What did my efforts get me? Community service.
But like it or lump it, Judy’s success or failure this summer rests with me. And seriously, how hard can it really be to teach Judy to follow some basic commands like Sit, Down and Stay? If Rocky, the eight-week-old blind Pomeranian, can learn to do it, and if Henry, the fifteen-year-old three-legged German shepherd, can do it, and if Delia, the deaf, sock-eating Dalmatian, can do it, why can’t Judy do it?
Judy brings her stick to me again, drops it at my feet and nudges me so hard that I tumble sideways off the boulder. She gallops back over to the shoreline in anticipation of my next toss and barks four times.
Judy telling me what to do. As usual.
“Forget it, Judy,” I mumble, picking myself up off the beach and brushing dirt and pebbles off my arms and legs. “Today I’m in charge.”
Ignoring the stick at my feet, I set the books on the boulder and take ten steps backward, away from Judy.
“Judy, come,” I say.
Judy just stands at the water’s edge, tongue lolling, entire rear end wagging, waiting for the stick.
“Judy! Come!” I command, more firmly this time.
Judy cocks her head. Her bushy right eyebrow shoots up questioningly.
“JUDY! COME!”
A group of gulls lands on a boulder a hundred feet down the shore. Judy forgets all about the stick and me and charges off after the big white birds, barking as if a UFO has just landed on the beach.
“You stupid mutt,” I grumble, watching Judy pick up speed as the gulls, screeching, take off over the river. Shaking my head in disgust—at Judy or my own incompetence, I’m not sure which—I plunk back down on the boulder and keep reading.
Use treats to reward positive behavior, the book says.
That I can manage.
“Judy!” I bellow down the beach after her. “COOKIE!”
Aha! Judy stops in her tracks and whips her head toward me. At least the stupid mutt isn’t deaf. I feel a surge of success. But then Judy notices that all I’m holding up is a mini-Milkbone, just like all the mini-Milkbones I’ve been feeding her all morning, one for each time she sticks her soggy nose into my shorts pocket. She turns her attention back to the birds.
I slam the book shut and let my shoulders sag in defeat. I’ve failed at dog training, or Judy training in any case. “It’s not rocket science, for shit’s sake!” I can imagine my mother chastising me. And she’d be right, because I remember, back when I was six or seven, getting Brownie to sit for Cheerios, carrot slices, little bone-shaped kibbles— he wasn’t picky. But Brownie was a smart dog. A calm dog. A good dog.
Not a maniac like Judy.
I know that Dr. Fred expects more of me. I know that if I go to him and tell him I can’t do it, he’ll just grin and give me a pep talk about not giving up on Judy—and myself— so soon.
And it’s not like I have the actual option of throwing in the towel anyway. I’m stuck at Camp Dog Gone Fun for the rest of the summer. Judy is my punishment, my community service. My work here isn’t necessarily supposed to be easy—or fun. That’s what Victoria would say. So I guess I’ll just have to up the ante with Judy, start from scratch.
Wait a minute. From scratch.
A lightbulb—an oven light—pops on in my head.
FOURTEEN
I wedge the last of the crusty lunch dishes into the rattly dishwasher, slam the door shut and push the ON button. I’ve tied Judy to the shady side porch and tossed her a rawhide loop to chew on. It’s the size of a mountain-bike tire; it should keep her busy for at least an hour.
Time to get to work. Hi-ho, hi-ho, as Nicholas goes around camp singing.
Into a big mixing bowl, I scoop a few cups of whole-wheat flour, a cup of cornmeal and a big bowl of leftover oatmeal from breakfast. I crack three eggs into the mix, pour in a monster can of mixed vegetables and add just enough salt-free chicken broth to make a nice pliable dough.
Victoria rushes past me on her way outside for her midafternoon jog. She’s got a trail worn around the perimeter of the island. Victoria does fifteen laps of this trail every single day—heat wave, downpour, impending hurricane, nothing stops her. Sullivan told me that during the winter months, when his mother and Dr. Fred live on the mainland, Victoria runs along Highway 2 every morning, dodging the transport trucks and potholes and roadkill. I’m sure some people would call it dedication and stamina. Probably the same people who gave Victoria all those framed Counselor of the Year awards she’s hung around the lodge as a reminder that she’s “here for us.”
