Earnest

by Kristin von Kreisler

  “I was too quick to judge.”

  “So was I. I’m sorry too,” Jeff said.

  His words were balm. “Well, we’ve got that straight,” Anna said.

  For the first time in months, Jeff smiled—wholehearted and sincere. Anna smiled back the same.

  “We should be there tomorrow when they set Earnest’s leg,” she said.

  “I’ll call Dr. Nilsen in the morning and find out what time.”

  “Maybe we can see him for a minute before they give him anesthetic.”

  On the quietest of tiptoes, peace returned to Jeff and Anna.

  When the phone rang near midnight, Anna’s eyes sprang open, though she hadn’t been asleep. Her stomach hurtled to the floor. She did not want to answer because Dr. Nilsen’s night technician might be calling to say that Earnest had taken a turn for the worse. Or Jeff might already have heard the news and want her to rush to tell Earnest good-bye.

  Quivery, Anna rolled on her back and reached for the receiver.

  “How’s Earnest?” Joy asked.

  “Oh, it’s you. Thank goodness,” Anna said.

  “Always nice to be appreciated.”

  “I was scared you were someone from Dr. Nilsen’s clinic.”

  “I figured Earnest was there.” A tenor crooned on Joy’s radio.

  “Earnest has a broken leg,” Anna said.

  “That poor boy. Smoke inhalation and now this. He’s had a hell of a last few months,” Joy said. “News traveled fast tonight. You wouldn’t believe how many people asked about him at the meeting.”

  The meeting. Anna, Joy, and Lauren could have won a victory, or the council could have ended the women’s last stand with a tomahawk to their gizzards. Part of Anna wanted to know which, but another part wasn’t ready to hear. She dreaded more conflict when her psychological well was dry.

  “The meeting went on and on. I just got home a little while ago,” Joy said. “You should have seen the fireworks at city hall. Standing room only. Reporters. People stomping around. It was quite a scene.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it.”

  “You didn’t miss the vote. The council postponed their decision so they could deliberate more in a private session. I don’t know when they’ll meet, but Mrs. Scroogemore can’t tear down the house yet. We’ve thwarted her at least for a while,” Joy said.

  “That’s good.”

  “I vote we keep a few things in our shops and hang on till everything’s decided. She’d never pay a sheriff to serve us an eviction notice.”

  “Okay.” Anna meant to sound resolute, but her word came out anemic.

  Joy paused, as if the anemia were registering on her. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s been a long night.”

  “That poor dog,” Joy said again. “We can talk tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be late. A surgeon’s setting Earnest’s leg in the morning.” Anna rested the back of her wrist on her forehead.

  “Jeff going to be with you?”

  “Yes. We’re actually getting along.”

  Joy chuckled. “Wonders never cease.”

  “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow,” Anna said.

  “Sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”

  Anna didn’t sleep. There were too many unknowns—too many feelings to process and things to worry about. Missing the comfort of Earnest’s snores and his body pressed against her, she lay there for hours, blinking in the dark.

  CHAPTER 47

  “I’ll pay the bill,” Jeff offered.

  “I can do it,” Anna said.

  “No, really. I’ll do it.” Here we go again, falling all over ourselves to get along. Anna had reactivated Jeff’s urge to provide. He wasn’t sure how that had happened, but he wanted to look after her.

  “Why don’t we split the bill?” Anna handed her credit card to Dr. Nilsen’s Saturday receptionist.

  “You’re sure you’ve got enough money?” Jeff asked.

  “We agreed to share Earnest’s expenses, remember?”

  Jeff did not want to remember. He never again wanted to think of the mediation, when Mad Dog Horowitz had infuriated him, and he and Anna had agreed to divide the costs of Earnest’s care. Fortunately, Jeff’s skin no longer prickled with disgust at thoughts about that day. It seemed like long ago. Back when the big bang happened or dinosaurs ruled the earth.

