Talk to the Paw

by Melinda Metz

  MacGyver just needed to put more effort into making his person see that what she needed to be happy was the right packmate. He was up for the challenge. Anything for Jamie. She was flawed, true, but she was his. He trotted to the porch and slipped through the hole in the screen. Before he could do anything else, he had to deal with the stench. He went straight to the palm closest to the fountain and gave it a good scratching, obliterating the odor of dog piss with his own musky smell. There. Now he could focus on his mission.

  He tilted his head back and flicked air into his mouth with his tongue, smelling and tasting at the same time. The loneliness was strongest in the same place it had been two nights ago. He wondered if he could train Jamie to use her tongue to get information about her surroundings, including his gifts. Doubtful. If her sense of taste was working correctly, she’d never eat grapefruit. He could hardly stand to watch her jab her spoon into the disgusting thing.

  It didn’t matter. Mac’s nose and tongue were good enough for both of them. He started toward the lonely smell. Unfortunately, the reek of dog pee got stronger and stronger the closer he got to his goal, so strong he almost wished he had a human nose. Almost. He could never actually make the sacrifice. He slowed his trot and dropped into a stalk as the house with The Smell came into sight.

  That dog Mac had seen earlier stood in the yard, a grotesque mishmash mutt with long, floppy ears, a long, wide body, long legs, an oversized head, and a mouth that excelled at slobber production. Mac knew he wouldn’t have a problem eluding the bonehead, but he knew the mutt could bark as well as he drooled, and Mac didn’t need a commotion when he was in stealth mode.

  He decided he’d come back a little later. For now, he’d do some exploring. He caught a whiff of a different strain of loneliness, and decided to track it. It led to a house with a window in front open so wide it was like an invitation. Mac accepted by leaping inside. He landed softly, quickly assessing the room.

  Even if he’d landed with the bang of a firecracker, he probably wouldn’t have woken up the person sleeping on the sofa. Her scent was potent, an odor Mac had learned to associate with a human female who wasn’t a little girl or an adult. Their sweat was especially strong, although they almost always tried to disguise it. This one’s true scent was masked by something that smelled sort of like apples and melons and flowers, but sweeter and sharper at the same time. Mac could still make out the odor of anger coming off her, anger mixed with a little loneliness.

  She wasn’t the one producing the scent he was tracking. He followed that scent out of the room and down the hall. The girl inside was young. A young one shouldn’t have such a powerful lonely smell. She still needed a pack leader to survive, and it didn’t smell like she had one, at least not one who was nearby. Mac decided to find her one. He was a cat with skills to spare. They shouldn’t be wasted. He leapt up on the bed and brushed his cheek against the girl’s, a silent promise that he’d be back.

  But now it was time to return to his primary mission. On his way out of the house, Mac paused to take a few licks of the potato chips lying on the table near the older girl. He didn’t especially like chips, but he loved the salt.

  When Mac got back to the house with The Smell, the bonehead was still in the front yard, sniffing around under the tree that Mac needed to climb to get into the house. The dog dropped into a squat, and Mac took the opportunity to race toward the tree. He scrambled straight up the otherwise-occupied dog’s back and shimmied through the window.

  The dog started yammering, but Mac didn’t care. The opportunity to use the bonehead as an on-ramp had been too perfect to pass by. And anyway, dogs were always barking about something. They didn’t have the brain power to decide what was important and what wasn’t. “Diogee, shut it!” he heard a man call from downstairs. His voice didn’t have any anxiety or fear in it. Clearly, he didn’t rely on the dog for warnings. A sensible human, then. Except that he’d chosen to live with a bonehead.

  It didn’t take Mac long to find the perfect thing, ripe and rich with scent. Jamie would have to understand his message this time!

  CHAPTER 3

  “’Bye, Mac. I’ll be bringing you a present when I come back,” Jamie called, then edged her way out the front door and shut it behind her as quickly as possible. There was something black and yellow curled on the doormat. Snake! She jumped back.

  Actually, now that she’d gotten a second look, she didn’t think the thing really looked like a snake. She gave it a tentative poke with her foot, then when it didn’t slither away or anything equally disgusting, she reached down and picked it up, using two fingers as tweezers.

