About a Dog

by Jenn McKinlay

  “You sighed,” he said. “You sounded a bit forlorn.”

  “No.” Mac shook her head. “Just nostalgic, I guess.”

  “You’ve been away a long time.” It was a straightforward observation not giving Mac any inkling as to how he felt about her absence, if he felt anything at all.

  They left the orchard behind and passed several farms. When they reached a large fenced field with a gray horse in it, Gavin flipped on his signal and pulled over to the side of the road.

  “Sorry, I have to make a quick business stop, if that’s all right?” he asked.

  “Sure, no problem,” she said. She glanced at her big bag on the floor. Why, oh, why didn’t she carry around tequila like Jillian had on their girls’ weekend? If ever there was a time for a covert shot of liquid courage this was it.

  Gavin reached into the small space behind their seats and grabbed a paper sack. He glanced at Mac and then down at the bag.

  “I know you said you weren’t hungry, but it just didn’t seem right to welcome you home without some Maine staples.”

  Mac watched as he pulled a paper-wrapped whoopie pie out of the bag. When he handed it to her, she grinned. The label on the wrapper read Making Whoopie, which was the name of Jillian’s small whoopie pie store in Bluff Point.

  “You know you can’t get a decent whoopie anywhere except Maine,” he said. Then he handed her a bright red can, and said, “To wash it down.”

  “Moxie soda?” she asked. Then she laughed, hard. “Wow, I haven’t had a whoopie pie or a Moxie in years.” When she said years, she made sure she twisted the “r” into an “uh,” tapping into her old Maine accent.

  Gavin chuckled. Then he pulled an apple out of the bag.

  “Wait. Are you kidding me?” Mac asked. “You’re handing me two fistfuls of sugar and you’re going to eat an apple?”

  He shook his head and then jutted his chin toward the farm. “Nah, the apple is for my girlfriend.”

  Mac’s head whipped in the direction of the field, expecting to see some gorgeous farm girl, dancing barefoot across the high grass in a floral dress. Instead, the pretty pewter horse she had seen in the distance was moving toward the fence at a clip.

  Gavin popped out of his side of the truck and went to the fence to meet her. Mac put the soda down but took her whoopie pie as she went to join him.

  The horse tossed her silver mane and pawed the ground. Mac didn’t speak horse, but judging by the happy nickering, the mare was pleased to see Gavin.

  He gave a low whistle and she trotted right up to him and put her head over the top rail and pressed her long nose into his shoulder. Gavin put his hand on the side of her face and she whinnied. Clearly the affection between these two was mutual.

  “How are you doing, Star?” he asked. She stepped back and tossed her head. “Let me see you run.”

  Star neighed and shook her head. If Mac didn’t know better she’d swear Star understood him.

  “Fine, no treat for you if you don’t want to gallop for me,” he said. He crossed his arms over his chest, hiding the apple.

  Star backed up and pawed the ground.

  “I guess I’ll just go home then,” Gavin said.

  This time, Star pawed the ground and then pushed off with her forelegs and spun around. She did a short gallop around the field and Mac watched as Gavin’s eyes narrowed as he observed her running.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Star slipped on some ice and suffered a bone bruise about six months ago,” he said. “She’s better now but I still like to check on her and make sure there is no recurrence. It’s a beautiful thing, watching her run again.”

  He took a small jackknife out of his pocket and deftly sliced the apple in half. As if sensing her treat was being prepped, Star bolted for them. Watching the wind whip her mane and the sun shine on her glossy silver coat, Mac could see what Gavin meant. She was beauty in motion.

  “Want to feed her?” he asked.

  “Me?”

  Gavin looked around them as if checking to see if there was someone else there. Mac wondered if she should just shove the whole whoopie pie in her mouth and hope for a swift death from sugar shock. Why did this man make her feel so awkward? It was galling.

  “You,” he said.

  He took her free hand and tugged her forward. He positioned Mac so she was standing in front of him and he took half of the apple and wrapped her fingers around it and then put his hand under hers. Together they held the apple out to the horse.

