Honest to Dog

by Neil Plakcy

  “Grew up here, lived in New York and California for a while, then came back after my divorce with my tail between my legs to start over.”

  “Yeah, I’m trying to start over myself,” he said. “I moved down here to get close to the kids, but we’re having a rocky time of it, and my ex isn’t making it easy for me, either.”

  I guessed I was fortunate that my ex had remarried soon after our divorce, and we’d had very little contact since then.

  “Ethan hates my guts and Maddie’s just confused,” Doug continued. “But I’m in it for the long haul. Not going to let them go.”

  I saw the way he looked at his kids as they returned along the towpath, and I hoped he’d be able to manage the reconciliation he wanted. Rochester roused himself and ambled down the canal bank toward the kids and the Yorkie.

  Maybe my golden and I could help Doug, especially if he was able to take over the seminar at Friar Lake, and we rekindled our friendship. The first step, then, was to recruit Doug’s help. “Are you busy this weekend?” I asked Doug, as we stood up. “I need somebody to lead a seminar on personal finance, and Tor suggested you might be able to.”

  He thought for a moment. “Catherine has the kids this weekend, so I’m at loose ends. All I’d be doing is sitting around my apartment.”

  “Hey, hold on. Did you marry Catherine Hollister?” Catherine had been an English major, like I was, and we’d been in several seminars together. I remembered that she’d been dating Dougie senior year.

  “Yeah. As soon as I got my MBA. We moved to New York and I went to work in public finance, and Catherine got one of those secretarial jobs in publishing that they pretend is really an editorial one.”

  “I thought about one of those myself,” I said. “Couldn’t type fast enough, though.”

  “She finally quit when she got pregnant with Ethan, and then after Maddie was born we bought a house in Westchester. I worked my ass off to support everybody, traveled nearly every week for business. Didn’t notice my marriage was falling apart until it was too late.” He shrugged. “Catherine wanted a new start after the divorce. She has these cousins down here, so she sold our house and bought one here.”

  “That’s why you moved down here?”

  He nodded. “I hunted for a job for a couple of months, talking to everybody I could. I’d met Shawn at a conference a couple of years ago, right after he started Beauceron, and I got back in touch. We talked for a while, and eventually he offered me a job. But it’s all on commission, though, so I’ve got to work my tail off to build up a client base.”

  “Then this seminar could work out for you,” I said. “Maybe you can pick up a couple of new clients.”

  “That would be good,” he said. “I need to start generating some revenue. Catherine’s alimony and the child support is bleeding me dry.” He shook his head. “The other day Maddie told me Mommy has a boyfriend. I didn’t say anything to her, but I hope it’s true. If Catherine remarries then I’ll be free of the alimony.”

  “I can pay you for the weekend,” I said. “I remember being in your situation and I know that every little bit helps. Why don’t I email you the handout and presentation that the professor who was going to lead things put together? We can talk after you take a look at it.”

  “Sure, I’ll give it a look.” He gave me his business card as Rochester romped back down the bank toward me, followed by Pixie, Ethan and Madison.

  “Shawn and I bonded because both of us went through bad divorces,” Doug said. “At least he got to keep his dog. Big boy, comes to work with him every day.”

  “What kind of dog?”

  “A Beauceron, of course,” he said. “French version of a German Shepherd.”

  Rochester rushed up to me, and I scratched beneath his chin. “Hey, boy, did you have fun playing with Pixie?”

  “Your dog is big,” Madison said.

  “But he’s cool,” Ethan said, and for the first time he smiled. “My mom says we can’t get a big dog because they drool and shed too much.”

  “Once I’m settled down here maybe I’ll get a dog,” Doug said. “When you come over on weekends you can play with him.”

  Ethan’s face darkened. “Whatever,” he said.

  Helping Doug reconcile with his kids would be a big job. But I wanted to give it a try, and I knew Rochester could help. Doug would be doing me a huge favor if he took on the investment seminar, so I’d owe him.

