Year of the Dog

by Shelby Hearon

  “I’m Janey Daniels.” I held out my hand.

  “A southern voice?” she asked.

  “I’m from Carolina, South Carolina.”

  “All right,” she said. She seemed quite reserved, quite contained, as if she did not expect things to be easy. “Come into the kitchen. I would like to tell you some of it before Owen comes home. Will you wait for refreshments? Do you need a bathroom?”

  “We’re okay,” James said, and I nodded.

  She waved us onto kitchen chairs in a sunny room with windows looking out on a backyard with three bird feeders. She stood, wearing a neat shirtwaist dress, pressing her palms together. “I had a youthful marriage to an abusive man. All right? Owen and I met; we were both teachers at that time. Not here, not in this state.” She glanced at James. “You know that.”

  He nodded, and swallowed.

  The woman, Lucille, continued, her voice low. “I got pregnant. If my husband had found out, I could never have got free. I had to leave before it was apparent, and hide out. He was the type of man, if he’d learned I was pregnant, would have become violent. Perhaps you’ve known others like that. He’d had a vasectomy, to ensure I had no reason for birth control.”

  James seemed about to ask something, half rising in his chair, but at that moment the front door opened, and we heard a man’s voice. “Lu,” he called, “you in there?”

  “I’m in the kitchen, Owen.” She waited, composed, pressing her lips together. When he came into the room, a tall man, he looked familiar, as if I’d seen him before. It took me a minute, while he crossed the room to kiss his wife, to take in the combed-back dark hair, the blue eyes.

  “This is James Maarten,” she said to him. “And his friend Janey Daniels, who is from South Carolina.” To us, she explained that Owen put in time at the high school on Saturday afternoons, helping with student science projects.

  “Maarten?” The man reached out his hand when James rose. “Well, I certainly can tell that without needing to be told. Now you’re too young to be one of my brother Reg’s boys; I expect you must be my Cousin Andy’s boy. Stand up here and let me see, I swear.”

  And the resemblance between the two of them took my breath.

  “Owen,” the woman said, “he’s our boy.”

  The man flung his arms around James and a low crying sound came from his throat. “It’s him?” He held James out and looked at him, his eyes wet. “It’s the answer to a prayer. You’d be twenty-eight, isn’t that so? Sure, it is. I can tell you the day in March.” He wiped his eyes. “Lu, you must’ve fainted when you saw him at the door.”

  She smiled slightly. “I’m not a fainter, Owen, but I have to admit it knocked the wind clear out of me, how he favors you.”

  Owen seated us all at the table, and they served us homemade, cream-cheese frosted carrot cake and filtered decaf coffee. Although they asked if we’d like something else, it was clear the cake had been prepared just for us, as the kitchen was still warm and smelled of spices.

  Owen kept looking at James as if he couldn’t yet believe his eyes. “I wanted to kill that man, her husband, that John Freeman. But Lu said if we gave up the baby, she could get her divorce. She and I had been together while she was married. You might as well know that. We’d found ourselves in love and didn’t use precautions, though now I see you here, I’m glad for our carelessness.”

  James put down his fork, finding it hard to eat. “I can understand that, sir.”

  “Tell me now, how was it you found us?”

  James explained that the woman who raised him had given him their name, at the last. He looked away, and a sigh escaped him—maybe something about all those other years or maybe no longer holding his breath. “These days,” he said, as if he’d waited for the opportunity, “you can find people on the internet, if you spend some time on it.”

  I felt weak as dishwater watching them. So the woman, Lucille, hadn’t told her husband this was their son showing up, not beforehand, not before she’d laid her eyes on James. What if he’d looked like a stranger instead?—but there was no point in going down that road.

  “Should we call the kids?” the man asked.

  “Owen, no, not just yet.” She put a hand on his arm, as if restraining him. “I think we should ask James about his feelings on that matter. He must know we had other children. Perhaps he is angry. Are you, James? Angry at us?”

  The man waved that away. “Lu, he came and found us, didn’t he? That answers that.” He turned to James. “Am I right?”

