by Mary Miller
“Whenever you call her Layla, she’s probably thinking, ‘I don’t know who that bitch is.’ ”
“I doubt she’s thinking that.”
“You don’t know what dogs think.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But Katy seems like the name of a person, a human being.”
“And Layla doesn’t?”
“No.” I wanted to tell her the story about Clapton but I couldn’t remember it. He’d been dating a woman named Debbie or Pattie and George Harrison had stolen her out from under him. I had no idea where Layla came in, how Layla entered into the picture. Surely Harry Davidson had managed to tell her the story. He clearly loved that story and would have found a way to tell it.
“You don’t change a dog’s name after two years.”
“You don’t swap horses in the middle of a race.”
“That’s right,” she said. And then, “I like that. I’m not sure it applies here but I like it.”
Our food came out more quickly than I’d anticipated. We were just getting a good conversation going, a rapport. Her eyes were hazel, not like a storm at all—the green and brown swirling in such a nice pattern. I couldn’t look at them for very long but hoped I was doing a decent job of maintaining eye contact. Not too little and not too much. I wasn’t sure what was too little and what was too much. I didn’t know anything about what it was to be with another person, even though I had been with someone for over thirty years. When Layla knew I was getting ready to leave the house but wasn’t sure if I was going to take her, she would sit in front of me and stare off into the distance, like she was going to show me how good and quiet she could be, how unobtrusive. I wouldn’t even notice if she went along, she would be so well behaved.
At some point, Sasha said, “Let’s slow down. We’re eating too fast.”
I was shoving an entire link of sausage into my mouth at that moment; what a horrible image this must have been for her. “I didn’t know how hungry I was,” I said, and smiled in a way that I hoped was self-deprecating and good-natured.
“Whenever I eat a lot at night I’m even hungrier the next morning. It’s very strange,” she said. “A very strange thing. You could get super fat that way.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, and I did, though I was always hungry in the morning, at least until I’d had my two cups of coffee and then the hunger subsided.
“Is something burning?” she asked.
Something was burning. There was yelling in the kitchen and the students began to look up from their textbooks and laptops. The yelling stopped and then it started again along with some clanking pots. Something shattered. We looked around at the other patrons and smiled and shrugged, resumed eating. I always liked breaks in the action like this, and it was the second time it had happened that day. I checked my watch: it wasn’t even twelve o’clock. The world was magic.
“You have pancake on your face,” Sasha said, and she stood in the booth and reached across the table. Instead of wiping it off, she touched it. “Or it might be egg. Yep, it’s egg.”
I wiped, covering a large area to be certain. “Did I get it?”
“You got it,” she said.
Her phone dinged and she fished it out of her giant purse—had it been so large earlier? Why did she need such a big purse? She typed something short, no more than two or three words, and dropped it back into her purse. A few minutes later the same thing happened again. I finished everything on my plate and the extra bacon, too.
On the way home, we swung by Home Depot at Sasha’s insistence for some kind of bird deterrent. She wanted to wait in the car so I left the keys in the ignition, the radio and a/c on. The guy at the entrance asked if he could help and I declined and then proceeded to walk up and down what felt like dozens of aisles all the while thinking about Sasha in my car, running down the battery, growing impatient. I started to sweat as all of the other trips to Home Depot came back to me—every small part I’d had to return, the copied keys that hadn’t fit. There were times I’d made three trips in a single day. After about twenty minutes I located a bin of Bird-B-Gone Flash Tape and grabbed four rolls to be on the safe side.
The car was still there, as was Sasha, eating from a movie-theater-size package of Twizzlers. I said nothing but studied her for longer than usual: her legs propped on the dash, the scar redder and angrier up close. It looked like it hurt. Had someone done this to her or had she been in an accident? Perhaps its origin was even less romantic, like a vein that had been removed.
“You have tape at home?” she asked, examining the rolls. Her head snapped back as she gnawed off a hunk of licorice.
