Not That Kind of Girl

by Susan Donovan

  “How could he already have an order for my dog to be impounded?” she asked then, not bothering to hide her panic. “He hasn’t set foot out of the hospital! What’s going on here?”

  The two officers glanced at each other. “He made some calls from his bed,” one said.

  “Mr. Sandberg knows a lot of people in this town,” the other officer added.

  “No,” Roxie whispered, feeling her throat close up with panic. “He can’t do this to Lilith. I won’t let him.”

  * * *

  Because home for Eli was a four-thousand-acre ranch in southern Utah, there was no such thing as a quick trip there and back. The drive was twelve hours each way. Flying wasn’t much better, with a jet from San Francisco to Salt Lake, a long layover, and then a puddle-jumper flight to St. George. From there it was another two-hour drive to the outskirts of Panguitch, then down three miles of bumpy access road that ended at the gate to Dog-Eared Ranch. Despite all this, a few days at home was always Eli’s preferred method of relaxation. It was the only foolproof way to return his mind, body, and spirit to a state of equilibrium.

  What did it say about his current state, Eli wondered, that he’d canceled all appointments for the week and set out for home on a Monday afternoon? Did it mean he was so out of whack he couldn’t wait for the weekend? Did he need to put about eight hundred miles between himself and Roxie Bloom, the long-legged, dark-haired sensual volcano who’d nearly rocked him off course?

  Eli hoped to have it all figured out in a few days. In the meantime, he’d remind himself to breathe and enjoy the trip.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like San Francisco. He did. The city hummed with energy from the diversity of human beings who lived there. It had food, music, art, and architecture for every palette. Then there were the magical blue stretches of ocean and bay. The parks. The wind that whipped around the Golden Gate Bridge. The beauty of the city at night was a vision that sent shivers through him.

  But it all got to him after a while. The people and concrete and traffic and noise could make him feel jumpy. His core—that unshakable sense of who he was as a human being and a man—would start to feel just the slightest bit fuzzy. And when that happened, he knew it was time for a dose of never-ending mountain and sky, and the rolling waves of sagebrush topped by high-altitude cedar forest. He needed to be in a place that had more coyotes than cabs. He needed to go home.

  That’s how he found himself at the Salt Lake City International Airport that Monday evening, waiting for the SkyWest connecting flight to St. George. He looked at his cell phone and sighed with relief. In a few hours he’d be sitting on his porch, his dogs around him, a cold beer in his hand, and his familiar mountains rising in the darkness beyond.

  Of course, this idyllic homecoming would include the usual interrogation from his sister, Sondra, who’d never understood his San Francisco sabbatical in the first place.

  “Are you crazy?” she’d ask first, followed up with “Can’t you just let this go?” and, Eli’s favorite, “What are you—a glutton for punishment or something?”

  He smiled softly to himself and cradled the back of his head in his hands, watching, through the glass wall, the maintenance crew at work on the small sixteen-seat commuter plane. Of course she didn’t understand—how could she? Sondra knew who her mother and father were. When Bob Gallagher died last year, her world stayed in order. She grieved, of course, but the universe still made sense. It hadn’t been that way for Eli. He’d found out by accident, while getting his father’s papers in order for the attorney. In his hand he was suddenly holding a slightly yellowed legal document he never knew existed. In it, Robert W. Gallagher of Denver, Colorado, became the legal guardian of the illegitimate son of his new wife, the former Carole Broward Tisdale, also of Denver. The identity of the biological father was unknown. At the time of the adoption proceedings, the child in question was eighteen months old.

  Eli had sat there in his father’s study, numb with shock. It took a good half hour for him to thaw out, but when he did, he was on fire with anger, hurt, and the knowledge that he’d been betrayed. He’d been thirty-one years old, for God’s sake! When had they planned on telling him? How could they have justified keeping this from him for his entire life?