  “Right,” James answered. “That was a long time ago and everything.”

  Lucille ran a hand over her cheek, then pressed her temple with two fingers. “We were young,” she said. “Those were hard times.”

  Owen stood, his hands shaking a little. “I want to show him the family albums; when he sees me and my brothers, back in the old days, he’s going to think he’s looking at pictures of himself.”

  After her husband had wiped his mouth, got up from the table and motioned for James to follow him, Lucille said to him, in a low voice, “Tell me one thing: was she good to you? Did you have a good life?”

  James rose. “Sure, she was,” he said. “Norma was a businesswoman, and she had a brother who came around a lot, teaching me stuff like how to catch a ball, you know.”

  “Yes.” Lucille closed her eyes briefly and I could see the vein in her temple.

  The two men sat side by side on the sofa in the living room, a stack of photo albums in front of them on the coffee table. Every single Maarten in America must have been kin to Owen and must have had his picture made throwing horseshoes, playing touch football, the older men playing cribbage and dominoes, the younger ones in driveways shooting baskets or on the slopes skiing. There were occasional holiday shots of wives and baby Maartens.

  Owen said, “We told the kids, that’s Brian and Kara, we told them from the start that we lost a baby before they came along. I don’t see the problem in telling them that we found him again, the truth of the way it happened. In a nutshell, at least.” He motioned for Lucille to sit, and she took my hand and led us to a pair of arm chairs facing the sofa.

  Owen went on, “We’ll get them back here—Brian’s outside Boston with his family, and Kara, she’s the one not married yet, is working on a nursing degree in Worcester. Neither one took to teaching the way we did. We’ll get them here when the time is good for everybody and have a big reunion. And next year, I promise you, we’ll do it up right. We’ll celebrate your birthday in a proper way.” And Owen Maarten gave James, his eldest son, a cuff on the shoulder, and then hooked an arm around his neck.

  I considered that it might not be just me who would have certain feelings about the prodigal son’s return. I wondered how Brian, who’d been the good son all along, and who probably looked like Lucille’s side of the family and so not at all like a Maarten, would take the news of his new brother. And if Kara, the daughter, who hadn’t rushed to marry, perhaps because of the six photo albums showing grandfathers and uncles and brothers and nephews and boy cousins and grandsons, might refuse to meet another male Maarten. Mostly, I wondered how Lucille—whose control I couldn’t help but admire—felt in her heart about having her decision of twenty-eight years ago walk through her door on a Saturday in May.

  James, sitting next to his dad, beaming and dazed, looked as if he’d just come downstairs on Christmas morning. As if he’d just discovered there really was a Santa Claus. I had to look away to get my mind around it. Here I’d been aching for him to have a family of his own, not realizing that once he did, he might never look back. I could have gotten in the car and headed home. He’d never have noticed.

  Home

  38

  FROM THE FIRST day back in Peachland, it was like I’d never left. I imagined things would be different, that I’d start over fresh, but I should’ve known better. I’d rented a nice rose-painted bungalow with a front porch big enough for a swing, a blue bedroom upstairs where I could watch the pa
pergirl deliver the News and, with the windows open, listen to the pond frogs and the phoebes. And a big fenced back yard.

  That morning, I decided to walk to the pharmacy, to get dear dog used to the new town, and maybe stop for a cup of coffee, like old times, at the diner called Peanuts. I’d just turned onto the front sidewalk, walking leash in hand, when a car pulled up at the curb. Right while I watched, out stepped a girl in shorts with a baby tucked in a sling on her chest—Millie Prentice nee Dawson, who, I could see, like everyone else in town, already knew where I lived.

  “Hello, Janey,” she said, looking up at me, uneasy but using a friendly tone. “We—I heard you were back. Don’t you look nice.”