“That’s tape right there.”
“This isn’t sticky. You can use string, though.”
“Why do they call the damn stuff ‘tape’ then? It says so right on the label.”
She looked up the product on her phone and started reading the reviews. “Looks like woodpeckers and crows don’t mind this stuff but you’re not dealing with woodpeckers or crows so you should be okay. Oh, this is funny: someone asked if it can repel humans like his next-door neighbor and someone else responded, ‘Haha! They could charge way more if it did.’ ”
Back at the house, Sasha set herself up on the couch, an enormous sweatshirt on top of her clothes with a blanket on top of that and two pillows she’d taken off her bed. Was she cold? Why was she so cold? She was still eating the Twizzlers, really working them over, while I inspected the tape. Now that I had a solution, or a potential one, I wasn’t sure I wanted the bird to go away. I’d grown accustomed to the banging, its arrival every morning signaling a new day.
“You have a cheap cable package,” she said, flipping around. “Bottom of the barrel.”
“I only watch a few things.” I considered mentioning Naked and Afraid but decided against it. I put the tape back in the bag.
“I bet you like Fox News,” she said. “America’s News Headquarters!”
It was edging closer to the time when Maxine would arrive and I was getting anxious. I could explain the situation—a daughter and a grandchild I didn’t know all that well but was hoping to know better—and ask her to get out of the house for a while, go to a movie. She could buy herself another package of Twizzlers and a gigantic popcorn. I’d give her twenty or forty dollars, I didn’t want to seem cheap, from the stash I kept in my sock drawer. I liked imagining her with her popcorn and soda in the dark, smiling at the screen.
I fed the dog some treats and Cloroxed the kitchen counters, rinsed a couple of pots and tried to appear busy because it was the middle of the day and I felt like I should be doing something. Perhaps, if Sasha weren’t there, I’d be doing exactly what she was doing—no, I knew I would—and what a waste. Was this the extent of her days? It was so gratuitously self-indulgent it seemed impolite to look. I got out the vacuum cleaner and started pushing it around but it didn’t seem to bother her at all other than the fact that she turned the sound up on the TV until it was blaring, until it could be heard clear over the damn thing. It was incredible. I almost admired her for it.
I turned the vacuum off, shoved it into a corner of the room. I couldn’t recall ever having vacuumed before. It was a fact: the house had not been vacuumed since Ellen left. The kitchen floor had not been swept.
“Could you bring me a glass of water?” she asked.
“You want ice?”
“No thanks. I usually only like ice at Sonic—they have the good pebbly kind. More places should have ice like that, don’t you think?”
“I never go there,” I said.
“Oh, you’re missing out. Although they usually burn the onion rings and they’ll give ’em to you all burnt and dried out. Quality isn’t at the top of their list but I like all the drink combinations. There are thousands, and I mean thousands, of options.”
I handed her the glass and then squeezed myself onto the couch by her feet. It was an awkward thing for me to have done—there really wasn’t room for me with her setup. She glar
ed, but it was a fake-angry glare and then the dog jumped between us and jostled around.
“Good girl, Katy,” I said. I looked at Sasha as I said it to show her I was coming around, would be able to change and adapt. It wasn’t like I’d known either of them for long and if I had to call them something different, I could. But once you’d imagined something as one thing, even for a short while, it was hard to imagine it as something else.
“My feet are cold,” she said, nudging them under my leg.
“I have some socks you can borrow,” I said. “I mean you can have them, I don’t need them back. Do you want me to get ’em for you?”
“No.” She gave me a big toothy smile and shoved her feet beneath me more forcefully. There was a chip in one of her teeth that I hadn’t noticed before, not a big chip, just a small one. Of course I had seen that her teeth weren’t very good but I hadn’t noticed this chip, which was fairly prominent, though not so prominent at all. It was both at the same time.