  Star’s enormous lips snuffled around Mac’s hand, making her giggle. Then the horse gently took a bite of the apple, leaving half of it behind in Mac’s hand.

  “She’s so careful!” Mac cried.

  She turned to face Gavin, and realized too late that his face was just inches from hers and he was watching her with an affection that made her feel ridiculously warm and fuzzy inside. A nudge against her other hand made her whip back around just in time to see Star going for her whoopie pie.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Mac said. She moved her arm out of the horse’s reach. “The whoopie pie is mine.”

  She pressed the remaining bit of apple into Gavin’s hand and stepped away from them.

  “You should probably take over,” she said. Then she took a huge bite of the whoopie pie to keep herself from saying anything stupid like, OMG, you’re hot!

  While she chewed the soft chocolate cake filled with delectable vanilla icing, she made herself think about Trevor. Her boyfriend—well, her boyfriend on hiatus. The guy she had been seeing for years. The one who had convinced her to start dating again when she was so broken and beat down she was sure she’d never let anyone into her life ever again. He was perfect for her. He caused her no grief, no strife, no heartache, which was exactly what she’d always wanted in a boyfriend. Period.

  She turned away from watching Gavin and Star. She needed not to be thinking about Gavin in any way but as her best friend’s little brother. She shoved another bite of whoopie pie into her cakehole.

  A movement in her peripheral vision caught Mac’s attention. Something was moving in the high grass at the edge of the field. She walked toward it, wondering if it was a cute little bunny or maybe a bushy-tailed squirrel.

  Instead the big, blocky head of a brown and black brindle dog popped up out of the grass. It saw Mac and its brown eyes went wide. Its ears were floppy and its gaze scared. Mac got the feeling that it was just a puppy.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Mac said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  The dog let out a yip and took off across the field at a low-to-the-ground run that made it look like a brown bullet just skimming the grass.

  She supposed it belonged to the same farmer who owned Star, so she turned back to Gavin and his girlfriend who were still canoodling by the fence.

  With a final pat on the neck, Gavin said good-bye to Star and they headed back to the truck. Mac held out the remaining half of the whoopie pie to Gavin, and he took it with a smile.

  “You’re out of practice,” he said. “I remember when you could eat three of those and still make room for dinner.”

  “Only so I wouldn’t get busted for eating three whoopie pies,” she said. “Is this still the Dillmans’ farm?”

  “Yeah, why?” He polished off the whoopie pie in two bites and Mac had to force herself not to study his gray T-shirt to figure out where the sugar and fat could possibly go since there wasn’t an extra ounce on him.

  “Do they own dogs?” she asked.

  “They have an old hunting dog, a vizsla named Tucker,” he said.

  “I saw a puppy in the field,” she said. “You don’t think it’s a stray, do you?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to say. I’ll tell Mr. Dillman to keep an eye out for it though.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gavin shut he
r door and circled around the truck. In moments, they were back on the road. They passed another farm, a plant nursery, and a lumberyard, before the traffic got thicker as more neighborhood streets connected to the main road. Gavin slowed down to accommodate the other cars.

  “I know I’ve been gone a long time,” Mac said. “But the town looks amazingly unchanged.”

  Gavin turned the truck onto another main road. This one led them closer to the shoreline. Mac could smell the brine on the air and off in the distance she could see the top of the Ferris wheel at Belmont Park, which took up four acres at one end of the boardwalk that ran the length of the town’s five miles of beach ending at the Bluff Point lighthouse. The big white beacon had looked over the town for more than two hundred years and Mac’s heart lifted in her chest at the sight of it.

  “Not much changes in Bluff Point,” Gavin agreed. “Unless you look really closely.”

  Mac glanced at him and then back at the town. What did he mean by that? What had changed since she’d left?

  They could have followed the road they were on all the way to the beach, but Gavin turned onto a smaller road that led to the center of town. Bluff Point had a traditional town green, with its two main churches sitting at each end as if keeping an eye on each other. In the middle of the green was an oversized gazebo, which was used as a bandstand for the Veterans of Foreign Wars brass band on Saturday nights in the summer.