  I had to give her credit. My folks and her folks and Curtis’s folks along with everybody else in town would be waiting to glimpse us bumping into each other at the market pushing grocery carts, or catch us sitting across the same aisle listening to the pastor’s sermon on sin and forgiveness at First Methodist, or, sooner or later, happen on us meeting face to face at the pharmacy. The truth was, even with my heart still bruised on her account, I had to figure I owed her a favor and couldn’t muster much rancor. “Hi, Millie,” I returned the greeting. “I kept up with your news, since my mom says your mom shows her forty pictures of the baby every time they get together.” I said it in a light way. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” she said, her face sweating. “I kept up with you, too, like you say, through our moms. And Mr. Sturgis, when I had to go in there with Danny. Babies have a lot of trouble the first year.”

  “They do,” I agreed.

  She sucked in her breath, the way she used to in grade school, when she was trying to guess the right answer. “I hope you won’t mind, now, if I have to bring him in when he’s sick?”

  Her legs looked a little swollen still, from carrying such a load. “Millie I’m not going to not do my job, help him out with earaches and bad coughs and diaper rash, just because you and I both wasted a whole lot of our lives on Curtis Prentice. You know me well enough.”

  “I guess, sure,” she said, looking like she’d done what she came to do and didn’t know if she ought to get back in the car.

  I could feel the sun beating down at nine in the morning, and worried that the tongue of my trusty transplanted companion would be on the ground by mid-afternoon in this heat. Fanning myself, to show it was nothing personal, I moved us into the shade of an old pecan tree whose roots buckled the sidewalk.

  “I didn’t know you were a dog person,” Millie said. “You didn’t used to be.”

  “I am,” I said. “I am a dog person.” Looking down at the sling across the chest that used to wear a cheerleader sweater, I smiled. “You didn’t used to be a baby person, either.”

  She sighed but smiled also. “You learn when you have to.”

  “You do,” I agreed.

  “Your dog’s got a nice disposition.” She hesitated. “Maybe sometime you could bring it around for Danny to play with. What’s its name?”

  “Edgar,” I told her. “His name is Edgar.”

  39

  WHEN I PUT on my white coat again, it felt like I’d truly come back. Everything familiar, old times, me working where I belonged. “Good morning, Orville,” I called to Mr. Sturgis, like we’d always been on a first-name basis.

  “Janey’s back!” he hollered out, giving me a big walrus-type hug around the middle, his bald head reaching my chin, and then introducing me to the new pair of Pharmacist’s Assistants. And it made me feel good to see black faces again as a matter of course. “Come along, come along to the back,” he said, “you won’t believe the improvements.” Mostly he meant new computers. “We were losing them right and left before,” he told me. “Not any more.”

  “Patients?”

  “Doctors. They said we got mired down, they said we were still puddle-jumpers in an age of jets. They must’ve read that in some doctors’ newsletter telling them to blame things on the pharmacists. Especially, we got grief from the ones, you will recall certain well-known examples, who forget what they give a person and then go and give him something else.”

  That very first morning on my old job, most everybody in town came by to reassure themselves that Janey Daniels really had come back. Mr. Grady came in, the first customer, to tell me that now that Bayless was gone, he’d got himself a replacement doctor, that she made him turn in his old pills to her before he could get a new prescription, so he’d stopped getting himself into trouble. Then Mr. Haynes showed up with Blind Dog, and I thanked him for telling me about the Companion Dogs and for being a good example for me. While Edgar sniffed and rubbed noses with the large black lab, I let Mr. Haynes know how proud I’d been that my Big Dog had made it, even though losing her had been sort of like having my arms and legs ripped off, and he understood about that. I asked him for the name of a veterinarian, so I could put Edgar’s windpipe in good hands, and invited him to bring Blind Dog over for a playdate soon in our new fenced yard.

  Madge, Mom’s friend from the bank, came in, to make sure it really was me she’d seen talking to a certain person in front of my pink rental this morning. And to mention that her husband Cletus, who was also my lawyer, had said anytime I wanted to tie up the ends of my settlement, just give him a call.

  I turned around to greet a frail woman in a wheelchair, who had been waiting her turn, and it took me a full two minutes to recognize her as old Mrs. Runyan, the mother of the man who owned my daddy’s hardware store. Her body had given out in recent months, but not her manners, and she welcomed me home with a warm, talcum-powder hug, before asking me to check, would I mind, that she was taking the right dosage.