I went to the bathroom and took a piss, gathering my nerve to hand her a fistful of cash. I decided sixty dollars might seem better. I didn’t want to give her too much, though, not enough to get a hotel room for the night, for example. I went back out and sat in my chair. She was watching a TV show in which a virus had broken out.
“I like this kind of stuff, end-of-the-world stuff,” she said.
“I don’t usually watch them.”
“Once you start, you get really into them. You start wishing you could be challenged to see what you’d do in the situation.”
“Oh, I have thought about that,” I said. “Being challenged, different scenarios . . .”
“I want to see if I’m weak or strong, you know. Like, would I be brave enough to do incredible things? To save people’s lives? Or would I give up because I was too scared? They’re questions you can’t answer when you’re just sitting on your couch.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Maybe you shouldn’t sit on the couch so much.”
She shot me a look that was certainly not fake-angry. Watch out, mister, it said. You’re going down a road you don’t want to travel.
“You could start training for something,” I suggested. “A marathon or a triathlon, take up a martial art.”
She was going to be angry for another minute so I waited. I wasn’t going to press her on it. Then she said, “In The Walking Dead, Morgan practices Aikido. He’s probably called a lot of attention to Aikido.”
“I saw the first season but it wasn’t for me.”
“You were scared!”
It was true, I had been. I petted Layla with my foot and said, “My daughter’s coming over with her baby in a little while and I need to spend some time with them.”
“When?”
“About an hour.” It was more like an hour and a half but it was clear she wasn’t a fast mover.
She didn’t say anything and I felt I’d made my point. We went back to the virus show. I’d missed some of it but it was easy enough to pick up on what was happening: they were trying to contain the virus to a section of Atlanta that had been cordoned off and no one was allowed in or out. But of course people had been divided by the walls and were desperately trying to get to one side or the other. The acting was terrible. I wondered again if this was how she spent her days, and why. I didn’t do much with my days, either, but I was retired and my wife had left me. I realized I had been depressed, that until Layla had come into my life, I’d just been sitting in my chair. For months I’d been sitting in my chair waiting for something to happen and now it had and we were still sitting.
“Hey, Sasha,” I said.
“Hey, Louis.”
“Could you pause this for a second?”
“Sure.” She turned the sound down and continued to look at the TV.
“No—could you actually pause your program?”
“My program?” she said. “I love that, my program. That’s what my mom calls her soap opera. She doesn’t talk to me when she’s watching her program.”
“You’re welcome to stay here—I hope I’ve made that clear—but I want to ask you a few questions.”
“He knows where I am,” she said. “I told him.”
“You gave him the address?”
“No, I told him we were staying with a friend for a few days and he asked if that friend was the ‘goddamn dog thief’ and I said it was.”
“Wait, he’s accused me of stealing Layla?”
“Something like that. Basically. That’s the gist of it.”
“Oh wow.”
“The plot thickens,” she said, moving her eyebrows all around. The dog was looking back and forth at us, following the exchange, eager to see what would happen next. Harry Davidson with his baseball bat, swinging it into the palm of his hand with nice little smacks. Pulling the gun from his britches. Searching his britches for his gun, the gun having gotten lost somewhere in the enormity of the fabric and folds. I took a few deep breaths and she asked if I would get her that pair of socks, after all. I went to fetch them, holding on to the dresser to steady myself. I was light-headed, fuzzy, and wished I could get back in bed and rest for an hour or two. I handed her the socks and she lifted a foot, pointing her toes at me, so I sat and got to work. Why was it so hard to put a sock on someone else’s foot? She could’ve done it herself in two seconds. What an odd woman. I had feelings for her that I couldn’t explain, that made little sense. I didn’t particularly like her. I had always liked Ellen, or had for many years. We’d had fun together. I could talk to her about things.
I didn’t know whether to leave the extra material bunched up at the toes or the heel. And then her program was back on, louder than it had been before: people running and yelling. I checked the clock. It was after two o’clock and Maxine would arrive soon. If I knew anything about grown-up Maxine, it was that she was damn punctual. And then there was a knock at the door and another and the door was opening and Maxine was saying, “Dad?”