  In the depth of her mourning for her husband, Eli’s mother begged Eli to understand—it was about her shame, she said. She sat with him at the kitchen table, crying, telling a story about how she’d been a freshman at Berkeley when she found herself pregnant. It was 1977, a time closer to the dawn of Young Republicanism than the Summer of Love, but his mother apparently missed the memo. She’d spent her freshman year living the life of a UC Berkeley wild child—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, as the saying went. She told him, with her head bowed, that Eli had been a product of one of those random moments of abandon, during one of those pot-fogged nights, with one of those faceless (and occasionally nameless) men.

  His mother assured him that his father had loved him like his own, and was so very proud of his son. She told him that Bob Gallagher always saw Eli as a gift from God.

  Eli remembered how he had sat there at the table in silence as she told him the truth, listening to the sound of his own breathing and the howl of coyotes in the desert night. He had tried to take it all in, put the new information in some kind of order in his heart, but Eli’s understanding of the world had shifted that night.

  Unknown? His father was unknown?

  From that moment on, Eli was determined to fill in the blank.

  His cell phone vibrated inside the front pocket of his jacket. It was Sondra, making sure his flight was on time and informing him she’d already left the ranch for St. George to pick him up. Should they plan on stopping somewhere for supper? she wondered. Did he want to pick up supplies in town before they headed back? Should she go back for a couple of the dogs? Or maybe all of them? Or, since a storm was forecast, should she just keep driving and forget the dogs?

  An overhead announcement told him to board the plane, so he ended the conversation with Sondra. Eli stood, grabbed his carry-on, and set his hat back on his head. He was just one passenger away from handing over his boarding pass when the phone buzzed again. Not even looking at the number, he stepped out of line and answered with a laugh. “Let me guess—you called to remind me to use the bathroom before I get on the plane?”

  When he heard silence in place of one of Sondra’s chuckles, he removed the phone from his ear and checked the screen. The call hadn’t come from home—it was a San Francisco number he didn’t recognize. Eli put the phone back to his ear. “Pardon me. Hello?”

  The woman’s voice was so soft he could hardly hear it with the airport background noise. “Have I reached Eli Gallagher?” she asked.

  “Yes. Who’s calling? Can you speak a little louder?”

  There was a tap on his shoulder. “Sir, you really need to board now,” the SkyWest employee said, smiling politely.

  “Sure. Be right there.” But with the momentary distraction, Eli had missed whatever reply he’d gotten from the caller. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

  The mystery woman laughed. “Of course you’d want me to repeat it. You get off on hearing women beg for help, is that it?”

  Eli blinked. The voice was clearer and louder now. He felt his belly drop to his boots.

  “What did I expect?” she continued with renewed vigor. “That you’d be something other than an arrogant bastard about this? My God, I must have been crazy to think you’d help me.”

  “Roxanne?”

  More silence.

  “This is Roxanne Bloom, correct?”

  “How in the world would you know it was me?” she asked sharply.

  Eli laughed and was about to answer her but lost his train of thought when the airline employee tapped his shoulder again, this time without the friendly smile. He held up his index finger to indicate he’d just be another minute.

  “Because I know you, Roxanne,” was Eli’s answer. Immedi
ately, he realized how odd his statement sounded. What he’d meant to say was, Because I know your voice. Talk about losing his equilibrium!

  “I hardly think so,” she said, her words flat.

  “Ms. Bloom, is there something I can do for you? I don’t mean to be rude but they’re holding a plane for me.”

  “A plane? But you can’t!” Roxie’s voice softened again. She sounded truly frightened. “Oh, God! What am I going to do?”

  If Eli heard right, Roxie then began to cry.

  “Tell me exactly what’s happened,” he said, already guessing the general nature of this call. With everything that had transpired between them, there could be only one reason Roxanne Bloom would ever contact him—her dog had attacked someone and she needed his help.

  “Yesterday, Animal Control took her … they’re going to destroy … Oh, God … I have to prove she can be rehabilitated or they’ll put her down!” Roxie stopped a moment, unable to speak. Eli heard her struggle to contain her emotions. “There’s a hearing …”

  That’s when Eli heard Bea Latimer’s voice in the background, insisting Roxanne spit it out.