  Just a sock. Well, not just a sock. A black sock with rows of yellow sasquatches on it. Jamie smiled. Cute.

  Her smile faded. This was the second time she’d found something she knew wasn’t hers on the doorstep. How’d they gotten there? She’d heard about LA’s legendary Santa Ana winds. They sounded strong enough to blow around a lot more than a sock and a hand towel. But there hadn’t been much of a breeze, forget about the so-called devil winds, since she’d arrived.

  Both items had been on the doormat, too. Not on the lawn. Not even on the two steps that led to the front door. They’d been right on the doormat. Had someone put them there? But, why? A sock and a hand towel? That was just random.

  “Jamie, coffee!”

  Al’s voice pulled Jamie’s attention away from her thoughts. “What?”

  “Coffee,” Al repeated. He was on his porch, holding a mug out to her. She’d barely stepped out of the house, and he had coffee for her. Did he—and Marie—do anything other than look out the window and watch the neighbors?

  Maybe not. But it was harmless. There was nothing so bad about being offered delicious hot coffee. It was nice. Neighborly. Could Al or Marie have left the stuff on her doormat? Maybe they thought she could use a hand towel. But one sock? Maybe they’d left a pair and one had . . . disappeared . . . somehow.

  Only one way to find out. Jamie walked across her lawn and over to the Defranciscos’ porch railing. “Thanks,” she said, taking the coffee. “You and Marie have been so sweet. Did you, by any chance, leave me this?” She held up the sasquatch sock.

  Al peered at it. “Never saw it before.”

  “What about a hand towel? A white hand towel?”

  Al peered at her.

  “It was on my doormat the day after I moved in,” Jamie added.

  “Not me.”

  “Marie, maybe?”

  “Marie!” Al hollered. “Did you leave a dish towel for Jamie?”

  “Hand towel,” Jamie corrected as Marie stepped out on the porch.

  “You need a hand towel?” Marie asked.

  “No, it’s just that I found one outside my door. I thought maybe you left it,” Jamie explained.

  Marie frowned. “Why would I do that?”

  Good question, Jamie thought. “Just checking,” she said. “Maybe the person who moved out dropped it and I didn’t notice it at first.” But that wasn’t how the sock got there. She would have seen it before that morning.

  “I’m going to the pet store,” she said. “Do you want anything while I’m out?”

  Al grunted. “Got everything we need,” Marie said, then returned to the house.

  “I’ll bring the mug back later,” Jamie told Al. She started across the courtyard, then realized she was still holding the sock. She backtracked to her house and shoved it through the mail slot in her door. She’d deal with it later.

  As she started for the street again, she heard Mac give a long, aggrieved yowl. Maybe getting outside would make him happier about his new home.

  * * *

  Jamie stood in front of the dog/cat leash display in Pet World, staring. The huge selection had left her paralyzed. “Stop being ridiculous,” she muttered. “You’re making some big life decisions right now, but this is not one of them.” She flushed as she realized a tall guy with an enormous bag of dog food slung over one shoulder had come around the
corner just in time to hear her talking to herself. “Can’t decide if my cat is more of a superhero type or a pot-smoking Rastafarian monkey type,” she told him. Why had she thought that would make the situation less embarrassing?

  “You’re picking the leash by your cat’s personality?” the guy asked. “You’re a better person than I am. I slapped a pink one on my beast. We’re in a battle over who is going to be alpha dog, and I thought it would give me an edge. It’s that one.” He pointed to a light pink leash patterned with dog bones. “If I was really trying to emasculate him, although surgically he’s already there, I guess I should have gone for the pink one with hearts.”

  Jamie laughed. “I think there’s a flaw in your plan for dog dominion. Dogs are colorblind.” What was she doing? Was she flirting? She shouldn’t be flirting. This was not The Year of the Exceptionally Cute Guy. This was her Year of Me.

  The guy shook his head. “Actually, they’re more spectrum-challenged, like someone with red-green colorblindness. I actually have an app that lets you see in dog vision.” He grimaced. “Can we just forget I said that last part? In any case, I think Diogee can feel the pink and that it makes it harder for him to try to dominate me.”