It must’ve been a scene. Sasha’s feet in my lap, all of the covers and pillows, and the dog standing in the middle of the room as if she’d also been caught.
“Oh! Is this a bad time?” Maxine said, her voice higher than usual. She was thinner than I’d ever seen her, wearing highwater pants and shoes that covered everything but her toes—peekaboos, Ellen called them. I called them silly, impractical. Toes just asking to be stomped on, begging for dropped knives and pots of boiling water.
I walked over to Laurel and picked her up. She was too big to be picked up, but I went with it and she didn’t protest. She was a pretty child, with wide-set eyes and curly hair in a light reddish-brown color. She wasn’t nearly as creepy in person.
“My, you’ve gotten big!” I said. How old was she—four, five? It was hard to tell.
“I like chicken nuggets,” she said.
“Well, chicken nuggets are delicious. How old are you now?” I asked.
“Eight,” she said.
“No,” said Maxine, “you’re five.”
“I’m eight,” she said, looking completely reasonable.
“Why does she think she’s eight?” Sasha asked.
“Her cousin just turned eight,” Maxine said to me. “Anson turned eight,” she said to Laurel. “You’re five.”
“Me and Anson are both eight,” she said. “And soon we’ll be nine.” She had her pointer finger out and shook it for emphasis. It was small and lovely. I grabbed ahold of it and it devolved into a game in which I kept holding on to it even though she wanted me to let it go.
“Well then,” I said. “You’re quite small for your age.” I placed her back on the ground and she went and made herself a spot on the couch next to Sasha.
“Are you sick?” Laurel asked.
“No. I’m just tired.”
“You look sick.”
“I’m just tired,” Sasha repeated.
“Whose dog is it?”
“Mine,” Sasha said. “Her name’s Katy. Isn’t she pretty?”
“Where’s your dog?” Maxine asked me. “I thought that was Layla.”
“It’s a whole long story, but this is Sasha’s dog and they’re staying here for a night or two. In your old room.” I didn’t know how to explain who she was or why she was staying with me or the whole dog situation so I repeated that it was a long story. I imagined how it sounded—she’d think I had lost my mind, perhaps start looking into old-age homes. Retirement communities, they called them. Luxury Independent Living.
“So that’s not Layla?” Maxine asked.
“No, that’s her, that’s Layla. But she’s also Katy and she was my dog for five or six days until I found out the person who’d given her away, Sasha’s husband, had no right to do it. So the dog is Sasha’s and her name is really Katy.”
“That does sound complicated,” Maxine said.
“The dog’s name was never Layla,” Sasha said. “To be clear.”
Things were quiet after that, and tense, though Laurel happily moved to the floor with the dog and petted her belly.
“Does her belly smell like a corn chip?” I asked.
Laurel looked at me like she’d never heard of a corn chip so I turned to my daughter and told her that sometimes the dog’s stomach smelled like one. Then I told her that her hair looked nice. Her hair was fluffy, much bigger than usual. I wanted to pat it with my hands, make it go down.
“You have great hair,” Sasha said. And then she said, “I’m interrupting. I’ll let y’all talk,” and went back to her room, dragging the blanket behind her like a cape.
Maxine looked like she didn’t want to sit in the spot where Sasha had been so she sat bunched in one corner looking as uncomfortable as possible. She had to work hard to look so uncomfortable and disapproving. “I wanted to talk to you about something but this is clearly a bad time.”
“It’s not a bad time. I’m sorry. I thought Sasha was going to leave so we could visit but you’re early.”
“I should have called first,” she said. “You were right. Next time we’ll call first.” We looked at Laurel, who had her head buried in the dog’s belly, Layla’s legs peddling in the air. “Laurel, don’t do that. Stop it.”