“Do we have any cookie cutters?” I ask.
Victoria stops in her tracks, jogs across the kitchen and pulls open a cupboard full of all sorts of dusty kitchen junk. She rummages around a bit, finally extracting two cookie cutters: a Christmas tree and a snowflake. “‘Tis not exactly the season,” she says, handing them to me anyway.
“They’ll do,” I reply, switching the oven on to preheat and pulling out several cookie sheets from the drawer underneath.
“Those aren’t chocolate chips,” Victoria says, sidling up to me and peering over my shoulder at the dough. “They’re green. Is that a—”
“It’s a pea.” Now run off, would you? Next to being ogled myself, I hate having what I’m doing ogled.
Victoria’s nose wrinkles. “Mmm...interesting. Does this recipe have a name?”
“Mmm...Judy’s...Doggie Delights?”
“Gotcha,” she laughs, and with a spin, a wave and a swoosh of her red ponytail, Victoria’s out the door. (The rest of us humans may have descended from primates, but Victoria and Sullivan descended from Tasmanian devils.
An hour later, forty-eight trees and fifty-six snowflakes are cooling on the counter. They are crispy but not burned; crunchy, just the way Dr. Fred says a good dog treat should be. He’s totally into plaque busting.
Brant saunters in on break from his dog chores, grabs a bottle of water from the fridge and—
“Brant! Don’t!”
Too late. He pops a snowflake into his mouth.
“Bleckkkkk! Ewwww! Ickkkkk!” A horror movie plays out across his face.
I laugh. I’ve been doing that more and more lately— laughing. I feel so surprised when it happens, embarrassed almost, like I’ve let out a loud unexpected fart.
“Sarah-ha-ha, you forgot to add the sugar,” Brant tells me.
“No, I didn’t.”
Sucker for punishment, he bites into another cookie, a Christmas tree this time. He pulls the remainder of the cookie away from his mouth and squints at it. “Is that...a carrot? And what’s this other chunk? A green bean? You made vegetable cookies?”
“I didn’t make them for you.”
“Did I hear someone say...cookies?” Nicholas hurries through the kitchen door, wiping dirty ribbons of sweat from his face with the hem of his T-shirt. Sniffing the air like a hungry bear, he reaches over my shoulder and snatches a Christmas tree from the tray. He takes a bite. “Mmmph...not bad, Sarah. But...well...” He sucks crumbs off his top teeth. “Not very good either.” But he swallows the cookie anyway and stuffs three more in his pocket for later.
Brant tosses what’s left of his snowflake out the screen door to Judy. From the kitchen window, I watch Judy drop the rawhide, sniff the cookie tentatively, then suck it up like a turbocharged Shop-Vac.
Amen.
Nicholas and Brant leave to get back to their dog duties, muttering as they stomp down the porch stairs about how they hope I get back to making banana bread and apple crisp soon.
When they’ve wandered back to the dog barn, I prop open the kitchen door and step out of the heat of the kitchen onto the shady porch. I close my eyes and turn my face up into the stiff river breeze that blew this morn-ing’s smog downriver. Fresh air flows through my hair and down my neck. It may be the only moment of quiet, and the closest thing to a shower, I’ll have time for today.
My break has lasted all of fifteen seconds when a cold nose nudges my hand. I
open my eyes and peer down at Judy. Stringy beige remains of the rawhide chew are stuck to her neck and front paws. Snowflake cookie crumbs are stuck to her nose. I untie her from the porch railing. “I knew you’d like my cookies,” I tell her, giving her ears a good scratch.
Judy barks and shoves past me into the kitchen where she knows by smell that there are more snowflakes. Risking being trampled to death, I lunge in front of Judy and grab a snowflake cookie off the tray before she can jump up onto the counter to help herself.
“Judy! Sit!” I yell, trying to sound like what the books call “enthusiastic and authoritative.”