  About then, I spotted Curtis. Curtis dressed up in a tie, spit-clean and hair-combed, looking around as if he’d just that minute caught sight of me. Instead of that, I felt sure, he’d been standing around half the morning noticing who was coming in and going out. “Look who’s here,” he said, sauntering in the direction of the counter where I stood. “Millie says to me, ‘Guess who I happened to run into today.’”

  “We had a visit.”

  “What’d you think of my boy?”

  “Oh, was that baby yours?” I gave him a pleasant look. “Since you’re here, I won’t have to make a phone call to remind you I’ll be needing my half of the value of the house by the middle of July, don’t forget.”

  He wrinkled his forehead as if hearing something new. Giving me time to observe he’d fleshed out his jowls along with his responsibilities. “Now, Janey,” he complained, “we need to sit down and negotiate. Millie and me, we put a lot into that place, it wasn’t in such good shape back when.”

  I took a breath and reminded myself we were standing on my turf using up my time. “You want, we can talk about it again with Cletus in his office. I need to tend to my customers.”

  “Hell, Janey, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Then after a couple of hours, just as I was taking off my white coat to slip out for lunch, the way I used to do, late, who but Ralph Smalley should walk in. He asked had I heard the news concerning his recent divorce, if that happened to be of interest to me. I said how about let’s go eat at Southern Fried, I’d been missing the food. And we did.

  He looked good, a former All State player, who’d put on a loaf-of-bread size bulge at his middle and was showing a little wear and tear, but he still had the moves, striding with that spring up onto the balls of his feet that he’d perfected on the court. Walking the three blocks to the cafe, I figured everybody in town was watching us, drawing the same conclusion: that we’d end up together. After all, we’d gone around in high school, we’d both played pretty good basketball, we looked a pair—both a head taller than the average. And, sad if you thought about it, both of us divorced at our age. The frightening thing was wondering if I would have been thinking the same thing, strolling down the streets of Peachland with him—if I hadn’t gone away? Would I have gravitate
d toward him out of familiarity, figuring that we more or less belonged together and might as well pick up where we left off, the way Millie and Curtis had? It gave me cold chills even to have that thought.

  Over fried okra, hushpuppies, and fried catfish with a side of sweet-potato fries, he and I covered the two decades we’d shared since his folks moved here from Charleston in first grade. We talked about getting our growth early, and then about high school, when we no longer felt like freaks. When we might even have been considered cute. He admitted he’d got to be hot for a while, junior and senior year, when girls who wouldn’t look at him twice before, looked at him at least once, and he went out with a few. “Including you, if my memory serves.”

  We talked about all the people we’d lost track of and all the people who’d had bad things happen, and who of our crowd already had four kids, and who still hadn’t got married. We mentioned our moms and daddies, and the moms and daddies of all the other people we knew. And I began to feel the effects of the southern sun on my brain, wondering if anyone in this town ever did anything but talk about everybody else, from morning till night.

  When we’d got our sugar-dusted fried peach turnovers and a refill on the coffee from Maydelle the owner, Ralph slid his arm over on the back of my chair—checking to make sure he wasn’t disturbing the dog resting under the table. “If you’d gone to the All Night Party with me, Janey,” he said, “instead of going with Curtis Prentice who you hardly knew, the rest would’ve been history.”

  “Oh, Ralph,” I told him, “the rest is history.”

  40

  I WAITED AT the Greenville airport for the long-lost son. For James Maarten, who had been abroad, and come home. But I didn’t know exactly what that meant to him now, home. Would he catch up with what he missed, hanging out at Lucille and Owen’s house, see about some graduate courses at Dartmouth, it wasn’t too late. On the other hand, I didn’t exactly know what it meant for me either, home. Was I there? Was this it? The rose-colored cottage, the fenced yard for Second Dog, the occasional evenings with Ralph Smalley. Mom checking in with me every morning on the phone, catching me at the pharmacy if she didn’t catch me at my rented house, saying how the whole town was glad I had made up with Millie.