  Jeff looped a beach towel around Earnest’s middle and shored him up to keep weight off his leg. Anna coaxed him along the gravel path toward Vincent, waiting in the parking lot with plenty of sprawling room for Earnest in the backseat. Ecstatic to be free from the clinic, he hobbled along in his dreaded plastic cone, and he stopped to sniff messages left by Dr. Nilsen’s other patients. Some were so interesting that Earnest acted like he wanted to inhale the gravel.

  Jeff and Anna carefully hoisted him into Vincent. Though the day was cool, Jeff left the window partly open because Earnest liked to sniff the wind. He liked it to blow back his triangle ears as he half-closed his eyes in ecstasy.

  Jeff thought, We have a lot to make up to him.

  Jeff had never had a problem with the exterior stairs to his apartment. Usually, he bolted up them two at a time. Today, however, he studied them through Earnest’s eyes, and scaling them looked more forbidding than clumping across Mount Everest’s ice fields with broken crampons and a backpack of bricks.

  “This isn’t going to work. Even if I hold up Earnest with a beach towel, he could never climb those stairs on a broken leg,” Jeff said.

  “But it’s Saturday. You get Earnest for the weekend,” Anna said.

  “It’s impossible. He has to go out three or four times a day.”

  “Maybe he should stay in the condo,” Anna said. “It’d be easy for us to get him to the backyard.”

  She said “us.” Did she mean she wanted Jeff to care for Earnest with her? It sounded like it. And sharing the load would be better than each of them tending Earnest alone.

  “Good idea,” Jeff said.

  From the backseat, Earnest watched them intently. The puzzled ridges in his forehead asked, What’s the deal? What’s going on between you now?

  Jeff might have answered, More than I ever imagined. He headed toward the condo.

  Jeff glanced around the condo. It looked like the home of a disorderly chimp. Plants were lined up on all the windowsills and counters and in the kitchen corners. Cardboard boxes, their contents spilling from the top, were piled on each other and strewn through every room.

  These former contents of Plant Parenthood were stark reminders that Anna had begun dismantling her shop and that her grandmother’s house was poised for destruction, depending on the city council’s vote. But Jeff chose not to mention the mess because he didn’t want to ruin his and Anna’s détente. She seemed to have made the same decision, because she did not mention the mess, either.

  But the house’s future was out there, waiting, a shark’s fin circling their boat. Also waiting was another blowup between Jeff and Anna. It was just a matter of time.

  In the condo’s living room, Earnest plopped down on his bed as if he were king of a small nation, such as Liechtenstein, and Anna and Jeff were peons whose sole purpose was to attend to his slightest whim. If he’d had a signet ring, he’d have presented it for kisses. If he’d spoken words, for his dinner he’d have requested vichyssoise, savory Parmesan puffs, pheasant under glass, roasted venison with blushing pears, and people-cracker blackberry crumble.

  Earnest did not complain about his confinement. With dignity, he visually surveyed his palace and waited patiently for his pills, disguised in hot dogs or Brie. He graciously accepted cows’ hooves. With the finest cooperation, he allowed Anna to work the beach towel under him, and Jeff to carry him to the backyard. Outside, with majesty, he raised his leg.

  When evening came, Jeff went to Say Cheese and brought back a pizza, which he and Anna ate at the kitchen table. They laughed—and caved—when Earnest’s eyes commanded bites. After dinner, by mu
tual agreement, Anna got a comforter and pillow, and they made Jeff a bed on the sofa (which he chose not to point out was too short). By mutual agreement, Jeff, because he was stronger, would usher Earnest out alone at night for bathroom breaks. Also by mutual agreement, till Earnest was able to walk without support, Anna would stay with him on weekday mornings, and Jeff on weekday afternoons.

  Later, Jeff felt odd sleeping on what used to be his and Anna’s sofa in what had once been his and Anna’s condo. It was like leaving his house wearing two left shoes. But as he listened to Anna’s breathing from the bedroom, he looked out at the silver crescent moon, in the shape of an occupied hammock, and he decided that sleeping here again so close to her and Earnest also felt, well, really good.

  In the morning Anna pulled mysterious containers from the refrigerator and shuffled around the kitchen in her fuzzy pink slippers and fleece robe. One by one, she cracked five eggs and dropped them in a glass bowl. She added milk and whisked them around, then poured them into a skillet and snipped in chives from a pot on the deck.