Judy sits. The sound of her big butt plunking onto the kitchen tile is like...music. (Percussion, but music nevertheless.)
I give Judy the cookie. She gobbles it up and immediately tries to leap up on the counter for another.
I block her again, bracing myself for the thud and subsequent bruising as Judy hip-checks me into the counter. “Judy, sit,” I command.
Judy sits.
I give her a cookie.
Judy sits again. This time without a command.
I give her another cookie and throw my arms around her hairy bulk. Over Judy’s smelly shoulder —what the hell has the rotten mutt been rolling in now?—I see Dr. Fred standing in the kitchen doorway, grinning from ear to ear. He applauds as if Judy and I are rock stars.
“Victoria ran into me—literally,” he explains. “She told me you were baking,” he adds, giving me a thumbs-up. “Good work.”
Hot with embarrassment, I mumble thanks and turn my back on Judy just long enough to put a half-used carton of eggs back in the fridge.
Bad move.
In the five seconds it takes for me to shove the carton in and slam the fridge door, Judy has lunged up on the counter and scarfed down at least another dozen cookies from the tray on the counter. Dr. Fred just stands there busting a gut laughing. In response, Judy gives Dr. Fred and me a “joke’s on you” flick of her tail as she bounds out the unlatched screen door, down the porch stairs and onto the field, her back end dancing across the island in cookie-induced euphoria.
Okay, so Judy’s not a one-session wonder dog. But at least I know she isn’t stupid either. Judy has issues, but she also has...potential.
It’s food for thought.
FIFTEEN
Late the next afternoon I am back in the kitchen, this time making dinner. Chicken fajitas with homemade salsa.
Down the hall in his office, Dr. Fred is whistling “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” as he tabulates the week’s food receipts.
He and Nicholas have just returned from the weekly grocery run. I sent them over to town two hours ago with a three-page shopping list. (A list pared down, I might add, from my original nine-page “wish list.” Victoria told me that I needed to keep my menus within the Camp Dog Gone Fun food budget and the limited selection at the local No Frills. I’m not sure how many ground beef and macaroni miracles I can perform in one summer, but I’ll give it a shot.)
Nicholas is in the kitchen too, tossing bags of apples and pears into the crisper and glowing with pride. Dr. Fred, the optimist, believes it’s because Nicky resisted shoplifting during his so-called adult-supervised outing.
Ha.
“Look what I stole,” Nicholas whispers to me. He reaches a hand down the back of his baggy jeans and extracts roughly fifteen packs of Trident gum from the waistband of his underwear. “Maybe I can keep off the weight I’ve lost here at camp.” (Nicholas always says “at camp,” like Camp Dog Gone Fun is a flipping Boy Scouts retreat or something and he’ll go back to his grandmother at the end of the summer with a Dog Grooming badge or a carved wooden key chain in the shape of a bone.) “Brant said if I start lifting weights too, that I’ll really be able to wow the hot babes when I start high school this fall.”
Brant’s advice isn’t worth two steaming Chihuahua turds. “You won’t wow any babes if you end up in jail,” I tell him.
Taylor traipses into the kitchen and reaches over Nicky’s head for a bottle of water. “Not unless your idea of a hot babe is a hairy, tattooed, drug-addicted ax murderer named Bubba,” she says, chugging down her water quickly and wiping her chin with her wrist.
“They don’t put you in jail for stealing gum,” Nicky sneers.
“They will if you keep getting caught,” Taylor tells him.
“Or if you start filling your Fruit of the Looms with iPods and jewelry,” I add.
Nicholas reaches into the crisper and pelts a red grape at my head. “Well, Miss Mario Andretti, at least I never stole a car!”
“Fuck off, Nicky,” I say, but I can’t help laughing and whipping the grape back at him. He ducks, catching it in his mouth.
“Ten points for Captain Underpants!” he shouts. “Hey, Sarah, did you know that if you write your name backwards, it spells harass?”
“You won any spelling bees lately, Nicky?” Taylor laughs, chucking her water bottle into the recycling bin and heading back outside.
