“Boutique hotel. There is a difference.”
While Eli launched into an animated overview of what qualified as a boutique hotel, and why the distinction was so important, Cora took the opportunity to study him. Tall and scarecrow-skinny, he was wearing a cornflower-blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and heavy canvas dress pants. His pants were narrow and slightly cropped, exposing navy argyle socks and scuffed bowling-style shoes. Cora couldn’t tell if his geek-chic look was calculated or accidental. He was a tweed cap and vest away from a Newsies costume, but she supposed it worked for him.
“When we have more time, remind me to tell you about ‘key bombing.’ And did you know that you should never drink out of those glasses that are in your room at big chain hotels? They’ve got those little paper hats on so you think they’re clean, but they don’t actually wash them! They use”—he paused to let her curiosity build—“furniture polish! How disgusting is that?”
“Um, it’s horrifying, because I drink out of them all the time.” Cora hid a grin, amused by the way Eli didn’t just tell a story, but actually lived it as he spoke, gesturing dramatically like an actor.
“And you’ll never guess what’s all over ninety percent of the TV remotes in hotel rooms.” The words were coming out quickly, as if he couldn’t keep up with his thoughts.
“No clue.”
“Urine and semen.”
His words hung in the air for a moment before Cora burst out laughing.
“Wait, did I just say that?” Eli asked himself. “Did I really just say the word semen to you? Oh my God, I am the worst.” He leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling.
“I get it, humans are gross, that’s why I hang with dogs,” Cora said, trying to ease Eli’s embarrassment. She glanced down at her phone again and was surprised at how quickly the time had passed in his company. “Wow, she’s over twenty minutes late. It’s time for me to hit the road—”
“Not so fast,” Eli said quietly, staring across the lobby.
Cora followed his gaze to a young woman staggering toward them, loaded down with shopping bags. Her dyed blond hair had what looked like a days-old blowout that was starting to go greasy at the roots. Attractive in a slightly puffy, too-much-makeup kind of way, she wore gold mirrored leather high-tops, tight jeans that emphasized her thick legs, and an expensive-looking chunky white sweater coat that was too warm for the temperate spring day.
“Are you Cora? You must be Cora. I’m so sorry I’m late!”
“Hi, Beth Ann. I was just about to leave, I thought you forgot about our lesson. We’re really behind schedule, and I have another client booked right after you, so we can get started on Q and A and paperwork, but I have to leave on time.” Cora had little patience for people who didn’t respect her time. Plus, she noticed a blinged-out phone in Beth Ann’s hand. She had her phone and didn’t even have the common courtesy to text that she was running late.
Beth Ann furrowed her brow. “Okay, okay, that’s fine. Let’s hurry then.” She turned to face Eli. “Thanks for helping with this.”
Eli stood a few feet away, watching the women trade soft jabs. “My pleasure.” He turned to Cora. “The entire eleventh floor thanks you in advance. And I’m glad that you weren’t lobbied.” He bowed, turned on his heel, and walked toward the door.
Cora followed Beth Ann to the elevator, trying to focus on her new client’s disjointed monologue while digesting her thoughts about Eli.
“So what should I do about that?” Beth Ann asked.
Cora hadn’t heard a word Beth Ann had said. She defaulted to her standard answer. “I think we have our work cut out for us!” The elevator opened, and Cora heard Chanel’s keening barks and yowls the moment she stepped into the hallway.
Beth Ann turned to her and shrugged. “My baby doesn’t like it when I leave.”
The intensity of Chanel’s barking put Cora on edge. She was overly sensitive to dogs going through trauma, and she could tell that what she was hearing wasn’t just separation discomfort. The barks intensified as they got closer to Beth Ann’s door and reached operatic heights when the key hit the lock.
Beth Ann opened the door to her small, dark apartment. “There’s my baby! Momma’s home now! Yes, here I am!” Chanel panted and leaped at the pair as they walked in.
Cora had seen her fair share of unkempt dogs in her day, but Chanel was something to behold. The tiny yellow-white dog had dark tear stains that spread from the corners of her blackberry eyes to the tip of her nose. Her fur was matted tightly in some spots and patchy in others. The dog’s nails were so long that some of them had started to curl under. Beth Ann had told her that Chanel was a purebred toy poodle with champion lines from a local pet store, which didn’t seem possible, given the dog’s unmissable underbite and wonky ears. She also knew that the store in question was known for passing off puppy mill puppies as dogs of distinction with “papers.” People were so proud to say their dog was “AKC-registered,” but Cora knew that high-volume for-profit breeders who kept their dogs in squalor could easily get papers, and that having a “registered” dog was no guarantee of anything other than a steep price tag.