  “Because pink is a girly color and women are naturally submissive,” Jamie said.

  The guy’s eyes widened. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just—Can we just forget I said anything at all?” He shifted the bag of dog food, looking uncomfortable.

  “I wasn’t trying to—I was just busting your chops,” Jamie answered. Didn’t matter if she had been attempting to flirt. She’d negated it with that gender-politics-of-pink comment. “But I’ll wipe my brain of this conversation if you agree to forget you caught me talking to myself about which leash my cat would prefer.”

  “Done,” the guy said. He stared at her for a moment, then slapped the bag of dog food. “Gotta go pay for this.” He headed down the aisle. Jamie took a peek at his butt—nice—even though it was The Year of Me, and anyway objectifying men was as bad as objectifying women. She returned her attention to the wall of leashes and decided on a plain bright red one that would go great with Mac’s tan-and-brown-striped fur.

  About an hour and a half later, she stepped out her front door with Mac in her arms. Probably a third of that time had been used paying and driving home. The rest of the time had been used for getting the snazzy new leash and harness onto Mac, which included yowling (him) and fighting back tears of frustration (her).

  “Now, see,” Jamie said to her cat as she plunked him down on her little patch of lawn, “isn’t this great? You’re outside. I was, in fact, doing something nice for you, not torturing you.”

  Mac didn’t turn his head toward her. He didn’t even twitch an ear. Clearly, she wasn’t even close to being forgiven. Well, fine. She wasn’t sure she’d forgiven him, either. She took a fast picture of his profile, then held her cell in front of his face so he could see it. “Just so you know, this is what an ungrateful cat looks like.” He continued to ignore her.

  Deep, cleansing breath, Jamie told herself. Sometimes dealing with Mac required a deep, cleansing breath. She decided not to attempt a walk quite yet. Mac needed some more time to adjust. Instead, she decided to take a few pictures of her bungalow. First a closeup of the front door, she decided. The door set the tone of the whole place. It wasn’t a rectangle, for starters. Storybook style definitely wasn’t about right angles. The door was shaped like an oval with the bottom cut off, and had huge, wonderfully ridiculously huge, wrought-iron latches and an equally huge round doorknocker.

  Jamie made sure she had the ivy growing over the door in the frame, then clicked. She wondered if she could climb up on the roof. She’d love a closeup of the way the shingles had been set in uneven waves. But that could wait. There was plenty she could do from the ground. Ooh! Like the multipaned window over the kitchen sink.

  She took a step in that direction. Mac took no steps. She should have gone for a Snugli instead of a harness. Except that would probably have taken an extra hour to get him in. Jamie stayed where she was and used the zoom to get an extreme closeup of one of the door latches.

  “Well, hey there, Toots. I haven’t seen you around.”

  Jamie gave a little jump. The voice had come from right behind her. She turned, managing to loop Mac’s new leash around her ankles. “I live here,” she explained, eyes on the ground as she freed one foot. “I just moved in,” she added, as she freed the other.

  “Just moved in?” he repeated.

  Jamie was finally able to look up. The man who’d been speaking to her was maybe late fifties, with blond hair straight out of the nineties—aggressively gelled and spiked, with frosted tips. He wore khakis, a light blue button-down shirt, and a fishing vest with a dazzling number of pockets. A patch of sheepskin on the front held an assortment of pristine flies. Around his neck, a lanyard strung with wooden beads had several equally pristine tools hanging from it. The only one Jamie recognized was a pair of needle-nose pliers.

  “You just moved in?” he asked again. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the blue lenses of his round, wire-framed shades, but she had the feeling he hadn’t blinked since they’d started talking.

  “Uh-huh. That’s my place right there. I was just getting some pictures,” she told him. “So, you live in Storybook Court, too?”

  He pulled down the shades and grinned at her. There was something kind of fake about it, and something really fake about his Southern accent. “I thought I was asking the questions,” he said.

  “We can’t take turns? I ask something, you ask something,” Jamie suggested. She was a little relieved when the Defranciscos’ door opened and Al ambled out with a broom in one hand.

