Rita turned around, her mouth a big round “O”. “You’re kidding me,” she said in a hushed voice. “What did you say?”
“Told her to go away and leave me alone. Told her to keep her family over there. That’s all.”
Rita shook her head as she slipped the spatula under a pancake and flipped it. “Well. I don’t know what to say. I can’t wait to get over there with a pie.”
“You still want to go over there with your greeting service?”
“Of course! Especially now. ‘Know thy enemy,’ dear. If she’s going to establish herself as your enemy, then I really need to know what she’s doing. And to do that, I need to be neighborly. And taking a pie over is a neighborly thing to do.”
“Wow. You don’t have any underlying motives toward me, do you?”
“Goodness, of course not! You’re practically family.” She set a plate of pancakes and bacon on the table in front of Lauren and took her own place.
“I’ve been so tired. It would be Allison’s birthday next week, and I keep thinking about her.”
“Of course you do.”
“And when she threatened Allie’s dog, I just . . . I’m glad you’re here.” She took a bite of her meal. “Hey, how did Bert do with the sleep study?”
“They sent him home with an oxygenator when I picked him up this morning. Supposed to help. It’s probably just going to be one more thing that will keep me from sleeping.”
“But maybe it will help him. And if it helps him, it should help you, too,” Lauren said positively.
“I can only hope.”
* * *
The moving van had disappeared from across the street and the newcomers were quieter than they had been the night before, but the two women decided to take a break from the front porch in favor of the privacy of the Williams’ back yard when they reconvened later that evening. As they enjoyed after dinner drinks, Lauren kept an eye on Mop, next door in her own back yard. The breeze had picked up, and the dog frolicked after leaves that blew randomly down from the trees.
She held up the padlock she had bought that afternoon. “Here it is! I had to buy a hasp, too. I’ll install it tomorrow.”
“I’ll send Bert over to put it on for you.”
“I can do it myself, Rita.”
“Oh, I know you can. You’re probably more capable than most men. But it’ll give Bert something to do. He likes to feel needed, too, and he can’t get enough real fix-it jobs. Right, dear?”
“Yes, Rita,” the stooped old man said, letting the screen door slam as he stepped out onto the porch. “Wait a minute. What am I agreeing to?” He sat down in one of the porch chairs, set his full beer bottle down, and shook a cigarette out of a half-empty pack.
“Well, for one, that’s a beastly, disgusting habit. No wonder you need oxygen.”
“No, I need the oxygen because you use it all up, gossiping like you do. Scientific research. Peer-reviewed.” He gave Lauren a sidelong look and winked one mischievous blue eye.
“Why don’t you stop over to Lauren’s tomorrow and put up the hasp on her gate.”
Bert blew out a plume of smoke and looked at the lock and hasp that lay on the table. “All right. I can do that. Should take all of five minutes.” He took a swig off of his beer.
“Thank you, Bert!” Lauren grinned at him and gave him an exaggerated wink.
Rita laughed. “Well, the old battleaxe did have an earful to say about you and how rude and mean you are, young lady.”
“I’ll bet.”
“She loved the pie.”
“Of course, she did! Who doesn’t love your pie. Pumpkin?”
“’Tis the season.”
“Go on.”
“Well, she’s thirty-something years old.”
“Really? She looks almost fifty.”
“Yes, she does look quite worn. The big boy is her brother. They’re here from Virginia. They moved to New York because her sister has been hospitalized for some reason, don’t ask me why, I don’t remember. The kids are her sister’s kids.”
“Wow. What else?”
“Her house is disgusting. I mean, you always expect mess, clutter, and dust, but hers goes beyond the pale. I should cut her some slack, since they just moved in and everything is everywhere, you know? But I don’t think that she even cleaned up the house before they moved in. I don’t think anyone has cleaned that house since old man Lane passed on, bless his soul. I tried to help him out with that, but he was so ornery. Never wanted anyone over there. Kind of miss the old codger.”
“Yeah, it was too bad that we lost him. I miss him, too,” Lauren agreed.