Cora knelt down to pet Chanel, and the trembling dog urinated a small puddle.
“Oh wow, she really had to go,” Cora said, looking up at Beth Ann. “Let’s get her outside quickly before we start.”
“I’ll just take her to the balcony to save time,” Beth Ann answered as she scooped up Chanel. Cora watched Beth Ann wind her way through stacks of boxes around the apartment, plop the dog on the balcony and shut the door.
“So she’s . . . balcony trained? She knows to potty out there?”
“Sort of. She kinda pees wherever she wants!” Beth Ann gestured to the floor, which was dotted with dark stains.
“Okay, so I guess I should add potty training to the list of things we need to cover.”
“Sure, we can do that! That would be great!” Beth Ann radiated a maniacal energy.
Cora nodded toward the boxes and stacks of clothing strewn around the apartment. “When did you move in? Unpacking is the worst part, right?”
Beth Ann giggled self-consciously. “I’ve been here for two years! I just can’t get my shit together!”
Cora looked around the apartment again with a critical eye. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink and strewn on nearly every surface. She spotted bags of clothing from Nordstrom, Saks, and J.Crew stacked on top of the moving boxes, but from what she could see spilling from them, everything appeared to be tags-on brand-new and untouched. The couch was piled with dresses on hangers, and the one on top was a stunning frothy pink ballerina-style dress from Neiman Marcus. A small pile of petrified poop was next to it on the couch cushion.
The reality of what Cora was facing hit her.
Beth Ann was a budding hoarder.
Chanel hopped on her back legs and scratched at the glass door, barking a machine-gun riff-riff-riff-riff until Beth Ann let her in. Chanel immediately ran to investigate Cora.
“She’s a cutie,” Cora said, ignoring the fact that the dog looked like a “before” photo from an animal shelter. “She could use a nail trim, though.” Down on her knees to get a closer look at the dog’s ravaged body, she started with the most pressing need first because she didn’t want to dump the laundry list of Chanel’s ailments on Beth Ann right out of the gate. She held the dog’s tiny paw in her hand. “I bet it’s uncomfortable for her to walk with nails this long.”
“Oh my gawd, there’s no way I could cut her nails! She’s insane! She goes into beast mode when I try to do any grooming!”
Cora masked her disapproval. “Hm. Well, she seems fine with me touching her paws. Let’s add grooming to the to-do list as well, and in the meantime maybe you can take her to your vet for a trim?” The list was growing longer and more complicated by the minute.
Just then Cora realized that her knees felt wet. She leaped up, and sure enough her jeans had blotchy circles on them.
“I think I knelt in a pee spot,” she said, gesturing to the evidence.
“Probably. It happens all the time. Don’t worry, I’ll clean it up later!”
Cora was beginning to feel claustrophobic. The disarray in the apartment, the dog in need, and the owner who seemed very lost were almost too much for Cora to take. She hoped that she’d be able to break through Beth Ann’s veneer of forced cheerfulness and help her understand how to take care of her dog.
“Beth Ann, look at how Chanel is sniffing around. That’s an obvious clue that she needs to go to the bathroom. I didn’t see her do anything when she was out on the balcony, so let’s get her outside before she has another accident. But I want to take her on a real walk, so get her leash, please.”
Beth Ann nodded and chanted to herself, “Leash, leash, leash, where is her leash?” as she dug through various stacks. She clearly had no idea where it was, which led Cora to conclude that Beth Ann probably didn’t walk her dog on a regular basis.
Chanel was sniffing and spinning more urgently, which meant that they needed to move quickly. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it, I have a leash in my bag. Just pick her up so she doesn’t go.”
Beth Ann acted as if she hadn’t heard Cora and continued moving items from one pile to another, still chanting, “Leash, leash, leash.” Cora ran to her bag to grab her all-purpose leash but was too late. Chanel squatted and dropped a giant runny pile of poop near the couch.
“That’s okay, baby!” Beth Ann shouted to her dog. She looked at Cora and grinned. “I guess you do have your work cut out for you!”