  “Sport!” the man exclaimed. “Toots here says she just moved in. That right?”

  Al nodded, then looked at Mac, taking in the leash and harness. “My sympathies,” he said to the cat and began to sweep the front steps. Mac gave a long, high yowl in response.

  “Saw her skulking around, and I thought I should check it out,” the man told Al. He turned to Jamie and held out his hand. “Hud Martin.”

  “I was hardly skulking,” Jamie said as they shook. “I was standing in front of my own home with my own cat taking a picture.”

  “When you’ve seen what I’ve seen . . .” Hud let the words trail off as he sauntered away.

  “Wow,” Jamie said, watching him go. Al gave one of his grunts.

  She took a few more pictures of the latches and the doorknocker, feeling a little jolt of pleasure that for one whole year the magical fairy-tale house was hers. She looked down at her cat. “Okay, MacGyver. Let’s move it out.” She took four purposeful steps toward the kitchen window she wanted to photograph, then stopped. The leash had reached its limit. She gave it a gentle tug. Mac’s tail began to whip back and forth.

  Jamie hesitated. The best thing to do was just admit defeat and take Mac back into the house. But how to get him there? She couldn’t pick him up right now. She knew what that lashing tail meant. It meant, “You touch, you get scratched.”

  Maybe if he knew they were going back inside, he’d be willing to walk on the leash. Jamie moved as close to the door as she could. “Come on, Mac-Mac. Come on, pretty boy.” Mac didn’t move. His tail whipped a little faster. “Okay, I admit it. I made a mistake. You cannot be harnessed. Let’s just go back in the house and I’ll take it off. And then we’ll play with Mousie. That would be fun, right? You love Mousie.” Jamie’s voice got higher and higher with every word.

  She heard the Defranciscos’ door click shut. She looked over and saw that Al had disappeared. She didn’t blame him. She’d sounded like a demented preschool teacher. Should she try letting Mac off the leash outside? She’d gotten him back in when he’d escaped the other day. But the other day he wasn’t pissed off. Maybe she should—

  The Defranciscos’ door opened again. Without a word, Al threw something to her. Jamie looked at it and gave a relieved smile. It was a
can of tuna. “Thanks,” she said. Marie appeared behind him holding a can opener. She handed it to Al, and Al tossed it to Jamie. “And another thanks,” Jamie added.

  She opened the tuna, let Mac get a whiff, and started toward the house, willing him to follow her.

  He did.

  * * *

  “I’m gonna have to card you before you eat one of those,” David warned Lucy when she picked up one of the cupcakes he had cooling. “There’s Jager in the ganache inside, and there will be butterscotch schnapps in the frosting once they’re finished.”

  Lucy just smiled in reply, then took a bite. “Yums.”

  “They’re for the Corner Bar. They want to try selling cupcake shots, so I’m experimenting with combos,” David said. He gave her a pipette filled with Jager. “Squirt this on if you want more kick. That’s the way the bar will be serving them up.”

  “You should make some rum and coke ones. With those squishy candy coke bottles on top,” Lucy suggested.

  “Been done,” he told her. “But what hasn’t?”

  He was sure Lucy had a reason for coming by the bakery while he was working, and he was pretty sure what it was. It had been almost a week since he and Adam had gone out, and they’d decided he needed checking up on. He decided to make it easy for her. “I’m fine,” he announced. “You and Adam don’t have to worry about me.”

  Lucy’s face flushed. “What? I wasn’t—We weren’t,” she began, then gave it up. “Okay, you’re right. I wanted to see if you were okay. Adam said you had kind of a hard night when you guys were out.”

  “Not really. Just choked a little trying to talk to a woman in the bar,” he answered. “Also, I made a complete ass out of myself talking to a woman at the pet store this morning. I’m out of practice.”

  Lucy looked intrigued. “You talked to a woman at the pet store—without Adam there to egg you on? Do tell.”

  David shrugged. “She was picking out a leash for her cat, and I showed her which one I got for Diogee. It wasn’t like I was trying to pick her up. You know how you just fall into conversations with people in stores.”