  “Please! I can’t let them kill her! You’ve got to help me. Please come back!”

  Eli sighed deeply, then made his way to the chair he’d vacated only moments before. He let his overnight bag fall to the floor and took a seat. “Did she bite someone, Roxie?” he asked calmly, his voice free of blame.

  She cried hard.

  “Roxanne, please listen to me.”

  She cried some more.

  “Was the injury serious?”

  “No!” She sniffed, pulling herself together. “It was totally minor stuff. He had some lacerations to his throat, but no major arteries were severed or anything.”

  Eli’s eyes went wide. “I see.”

  “All it took was ten stitches and some intravenous antibiotics and he was outta there!”

  Eli coughed. “But he’ll be all right?”

  “Oh, sure. He’s going to need some plastic surgery down the road, but, you know, nothing major.”

  “Ah,” Eli said, realizing he’d hate to hear what Roxie considered a serious injury. “And who, exactly, did Lilith bite?”

  “My pig-faced dickhead of an ex-boyfriend.”

  Eli sucked on the inside of his cheek a moment before he continued. “And where is the dog right now?”

  “They’ve got her. They said I can’t take her home until after …” Roxie stopped. In fact, it sounded like she’d stopped breathing altogether.

  “Roxie?”

  She let out a long, low howl of grief. The emotional pain he heard in her cry would’ve brought him to his knees if he weren’t already sitting. It reminded him a great deal of the way she’d cried at the horse paddock just the day before.

  Eli took a slow and steady breath. He pulled air into his chest and let it out through his nose. He saw where this was headed, and he would need to be steady. In fact, he would need to be steady enough for the three of them—himself, Roxanne, and her dog. And that was saying something.

  He smiled softly, realizing that the whole situation had the feel of inevitability to it. Here he was, in an airport, trying his best to run away from Roxie Bloom, and now it seemed he’d be running to her, instead.

  Eli grabbed his bag once more and made his way to the gate. As Roxie continued to cry into the phone, he informed the airline that he had an emergency and would be returning to the main terminal to book a flight back to San Francisco.

  He started walking, the phone to his ear.

  “Everything is going to be all right, Roxie,” he told her. “I’ll be back by morning. We’ll figure this out together.”

  “But … you mean you’re not leaving town?” She sounded incredulous. “You’re going to help me?”

  “Yes. I’ll help you.”

  What came next was clearly a stretch for Roxie. She’d become a little rusty at it, no doubt. But she managed to fix her mouth around those two little words and then say them out loud—to a man, no less. To Eli.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  Roxanne sat at an outdoor table at the Starbucks on Diamond Heights, waiting for Eli Gallagher to show. Not that he was late. She was early. Roxie’s plan was to appear relaxed and businesslike from the get-go, so she’d given herself a little extra time to accomplish that. She wanted Eli Gallagher to come down the sidewalk and see her sitting with perfect posture, legs crossed casually, sipping on her café au lait with an air of dignified nonchalance.

  To aid in this, she’d taken extra care with her appearance that morning, following a grooming routine much like the one she relied on back when she covered criminal courts for the Herald, back when she was forced to leave the house every day to do her job, back when her livelihood required regular, actual, face-to-face human contact. So that morning she’d applied a tasteful amount of makeup and straightened her long hair into a sleek but casual style. She’d chosen a pair of peep-toe heels, charcoal gray dress slacks with a scarf belt, and a tailored blouse in a pale lilac color. She wore modest silver hoops in her ears and an heirloom marcasite ring on her left hand.

  The goal was get an immediate positive reaction from Eli. She wanted him to see her and say something to himself along the lines of, That woman sure has it together! She’d even settle for, She certainly looks sophisticated and lovely today.