  I resolved to think about what I could do as soon as my first program at Friar Lake was finished.

  3 – Fine Tuning

  Eight months before, Eastern’s president had asked me to take on the responsibility of creating a modern conference center out of a nineteenth-century stone abbey in the countryside a few miles from campus. I was happy to have secured a job that suited my abilities in communication and organization, and I liked that my commute ran along the Delaware River instead of an anonymous highway.

  The next morning it was warm enough to roll the windows down on the way up to Friar Lake, and Rochester got to stick his head out into the spring air. A separate channel of the Delaware bordered River Road north of Stewart’s Crossing, and I could see through the leafless trees to the low-lying land. The water level was high after the spring snow melt, and though the river was broad and placid, the houses on the Pennsylvania side seemed very vulnerable to flood, especially as the bank on the Jersey side was much steeper. I still remembered stories my parents told of the hurricane that had destroyed the bridge between Yardley and West Trenton.

  Friar Lake was an impressive property, with a Gothic-style chapel and a cluster of dormitories and other buildings built of native fieldstone. Its hilltop location provided a vista of fields and forests down to the Delaware. A lot of work had gone into the restoration, and it was almost finished, with just a few punch list items remaining.

  As I parked next to the gatehouse where my office was, Joey Capodilupo crossed the lot and hailed me. He was a tall, good-looking guy in his early thirties, wearing neatly pressed jeans and an off-white fisherman’s sweater. An Eastern College ball cap was on his head backwards, the rising sun logo glinting in the early morning sunlight.

  Joey had worked for the construction company as project superintendent, and when most of the work had finished he had joined the College staff to manage the physical aspects of the property. “Small problem,” he said, as he walked up. Rochester stood up on his hind legs and nuzzled Joey’s crotch.

  “Down, Rochester!” I was energized by having recruited Doug Guilfoyle. “Problems solved are my specialty,” I said to Joey. “Come in to my office.”

  We walked inside, and I shucked my light jacket and sat at the desk in my office, behind the big window that looked out at the property. The buildings and grounds looked terrific, ready to accommodate a group of eager students. “What’s the problem?”

  “Our temporary certificate of occupancy expires tomorrow. The building inspector who needs to sign off is out sick, and I’m not getting any traction with anyone else in that office.”

  “I thought we had everything wrapped up weeks ago,” I said.

  He shook his head. “We had a couple of little issues we had to tidy up. But they’ve been finished since Monday, and I kept hoping he’d get better and come back to work.”

  “Our first guests are arriving tomorrow evening and we can’t let them on the property if we don’t have a certificate of occupancy,” I said. “What can I do to help? You want me to drive over to the township office?”

  “I tried that yesterday. Couldn’t get past the secretary.”

  “Show me what needs to be signed off, and then I’ll try my hand at some calls.”

  I hooked up Rochester’s leash, and we walked outside. The deciduous trees were in full leaf by then, and bright green shoots of daffodils and tulips poked through the dirt beside the entrance to the chapel. Birds chirped in the distance. Above us a jetliner flew silently through the sky.

  Joey led me through each of t
he open issues on the TCO. I’d learned a lot about construction during the renovation phase of the project, and the terms he used no longer seemed like such a foreign language.

  I left him at the classroom building, what had been the monks’ workshop, and walked back to my office.

  Friar Lake was my first real management position, and every day it seemed I had to learn a new skill. After getting my master’s in English from Columbia, I had taught in a private high school for a year while also adjuncting at one of the small colleges in Manhattan. Then I’d married Mary and followed her to California, where I had worked in a series of low-level tech jobs in Silicon Valley, writing manuals and building web pages.

  When I returned to Bucks County, I’d been lucky to get a part-time teaching job at Eastern, and after a couple of semesters of that, I’d been able to parlay my skill with databases into a job in the alumni relations office. All those experiences had helped me function in an academic environment, and led to my assignment at Friar Lake, where I had a million-dollar budget and a twenty-acre facility to manage, as well as a slate of programs to create and execute.