  Local businesses lined the streets that framed the town square, giving the town a busy, buzzy feeling as people moved from shop to shop like worker bees circling the hive. If there was a picture postcard for the perfect New England town, Bluff Point was it.

  Mac studied the familiar buildings, looking for anything that was new or different. A few buildings had fresh coats of paint but that was about it.

  She craned her neck to see Jillian’s bakery Making Whoopie on the corner. Jilly did a bang-up business in the summer as Bluff Point’s population easily tripled with tourists during the hot months. If Mac were with Emma, she would have asked to stop in to say hello but since she wanted to be clear of Gavin as swiftly as possible, she didn’t.

  “I’m looking closely,” Mac said. “But I’m not seeing anything different.”

  “You’re assuming I’m talking about the buildings,” he said.

  “Well, yeah,” she replied. “Weren’t you?”

  “I was referring more to the people,” he said. Mac had no time to ponder this as Gavin turned right onto a road that ran parallel with the town square; it was Elizabeth Street, the street where Mac had grown up.

  The houses were old, built mostly in the late eighteen hundreds. The stately row of old Victorian homes lined each side of the street like a proper group of gossipy old dowagers. Mac remembered walking home from school on this sidewalk, her hair in braids, her knee sporting a scab beneath the hem of a dress her mother had foisted on her, as she dragged a stick along the wrought iron fences she passed by because it made such a delightful racket on the normally quiet street.

  Halfway down the street, Gavin turned into the familiar gravel driveway. Mac glanced up at the large white house, with the deep green trim and the mansard roof that looked like a hat pulled low over its brow. Home!

  Gavin had barely parked the truck when Mac popped out and jogged up the steps onto the wide front porch. She didn’t have to raise her fist to knock because the screen door was shoved open and there stood her two aunts, Charlotte and Sarah Harris.

  “She’s here!” Charlotte shouted.

  “I know, I can see her,” Sarah said. “I’m hard of hearing, not blind, you know.”

  Charlotte got to Mac first and hugged her tight. She stepped back and pinched Mac’s cheeks just like she did when Mac was six and Charlotte caught her foraging for snacks in the pantry, which usually ended with Charlotte cutting her a nice thick piece of cake.

  “My turn,” Sarah said. She elbowed Charlotte aside and took Mac’s hands in hers. She scrutinized Mac’s face as if looking for signs of illness and then released her hands after a hard squeeze. Sarah wasn’t much of a hugger. “You look healthy.”

  “Healthy?” Mac asked. “Is that a euphemism for fat?”

  Charlotte laughed and Sarah frowned. They were twins but the years and personal style caused them to look nothing alike. Charlotte wore her white hair in tufted waves and preferred dresses and dainty shoes, while Sarah was more pragmatic and wore her equally snowy hair in a sleek bob and was all about the pants, jeans being preferred. Except at the moment, they were dressed identically in white jumpsuits, sort of like prison uniforms, that covered them from top to bottom.

  “Well, you’re just as sassy as ever,” Sarah said. “So that’s something.”

  “Aunt Sarah, you just saw me in Florida a few months ago,” Mac said. “Surely, you didn’t think I’d changed that much.”

  “No, but you’re home for the first time in years, and I just want to be sure you’re handling it as you should,” she said with a sniff.

  Even though Aunt Sarah wasn’t a hugger, Mac stepped forward and gave her a quick squeeze. “I’m fine, really I am.”

  Aunt Sarah gave her a brisk nod, signifying that the display of emotion was over.

  Charlotte and Sarah were Mac’s father’s older sisters. Since he had come late in life to their parents, the sisters had taken a hand in raising him, and Mac knew that they doted on their little brother like the child they never had. When he married, they had extended that love and concern to Mac’s mother and then to Mac.