“So she just got a job a few blocks from here, at GeneSystems. She starts tomorrow night.”
“Wow, that’s pretty fast.”
“Well, that place doesn’t care. They always need people, they have a big turnover. So she’ll be working eleven at night to seven in the morning. She’ll be walking. They don’t own a vehicle. She doesn’t have a license, and he drove the moving van without one.”
“Is that how they got here from Virginia?”
“Apparently.”
“Huh. What else?”
“That’s about it. I cut out all the swearing and et cetera, and that’s pretty much what was left.”
“You mean you’ve run out of things to say?” Bert interjected, taking another pull off his cigarette and tapping the ash into a small glass ashtray.
“No, just a temporary lull, Bertram.”
“Better enjoy it while I can.” He put out the cigarette and sat back. “Nice night.”
The three sat in silence for a while, sipping their drinks as the sun went down. Mop presently broke the silence, barking through the fence at Lauren.
“You’re being paged,” Rita said.
“Yup,” Lauren agreed. She had fallen into a reflective state, staring out into the night. It seemed that her emotions had left her. She felt utterly empty inside, and for that, she was glad. She sometimes felt that it was better not to feel anything than to feel the constant, bruised ache of her emotions.
“Hold on!” She called over to Mop. His ears perked up and he stood watching her, wearing his go-to expression, with his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. She rinsed her glass in Rita’s kitchen sink, then headed home after a brief goodnight to her hosts.
She searched for a new book to read on her tablet, but when she found one, it remained unopened. Instead, she sat numbly in front of the television set, watching some mindless sitcom. After about an hour, she stirred. Mop followed on her heels as she made her evening rounds. Satisfied that the house was locked down, she retreated to her bedroom. With Mop snoozing beside her, Lauren fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
* * *
In better spirits than she’d experienced in many months, Lauren rounded the bends at Southgate Trail, where she often took Mop to walk. She hadn’t been for a good walk in the woods in a while. It felt good to be outside, moving down the cedar-strewn path. She had dressed warmly, as the morning chill had accompanied the advent of deep fall. The air held a new, fresh, clean bite that brought a bright pink flush to Lauren’s cheeks and helped to clear her mind.
The English shepherd trotted along beside her. At first, he had bounded around at the numerous chipmunks and squirrels, pausing with his chest to the ground, inviting them to play; but Lauren had quickly gotten him calmed and into the rhythm of the walk, and now he remained at her side as the tiny rodents scattered at their approach.
Human and canine paused at the pond. All seemed quiet, except for life beneath the water’s surface. The lily pads shifted as fish, swimming beneath the broad leaves, brushed against them.
At the car afterward, Lauren poured Mop a bowl of water and praised him. “That was a good walk, buddy! We walked . . .” she unhooked her pedometer from her waistband and looked at it closely: “Five-point three-six miles! Over five miles! Good job!” She held out her hand. Mop put his paw on Lauren’s palm and she fed him a tre
at. She knelt and put her arms around the dog’s sturdy body. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she told him, squeezing him until he let out a small grunt. “I really wish Allie and Mike were here to do this with us, though.” She let go and looked into his big brown doggy eyes. “You look as sad as I feel, sometimes. I’ll bet you miss them just as much as I do.” He tipped his head sideways. Lauren ruffled his head with her palm.
Back home, Lauren let him out the back door and checked to make sure the gate was latched. She ran upstairs to the bathroom and started the water running for a bath. Waiting for the tub to fill, she glanced out the window and saw that the sky had grown full of ominous gray clouds. Small drops of rain began to tap against the window. Better bring Mop in, she thought.
As she headed down the stairs, a volley of barking and shouting erupted outside. Then Lauren heard the screech of brakes, a loud thump, and a high-pitched “Yipe!”
“Lauren! Lauren!” She heard Rita yelling her name outside. She took the remaining steps two at a time, beginning to panic, her inner voice repeating, Oh, my God, oh my God, Mop got hit, Mop got hit! She burst through the front door and ran outside. The cold, fine rain covered her face in a blanket-like mist.