  Jeff and Anna used to make their Sunday breakfast together, but now he sat, cross-legged on the floor. His role fell somewhere between a guest and Earnest’s personal attendant. “I never had to get up once last night. Earnest didn’t stir,” Jeff said.

  “He’s still pretty drugged.” Anna sprinkled salt and pepper on the eggs.

  “I think he was being considerate. He didn’t want to wake us.”

  “Typical. Doesn’t surprise me.” Anna put two slices of bread into the toaster and pushed down its lever. “You want jam?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Jeff said. “You’re making the same breakfast we always had on Sunday morning.”

  “Habit, I guess.”

  “Do you have eggs and toast on Sundays by yourself?” Jeff asked.

  “No. Too much trouble. Oatmeal’s usually it.”

  A small chafing-dish flame warmed Jeff’s heart. Because she was making him a special breakfast? Because she’d not carried on their Sunday ritual after he’d gone? Either way, he was glad.

  “Here you go.” Anna set their breakfast plates on the blue straw placemats that she and Jeff had bought at Hall’s Imports.

  He got up, pulled out what had been her usual chair, and helped her sit. Then he took what had been his usual place across the table. He pinched off his usual corner of toast and handed it to Earnest, who took it with his usual snap of teeth. Nothing’s changed. Well, nothing and everything.

  “Remember the day we adopted Earnest? How he tried so hard to get us to bring him home?” Jeff asked.

  “He was adorable.”

  “Still is. He picked us out as much as we did him,” Jeff said.

  “Remember the Fourth of July when we were waiting on the curb for the parade, and he was sleeping behind us in his flasher position?” Anna asked.

  “Yes, and people thought he was panhandling and left a dollar on his stomach,” Jeff said.

  “If he’d been wearing his plastic cone, they’d have felt sorrier for him and given him a five.” Anna laughed with Jeff.

  An A-plus observer of human emotion, Earnest watched. Far back inside his cone, the corners of his mouth turned up in Labrador retriever mirth.

  Jeff scooted back his chair. “I’m going to get more coffee,” he said before he remembered that he was in her place and the coffee wasn’t theirs. “Sorry. May I have another cup?”

  “You know where the pot is.”

  He set his cup on the few inches of counter space not taken up by plants. He poured. “Want some too?”

  “Please.”

  When he leaned down to pick up Anna’s cup, he rested his hand on her shoulder.

  CHAPTER 48

  Anna shook out the blue down comforter, which Jeff had left in a heap on the sofa before rushing to the ferry. His familiar masculine smell lingered in the cotton, along with a whiff of his shaving soap. She hugged the comforter and thought, Nothing stays the same for five minutes. Life is one never-ending change.

  The most monumental recent one was her change of heart toward Jeff. This morning she’d given back his condo key. She’d never have believed that she’d feel grateful he was staying here, but now she welcomed his presence. Her attitude shift astonished her.

  You’d better enjoy it while you can, she thought as she folded the comforter and set it on the sofa again. Soon, one way or another, a decision would be made about the house, and everything would change again. If Jeff didn’t get to build Cedar Place, he’d be angry with her. If the house got demolished, she’d be angry with him.

  Anna again remembered when she and Grammy had been driving through fog after the Huskies game, and Anna had kept wiping the windshield and craning her neck to see ahead. Grammy had said that the past was gone, and the future hadn’t happened yet, so enjoying the present was all there was. But how could Anna enjoy the present with Jeff when a threatening future loomed over them? No matter who won about the house, she and Jeff would be at odds again.

  It was easy to predict that their relationship would end with a spear-tipped exclamation point. Anna felt as if she and Jeff were riding through Central Park behind six white horses in Cinderella’s glass coach, and up ahead they’d hit a concrete wall. It was hardly a happy-ever-after ending. Yet there was no alternative.

  As Anna washed the dishes, she stared out the window at hyacinths and tulips in a bed across the street. Earnest napped in a rectangle of sunlight from the window above the sink.When she ran hot water over Jeff’s mug, she kept thinking about time. Her future was a problem, and her present could fall apart at any minute. So what about her past, which Jeff had accused her of clinging to?