  Roxanne reached for her cardboard-wrapped coffee cup and took a large slurp. Ha! Who was she kidding? She’d be lucky if the guy didn’t stop dead in his tracks and then run away in horror. She knew better than to think that a little lip gloss and under-eye concealer would hide the fact that she hadn’t slept for two nights in a row. Instead of sleeping, she’d been crying and blowing her nose, eating caramel corn and cheese puffs while dividing her zombielike attention between a cable shopping network’s “Cavalcade of Beauty” clearance special and the 2,351 Google results that appeared when she typed the words “Eli Gallagher, dog whisperer” into her laptop.

  How was she supposed to sleep? Lilith wasn’t with her. For the first time in nearly a year, Roxanne had been spending the night completely, utterly, and pathetically alone, all while her sweet girl was locked up in dog prison, unjustly accused. Sleep hadn’t even been an option.

  Roxanne sighed deeply. She put down her cup. She could do this. She could deal with Gallagher. As much as it pained her, she would do whatever it took to save her dog. Whatever he said to do, she’d do it. She owed Lilith that.

  Besides, Roxie Bloom had never been short on balls. She’d interviewed mass murderers on death row. She’d coaxed scoops out of the most uptight assistant DAs. She’d waited in parking garages at night to corner hesitant sources. She’d been on the scene for child pornography arrests, foiled bomb plots, and murder-suicide investigations. Surely, she could ask one measly cowboy for a hand with dog training!

  All it would take was a little self-discipline. She would put aside her own anger and hurt and graciously accept Gallagher for who he was—an animal handler known for miraculously turning around even the most aggressive dogs. She’d just forget all the rest—the way her body caught fire the first time she saw him, the pain of his rejection, how she couldn’t stop thinking about him, how that single kiss at the paddock two days ago had contained enough electricity to light up the city of San Francisco for a month …

  “Excuse me.”

  Roxie nearly rocketed from her chair, the deep voice scared her so much. “Uh. Sure. No problem.” She scooted in a bit for the college kid trying to pass between tables. She realized her heart was pounding and her palms were sweaty.

  No more caffeine today, she decided.

  She checked her phone. Fifteen minutes to go. She let her eyes roam, scanning the morning neighborhood crowd. She noticed an elderly couple holding hands as they took a slow walk. She saw a happy, laughing man and woman pushing a stroller with a happy, laughing toddler occupan
t. She saw a middle-aged married couple a few tables away, chatting cheerfully.

  She knew it was an exaggeration, but right at that moment she felt as if she were the only single person in San Francisco. It had been so long since she’d been part of a couple that she’d forgotten what it felt like.

  Had she really held hands with Raymond on the street like that? Had she looked up into his eyes and laughed? Had they had cheerful conversations? Had there really been good times before it all went to shit?

  Of course. It had been good with Raymond—right up until the Night of the Cigar.

  She’d been such a stupid, stupid girl.

  Roxie smiled tightly, recalling a conversation she’d had at that very same Starbucks table eight months before. Bea, Josie, and herself had sat here, eyes wide and faces flushed, as Ginger described her hot-and-heavy hookup with Lucio Montevez, the famous nature photographer. With a perfectly straight face, Ginger assured everyone she was starting menopause and was no longer fertile. What a crock! What a layer cake of delusional thinking! Because not only was Ginger not going through menopause, she was already pregnant as she spoke those words, but just didn’t know it.

  Then, Josie had served up her own delusion du jour, insisting that a woman could, indeed, find great sex and a great relationship all with the same man. She’d assured Ginger, “If it could happen for me, it could happen for you or Roxie or any woman!”

  Roxie recalled how, in her mind, she’d battled with her options: should she cut Josie some slack, seeing that she’d only just returned from her honeymoon and was drunk on love, or should she do everyone a favor and tell them the truth, for God’s sake?

  Since Bea was still reeling from Ginger’s kissing-and-telling, Roxie knew it was up to her to spread the gospel of reality. “In my experience, the hotter the sex, the harder the fall,” she’d told them. “You can’t have great sex and a great relationship with the same man. You’re going to have to settle for one or the other. It’s a universal law.”

  Ooh, had Josie been mad! In fact, it was the only real argument she’d ever had with her best friend. They’d gotten over it, in time. Roxie supposed that friends sometimes had to agree to disagree.