  No one knew why neither of the sisters had ever married or left Bluff Point, or if they did, they didn’t speak of it. For Mac, the aunts were just woven into the fabric of her life. She couldn’t imagine growing up without them. Because the family house was so large, when Mac’s father married, the two sisters had continued to live in the family home with him and his family. There had never been a thought that they wouldn’t, not even from Mac’s mother, who loved her husband’s sisters as her own.

  When Mac’s parents had retired to Florida several years ago, they had tried to get Charlotte and Sarah to come with them, but the two sisters could not be budged. Although they traveled quite a lot, neither sister had any interest in calling any place but Bluff Point home.

  Mac was selfishly grateful for even though she’d suffered a self-imposed banishment from her hometown for the past seven years, it had always comforted her to know that the aunts were here, keeping the home fires tended.

  “So, what’s with the flight suits?” Mac asked. She gestured to their outfits and the sisters exchanged a look as if trying to decide how much to tell her. “You’re not under house arrest are you?”

  “If you must know, we are studying to be apiarists,” Sarah said.

  “Api-what?”

  “Beekeepers, dear,” Aunt Charlotte said.

  “Huh.” Mac had no idea what to say to this new development.

  “Gavin Tolliver, aren’t you a dear to bring Mac to us,” Charlotte said. She was the flirtier of the two sisters and gave him a coquettish look through her lashes as he stepped onto the porch with Mac’s bags.

  “My pleasure, Miss Charlotte,” he said.

  “I’ll bet it was,” Sarah muttered. She was the feistier and more suspicious of the two.

  “Sarah, be nice,” Charlotte said. Sarah just waved her off like she was a housefly buzzing by her face.

  “I’ll take these up to your room, Mac,” Gavin said. “If you’ll show me the way.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Mac said. “I can take it from here.”

  “Mackenzie Harris, let the gentleman help you,” Charlotte scolded. “You could fall trying to get those upstairs by yourself.”

  “She’s right,” Sarah said. “And he looks like he might be strong enough.”

  Gavin grinned. “Miss Sarah, if ever I start to think too highly of myself, I wi
ll be sure to come by and spend an afternoon with you.”

  “Bring me your grandma’s lobster bisque recipe and you’d be welcome,” she said.

  Gavin raised his eyebrows. “She’d skin me alive for giving away her most prized recipe. That’s a pretty steep fee to have my ego checked.”

  Sarah shrugged. “That’s my price.”

  “Who are you kidding?” Charlotte asked. “You’d whittle him down to size just for the fun of it and you know it.”

  Sarah glanced away, making no comment, which Mac took to mean she conceded the point without having to actually say so.

  “I’m sorry, you were saying something earlier about people changing?” she said to Gavin. She gave him a pointed look to let him know the sisters had not changed one iota over the years.

  He grinned at her and Mac couldn’t help but return it. The man’s smile was infectious and she was pleased to have been the one to make him look, well, happy. She tried to shake it off but her smile would not be budged; best to get the man away from her ASAP.

  “Follow me, please.” She grabbed her garment bag and her carry-on and strode into the house, leaving Gavin to follow with her suitcase.

  “I’ll make some iced tea,” Charlotte called up the stairs after them.

  “Thank you,” Mac called back.

  She glanced over her shoulder to see Charlotte head toward the kitchen while Sarah watched Mac and Gavin from the foot of the staircase with a speculative gleam in her eye. Oh, that couldn’t be good. Sarah never missed anything.

  Mac’s room was the third on the right, overlooking the side yard and the short wooden fence that separated their property from the neighbor’s. At some point in her post-college years, Mac had come for a visit and transformed her teenage lair into a grown-up’s room.

  She sighed with relief when she entered and found the room looking very utilitarian, with its white furniture and soft green bedspread and matching curtains. There were no boy band posters on the wall or stuffed animals anywhere to be seen; absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about. Thank goodness.

  She dropped her carry-on on the wooden floor and gestured for Gavin to park her bag beside it. She hung her garment bag in the closet and turned to find Gavin checking out her room as if trying to get a sense of the girl who used to live here.