  He and Grammy had insisted that the past was over, but was that always true? Anna sometimes felt that it was a living thing that clung to her. It followed her around, insisted on being her dancing partner, and then stepped on her toes.

  Such as all the times she’d remembered finding Grammy dead, and a lightning bolt of panic zigzagged through her in the present the same as it had on that terrible morning. Or all the times when she’d thought of spending holidays at boarding school with whatever teacher was assigned to girls not going home—and she’d felt lonely, as if at that very moment it was Christmas all over again. So how could she say the past was past if it was still a part of her, a ball and chain of memory?

  Anna took a clean dishtowel from the drawer and dried her and Jeff’s granola bowls. She stooped down for Earnest’s dish to wash next. He was snoring softly and impersonating a sack of potatoes, and he seemed happy despite the plastic cone.

  As Earnest’s chest rose and fell, he also seemed indifferent to his stitches and injured leg. It is amazing how he rolls with life’s punches, Anna thought. As she watched him sleep, she remembered finding him at Second Chance Shelter. And it suddenly struck her that in one day he’d lost his home and the person he loved most—just as in one morning twenty-five years earlier, Anna had lost her home and Grammy.

  Perhaps Earnest had felt as sad and hurt as Anna had, but no one would have guessed that he’d ever been troubled. He’d seemed to accept his fate. From the moment he’d plopped his paw into Jeff’s hand at the kennel, as far as Anna could tell, Earnest had never looked back with longing or resentment.

  Like all dogs, he lived in the present. What’s done is done, he seemed to feel, and he greeted the future with joy. Change, whichever way the wind blew, seemed to pose no problem for him. He embraced it. He trusted. Even when a truck hit him, he moved on.

  As Anna bent down and petted his shoulder gently, so as not to disturb him, she thought that she should be more like him. Enjoying the now. Trusting fate. Reconciling with hardship. Not being so stubborn, as Jeff had said.

  Maybe Anna’s parents had hurt her, but that wasn’t all that filled her past. Along the way, she’d gotten plenty of love—from Grammy, teachers, friends, Earnest, and even Jeff for three years—and she could sip from a nearly full glass. And maybe life was not just an endless ch
ange, as she had thought, but also a jumble of pluses and minuses. Both the good and the bad had strengthened her, nudged her along her path, and gotten her where she was meant to be. And that place was the here and now. In her kitchen with the best dog on the planet.

  Earnest rolled over and bonked his cone on a chair leg. He yawned and resumed his nap. All this time, he’d been setting an example for Anna, but only now did she see it.

  Anna spritzed cleanser in the bathroom sink. If the rest of the condo looked like a hoarder’s nest of plants and boxes, at least she could keep this one room clean. She scrubbed the porcelain and faucets and sloshed around water. A few of Jeff’s whiskers from his morning shave washed down the drain.

  On the glass shelf above the faucets, he’d left his Dopp kit, unzipped. In such a precarious place, it was asking for an accidental poke to send its contents flying to the floor. Though she had no idea how long Jeff would stay here, Anna set the kit in the drawer where he used to keep it, safely out of the way.

  Strange. She’d never filled the drawer with her own belongings. For months it had sat empty, though Anna could have used the extra space. The drawer seemed like a living thing, with its own opinions and expectations. And what those came down to, the drawer might say if it could talk, was that it had been waiting for Jeff to come back.

  CHAPTER 49

  On the midday ferry, a few men read newspapers, and a woman with Nordstrom shopping bags watched gulls dive-bomb for fish. A mother whispered to her son as they returned from what Jeff guessed had been an orthodontist appointment. In the quiet, he missed his commuter friends’ raucous card games and political discussions on their usual five-thirty ferry.

  Nearly two weeks after Earnest’s accident, however, Jeff still had to get back by noon so Anna could go to the bare-bones operation at her shop. As odd as a midday ferry felt, he’d willingly swim Puget Sound at midnight to live up to his part of their deal, because he wanted her to be happy.