“You want a stick?” Nicholas asks me, holding out two open packs of gum. “You like spearmint or cinnamon?”
I take one of each. What the hey.
Nicholas finally goes to hide his stash in his cabin, and I enjoy about thirty seconds filled only with the sizzle of chicken strips browning in a pan before Sullivan crashes through the kitchen door, his big feet bare. I glance out the kitchen window and spot his red-and-green-plaid high-tops strewn on the field. “Stepped in dog you-know-what. Be back in a flash.” He makes a beeline through the kitchen to the rec room and then pounds upstairs to his room.
He’s back in less than a minute, wearing enormous black flip-flops that look like scuba flippers. He leans against the dishwasher, watching me chop onions and mushrooms and peppers.
“Don’t slice off your fingers,” he warns. “It’s a fact that lefties like you, Sarah, are fifty-four percent more likely than right-handers to have accidents with tools.”
“Where do you come up with this stuff?” I ask.
“Oprah did a show on left-handedness one day when I was off sick from school. She’s a leftie too.”
“So was Jack the Ripper,” I say, giving the chicken strips a toss in the pan.
“You look like Martha Stewart,” Sullivan remarks.
I reach around Sullivan for the garlic press. “Martha got sent to real jail.”
Sullivan’s ears turn the color of the red peppers on the cutting board. “No, no. That’s not what I meant. You look like...who’s that other woman...the one with the funny accent...she used to be on TV too...Julia Child?”
“She’s dead.”
“Sorry, I mean—”
“And she was old. And fat.”
“I just mean...you look like a real chef.”
“Genetic mutation,” I say, cringing at the compliment. Not everyone in Riverwood knew my father, the Ian Greene of Sarah’s Bistro, but still, his “unfortunate” demise was written up in all the regional newspapers. Local tragedy, blah, blah, blah.
Sullivan smacks the side of his head. “Right. Your dad owned that restaurant up in the city. By the way, sorry about what happened...you know...to him.”
“Don’t be,” I say, blinking hard. I mean it—and then some. But the damn onions are making my eyes water. I sure hope that Sullivan doesn’t think I’m crying over my father.
Like that would ever happen.
Here’s something you should know: if my father hadn’t given me one huge, skin-crawling reason to hate his guts for all eternity, there were a million small reasons why I loved him.
Take away his despicable Polaroid camera, and I had a dad who helped with homework, showed up at all my school concerts, and patiently taught me how to separate eggs, use his fancy food processor and melt chocolate in the double boiler. He took me to petting zoos, museums and parks on weekends. He encouraged me to name my dog after my favorite dessert.
Dad knew how to make Mom laugh, how to make her agree to some outlandish kitchen p
urchase, how to make her day with flowers, even how to get her nose out of the latest best-seller for a night out. In a town where divorced or battling parents were the norm, I never had to deal with screaming or slamming doors or weeklong parental silences.
Like Sullivan, my father made a big deal of my left-handedness. He read up about right-brain dominance and told me that left-handed people were supposed to be super creative. He signed me up for music lessons: piano, then violin, then clarinet. I sucked at all of them. Same with painting classes and the pottery workshop. Ditto for ballet and jazz dance. Even my efforts at a summer creative-writing camp were to great literature what nails are to the blackboard—or so the instructor said.
But I aced cooking. And while my father can take the credit for teaching me the basics, it was me who, that summer between sixth and seventh grade, went a bit crazy with it. I experimented with everything from the spices in Dad’s old family chili recipe to the consistency of the hot fudge he poured over his hand-churned ice cream.
Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I like cooking so much. I just like being good at something. Recipes came— still come—naturally to me, in much the same way that I think piano concertos must come to Jake Malone, the autistic boy who lives down the street from Mom and me in Riverwood. So I rolled with it.
“Earth to Sarah...”
Sullivan reaches over my shoulder and grabs a slice of red pepper. He bites into it, chews thoughtfully and swallows. “How do you like it here?” he asks me.
I bet Sullivan asks himself that same question a few times a day, especially since he’s been grounded. More than once I’ve overheard him humming the theme song to Gilligan’s Island.
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