a particularly neat or clean person but that was okay. We could hire a maid.
Layla wasn’t as nervous this time but she had some questions.
“We’re waiting to see if the wife comes out,” I said. “You remember his wife? Short shorts, long hair? I hope she wears the exact same clothes again today. I’d like if she wore them every day, like a uniform. But not that white shirt, a different one.”
“I’m sure it’s his wife, yes. Not his daughter. She didn’t look anything like him and she’s too old to be his daughter unless he had her when he was fourteen or something. Wait—is that right? What am I saying?” And then someone leaned into my window and I jumped.
“Can I help you?” the man asked. He was freshly shaven, wearing a tie.
I tried to look sober and sane, becoming immediately self-conscious of my appearance: barbeque stains on my shirt, hair uncombed. The beer half-drunk in the cupholder, looking exactly like beer. I was a damn slob, a child molester with a dog in the passenger seat.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for an acquaintance’s house, from church. Harry Davidson. He gave me his address and I wrote it down but I lost the paper and couldn’t remember the number. I’m not sure . . .” Stop talking, I thought, that’s enough. Don’t say any more. Only liars elaborate.
“It’s that one there,” the man said, pointing. “You go to First United?”
“For a few weeks now,” I said. “I’m just trying it out, going to visit a few to see which I like best.”
“Oh, you’ll like it there,” he said. “It’s a good place—I’m sure you met Pastor Mark? A fine man, fine, fine. We’re fortunate to have him.” He introduced himself as Kevin Hood and stuck his hand in the window. It was an awkward angle. We shook but it was terrible, my hand all clammy and my grip, it was not what it should have been.