“Mop!” she screamed. She ran to the street, where a mound of black and white fur lay limply on the wet pavement in front of an idling black car. She fell to her knees beside the dog.
“Mop, Mop!” She felt his body, looking for injury. In the glare of the car’s headlights, which reflected brightly against the surreal mist, she saw his head, which had taken the greatest impact. The dog’s skull looked misshapen. The one eye that she could see was open and lifeless, surrounded by bloody, matted fur and broken fragments of bone. Her voice rose in anguish. “Noooooo, nooooo, Mop!”
“Honey, honey!” Rita was beside her. “Don’t look, don’t look!” The older woman wrapped her arms around Lauren and pulled her to the side so that she blocked the younger woman’s view.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, the little boy ran out and the dog was right behind him, I tried to stop, I didn’t mean to hurt your dog!” The man’s voice cut through Lauren’s heartbroken sobbing. She looked up and saw the young man standing just behind his open car door.
“You!” she shouted. She stumbled to her feet, shrugging off Rita’s embrace, and launched herself at the man. She shoved the car door as hard as she could, slamming him between the door and the car’s frame. “You killed Allie’ dog! He was all I had left!”
“Hey! I’m trying to apologize!” He tried to hold off Lauren’s vicious attack as she slammed the door repeatedly against his body.
“You wouldn’t have to apologize if you weren’t speeding down the road!”
“Lauren! Lauren, stop! You’re going to get yourself in trouble! Bert, help me!”
Bert and Rita dragged Lauren away from the car, and she gave in and turned away. As she did so, she saw Rosalie Preacher standing in her yard across the street. Her sallow face wore a smug, satisfied smile. She patted her nephew’s back as she observed the spectacle unfolding in the street.
Rita gave Bert a look, and he responded with a slight nod. He led Lauren back to the Williams’ house and into the living room. He gently lowered her on to the sofa.
“You stay right here for a few minutes, okay?”
She simply nodded, unable to speak. She curled up on the sofa, shivering in her wet clothes. Cold water dripped from her hair and ran down the back of her shirt.
Bert went out to his garage and grabbed a tarp. When he returned to the scene of the accident, Rita was talking to the driver of the car that had hit Mop. “The dog belonged to her daughter. Her daughter and her husband were shot in the Parkhurst Middle School shooting this year,” she was saying. “You had no business driving so fast through a clearly marked speed zone.”
The young man’s face tightened with distress. “That’s terrible! Now I feel even worse!”
“Do something to help, then,” Bert said, beckoning him toward the body of the dog, which lay in the rain on the shiny pavement.
Together, they rolled the body in the tarp. When they were finished, Bert turned around and waved an arm at several of the neighborhood residents that had gathered in the street and on the sidewalk to look on with sympathetic expressions. “You all can go home. Show some respect, already. What, don’t you people know enough to get in out of the rain?”
The neighbors disbursed, murmuring quietly to one another. All except for Rosalie Preacher, who continued to smirk as the young man lifted the tarp-wrapped canine from the pavement. Bert stopped and glared at her with laser-blue eyes. Unnerved, she turned away, pulling the boy with her.
“Aunt Rosalie, did the doggie die?” The little girl, Elaine, asked. Her aunt’s response was unintelligible as they disappeared into their house.
Bert sighed. He looked at the young man holding the tarp. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Jack Phillips, sir.”
“This way.” Bert led Jack out to his back yard shed, where Jack lay the dog’s body down gently on the floor. Bert figured it would do temporarily until Lauren could get herself together.
When the road was empty, the rain washed the blood and bone splinters from the pavement.
“I brought you some warm, dry clothes from your house,” Rita said, sitting beside Lauren on the sofa. “I noticed your bath was running, so I shut the water off. You can take your bath here. I don’t want you to be alone right now.”
“Thank you,” Lauren said in a raspy voice.
“Why don’t you go on up? You must be chilled to the bone. You need to get out of those wet clothes and get warmed up.”