  It was important to me to succeed at Friar Lake so that I could feel my life was continuing on a forward trajectory. But right then, with yet another crisis looking, I felt overwhelmed by the responsibility.

  Rochester must have sensed my mood, because he nuzzled me once I sat down at my desk, and I spent a couple of minutes playing with him. I’d learned in the past couple of years that petting a dog could reduce ward off depression, lower blood pressure, and boost immunity, and Rochester was a champ at providing the unconditional love I needed.

  I could have called the college’s president to ask for his help, but I didn’t want to give up without trying myself. I called the number Joey had given me, where the secretary couldn’t help me, and the director of the department was unavailable.

  I thanked her politely. I had one more idea. I had met the township manager a few months before, when we hosted a ground-breaking ceremony at the Friar Lake, and he’d been delighted that the abbey was going to have a new life after the monks who lived there had moved on.

  Though as an educational institution, Eastern College was exempt from property taxes, it still pumped a lot of money into government coffers, from payroll taxes to college spending to the cash spent locally by students, faculty and staff. There had already been some buzz, led by the presence of the conference center, about an upscale residential development coming to what had been an undeveloped area of the township.

  After a couple of minutes on hold I was able to speak to the manager and plead my case. “As you can imagine, if we have to cancel our first program, that threatens the viability of Friar Lake as a conference center,” I said. “Someone has to sign off on extending our TCO, or better yet, on our permanent certificate of occupancy, before our first guests arrive tomorrow evening.”

  “Let me make some calls,” he said.

  I thanked him and hung up. Next on my agenda was Doug Guilfoyle. “Have you had a chance to look over the materials I sent you?” I asked.

  “I have. It looks pretty comprehensive. How many students do you have coming?”

  “Thirty-two.” Personal finance was a hot topic for our target audience, professionals in their forties and fifties who had capital to invest for their retirement. I had advertised the program extensively, in Eastern’s alumni magazine, in the New York Times and other publications. I was delighted to have that many people sign up for a program with no prior track record.

  “Awesome. Would it be okay to invite my boss to stop by? He went to Eastern, too, and it would be a good opportunity for him to see me in action.”

  “Sure. You can have him come to the opening reception tomorrow night—cocktails at six, followed by dinner.” I ran through the rest of the weekend’s agenda with him. “We have a whole complex here, including a kitchen and dormitories. I have a private room and bath set aside for you for both Friday and Saturday nights.”

  Soon after, I heard from the township manager. “I spoke to the director of building and zoning and he’s going to come out himself first thing tomorrow and if everything’s kosher you’ll get your CO.”

  I thanked him profusely and hung up. I found Joey in the classroom building fiddling with an air handler and told him what I’d learned. “You’re sure everything is fixed, right?”

  “Just doing a little fine tuning here,” he said. “Don’t worry, be happy.”

  Words to live by. As we drove home that evening, Rochester had his head out the window, his golden fur flying back like Tibetan prayer flags, and I wished I could be as happy and carefree as he was. Even after I took him for a long walk around the neighborhood, I kept pacing around the townhouse, fiddling with knickknacks, with Rochester right on my heels.

  “Steve, you’re getting on my nerves,” Lili said finally. “I need to focus on these papers and your agitation is distracting me. Why don’t you call Rick and see if he wants to get a beer with you? Have dinner with him, relax, come back when you’re mellower.”

  Rick Stemper and I had been acquaintances back in high school, but we’d become friends after I returned to town, bonded by bitterness over our divorces. He was a detective with the Stewart’s Crossing police department, and Rochester and I had helped him out in the past by providing information about a couple of his cases.

  I was about to protest that it was my house – but then I remembered that it was Lili’s home, too, since she’d moved in with me six months before. Yeah, I probably did need to chill out.

  I called Rick, and he said that he’d had a bad day and could use a beer and a burger, too. We arranged to meet at the Drunken Hessian, a bar in the center of town.

  I remembered what Joey had said, and repeated it to Rick. “Don’t worry, be happy.”

  He snorted, and I laughed. Maybe the inaugural seminar would go off without a hitch. Fingers crossed.

  4 – Cocktail Hour

  I parked at the back end of the lot behind the Drunken Hessian, where it butts up against the canal. The path on that side was much narrower than the one across the canal, and erosion of the bank made it more dangerous, so Rochester and I stuck to the other side for our walks.

  I stood there for a moment in the fading light, looking at the water and remembering Doug Guilfoyle and his kids, until I was startled by the beep of Rick’s horn as he pulled in beside my car.

  Rick and I were the same age, though his hair was grayer and thinner than mine. In his favor, he was in better shape, probably no heavier than he’d been in high school. He had a high-energy Australian shepherd, and he and Rascal ran every morning. Too bad Rochester was more of a meanderer than a runner.

  We walked inside the bar, which hadn’t changed since we were teenagers – the same scarred wooden booths, neon beer signs in the window. We settled in a wooden booth at the back, the table etched with decades of initials, and ordered a pitcher of Yards Brawler, a microbrew made in Philadelphia that the Drunken Hessian kept on tap.

  “So what’s got you so agitated that Lili kicked you out of the house?” Rick asked.

  I told him about the problems at Friar Lake.

  “Sounds like you have it all under control,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Do you ever worry that you just can’t handle everything on your plate?” I asked. “I’ve never done this kind of job before. I can’t anticipate what can go wrong because I have no experience, and so everything that happens blindsides me.”

  “You’d be surprised at the variety of crime that pops up, even in a small town like Stewart’s Crossing,” he said. “I can go from giving roadside sobriety tests to investigating a break-in to pulling in some kid from the high school for drugs.”

  I knew a lot about the variety of crimes Rick investigated, because I’d helped him out a few times. I held up my mug and said, “They say variety is the spice of life.”

  We clanked our glasses together at that, then ordered burgers and f
ries. “Before I forget, Sunday is Justin’s birthday. Tamsen’s having a party for him and you guys are invited.”

  Tamsen was the woman Rick had been dating, and Justin was her young son. “How old’s he going to be? Nine?”

  “Yup. I admire Tamsen so much – he’s a very active kid and it’s tough for him growing up without a father.” Tamsen’s husband had died in the Iraq war when Justin was very young.

  “It’s good that he has you,” I said. “You having any thoughts about making the arrangement permanent?”

  “You mean marrying Tamsen? It’s still early days yet. We haven’t even been dating a year. Though Justin has started to ask if I’m going to be his new dad.”

  From everything I’d seen, I knew that Rick needed someone to take care of, and while Tamsen was smart and independent enough to be a good match for him, she needed his help with Justin, who worshipped Rick. A marriage would work out well for all parties involved.

  ***

  As I’d told Doug, there were a couple of rooms in the Friar Lake dormitory set aside for staff, and I was going to be staying in one of them for the weekend, and I’d have to take Rochester with me, too.

  I often called him my Velcro dog, because he stuck beside me, following me around the house and the office, even if I just jumped up for a minute. I thought it was because of his background as a rescue dog, and then the death of his previous owner, my neighbor Caroline Kelly. He probably felt he had to keep an eye on me at all times to make sure nothing happened.

  Friday morning after I packed a bag of my clothes and toiletries, I put together for the long weekend, including food and toys for Rochester. Lili seemed happy to have a couple of days to herself, and she had planned a beauty salon appointment and dinner with a couple of her friends from the faculty. We kissed goodbye and she wished me luck with the program.

  My day began with a frantic call from the caterer. His van had broken down, and he had a kitchen full of food and no way to get it up to Friar Lake. I looked out the window, where I saw Joey Capodilupo sweeping the walkway in front of the chapel, and I had an idea. “How big a van do you need?” I asked.