Only at her friend’s mention of it did the feel of her cold wet clothes clinging to her skin register to Lauren. She trudged up Rita’s thickly carpeted stairs to the bathroom and gratefully sank through the thick layer of bubbles and into the hot water. She lay back against the end of the tub, closed her eyes, and tried to process what had just happened.
Gradually Lauren became aware of the murmur of voices. Sitting up slightly, she cocked her head to the side, listening, trying to bring the sound into focus. She looked over the side of the Williams’ claw-foot bathtub and noticed the heat vent. Rita and Bertram must be having a conversation in their kitchen, which was located directly below their bathroom. Their voices drifted up through the vent.
“You really think she did it on purpose?” Rita was saying to her husband.
Lauren stilled, straining to hear.
“Rita, I am telling you. I looked out the window because I heard the dog barking, and I saw that woman standing there. She was looking down the street. Then she called to the kid kinda sudden. She was waving, yelling that he had to come home then, that he needed to get back across the street right away. As soon as the kid was out of the way, bam! That car hit the dog. That’s how it looked. Set up at the last minute.”
“Well, from what I’ve seen of her, I wouldn’t put it past her. And I saw that smile on her face. That woman was happy. Smug. What I wouldn’t have done to go over there and wipe that smile right off her face! What are we going to do? Should we tell Lauren?”
“You know I don’t gossip. I don’t make accusations lightly, either. I think she did do it on purpose, but I don’t think it will help Lauren’s situation for her to know that. Who knows how it will affect her? I think we should keep it to ourselves, but behavior like that . . . anyone who would deliberately do something like that . . . I can’t have it. Not so close to where I live. You and I are going to have to figure something out, because who knows what else that woman is capable of?”
“How am I going to keep it to myself, when Lauren has the right to know? It’ll kill me to keep my mouth shut.”
“You’ll do what you need to do.”
But it was too late. Lauren had already heard every word.
Once home, Lauren walked through her empty house to the kitchen. She saw the padlock and hasp lying on the kitchen table. She grabbed the padl
ock and looked at it for a moment.
“Fuck!” she screamed, and threw the lock as hard as she could. Its weight carried it straight through the windowpane, which shattered on impact and whose pieces shattered a second time when they hit the kitchen linoleum and the back porch.
Only a few seconds passed before Rita was calling her name.
“Lauren? Are you all right?” Rita’s red, springy curls appeared on the other side of the broken window. “Oh, shit. Lauren?” She came through the kitchen door, Bert right behind her.
“Oh, honey, oh dear.” She held the sobbing Lauren once again. “I can’t stand this! I can’t stand seeing you this way!”
“You don’t have to.” Lauren said, the word broken by her sobs, her chest heaving. “You don’t need to be here.”
“Yes, I do,” Rita insisted firmly. “Bert and I are going to fix this for you. Aren’t, we, Bert?”
“Yep,” Bert responded. He was already sweeping up the broken glass with Lauren’s kitchen broom.
But neither of them was talking about the broken window.
Lauren didn’t fall into the numb depression she had experienced when she lost Michael and Allison. Her mind worked overtime, thinking about Rosalie Preacher. Cold anger motivated her, propelling her through her subsequent days, during which, when she replayed it over in her head, she kept seeing Rosalie Preacher standing in her front yard with a satisfied smirk on her face, patting her nephew, Brandon, on the back. The more she put that split-second together with the conversation she’d overheard, the more convinced Lauren became that Rosalie Preacher had seen and taken an opportunity to get back at Lauren for dismissing her.
But she couldn’t prove it. Her dog had run across street, excited at chasing a potential new playmate.
Rosalie Preacher had killed her daughter’s dog, the last remaining member of Lauren’s family. She had no siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents. She had been placed in the foster system at an early age, and had grown up in several foster homes. One of the only things she had ever wished for in life had been an average, traditional family. With her marriage to Michael and then Allison’s birth, Lauren’s dream had come true. A real family, with a family dog. She had cherished her husband and daughter, and then her daughter’s dog.
Blood and Bone: A Smattering of Unease Page 14