ELEVEN
* * *
ChienParfait.com’s top blog post was titled Brûler en Enfer, Boris Ershovich, with a whopping forty-two hits, the most of any on her site. Cora assumed the traffic was due to people trying to translate “burn in hell” into French and accidentally landing on her site. Her second most popular was Vas te Faire Foutre, Boris Ershovich, a post probably stumbled on by hapless folks looking to translate “Go fuck yourself.” She had a hard time saying the words out loud, but she couldn’t control what her fingers typed when she was on an Ershovich rampage. In her most recent post, titled Ça signifie la guerre, Boris Ershovich, she declared war after seeing him manhandle a puppy and challenged him to a train-off.
Though she sounded bulletproof when she wrote, she doubted that she could summon the same bravado on a TV screen. But still, she couldn’t stop thinking about Wade’s e-mail. Every time she looked at her inbox, there it was. She didn’t want to delete it, and she worried that she’d forget about it if she filed it, so it sat there like a turtle in the middle of the road, awaiting her attention.
The titles of many of her Ershovich posts were inflammatory, but the content was scientific to a fault. She worried that her few readers might get bored by her endless methodology comparisons, but she had to vent her anger about the damage he was doing in the name of training. Ershovich was abusive, and Cora not only pointed out why in her posts, but she also described how to approach typical behavior problems with a dog-friendly, scientific, replicable methodology.
Most of her non-Ershovich posts came from her clients’ lessons. Her series about leash aggression starred her long-term client Benson, the shepherd mix, whose incremental progress each week was enough to delight his guardian. Cora featured her client’s cat Baby, who always tried to take part in training alongside her canine brother. She wrote about the front door trick she’d shown Fran and even included a photo of Sydney in his doorknob tether setup. She always asked her clients’ permission before she wrote about their exploits, particularly when she took pictures of the dogs, but always managed to “forget” to tell them where to find the posts. Cora felt that she needed their blessing in order to write about them with a clear conscience, but she was afraid to get their feedback on what she produced. Her anonymity allowed her to express her feelings without judgment or repercussions. Something that wouldn’t be possible if she stepped into the limelight.
She logged on after her session with Beth Ann to write about the importance of grooming upkeep. Cora had a feeling that unfortunate Chanel would provide plenty of fodder for the blog, from potty training to socialization, all handled with her typical diplomacy. She never said anything negative about her clients, but she was still glad that she hid her identity when she wrote. She’d read other trainers’ blogs that spoke out against Ershovich and was shocked by the venom from his supporters in the comments sections. They claimed that trainers like Cora were just “jealous cookie-slingers” who couldn’t handle “red zone dogs.” Cora didn’t know if she could handle the backlash.
She took a peek at the dashboard, curious to see which posts, if any, were resonating. She was shocked to discover that the traffic to her two top Ershovich posts had doubled in a week. Then she dug deeper and saw that all of her posts about Ershovich had received a significant increase in traffic. Someone in Maryland was watching her blog very closely, checking back a few times per day to see if Cora had added anything new.
Cora texted her brother. “Can u tell me what’s up w CP? Traffic increase is weird.”
Josh texted back after a few minutes. “So weird. Gimme a sec to ck IP addys.”
Cora and her brother had nothing in common, but they found kinship in the tech side of her business. She was happy to hand him the reins, and he was happy to show off his skills and gain bragging rights to their parents about how much he was helping her.
She scanned the dashboard while she waited to hear back. Her posts mentioning Fritz all had a slight bump as well, but the majority of the hits were about Ershovich. Her phone dinged. “Almost all of them r the same IP addy. Don’t be freaked out . . .” The text ended.
She waited and freaked out. Josh loved a good cliffhanger. Her phone pinged again with a link from him. She opened it and scanned the confusing “WhoIs” data, scrolling down until she saw the IP address of the mystery reader who had been all over her blog.
The Washington Post.
TWELVE
* * *
“So did you forward your stuff for the audition yet?” Wade asked. He crossed his arms and stared at her, and with his shiny shaved head the pose made him look like a live-action version of Mr. Clean.
“You don’t give up, do you?” she answered with a smile. “I’m still thinking about it. The problem is I have zero experience with TV stuff. I’m just a regular old dog trainer.” His dog Daisy nosed through Cora’s bag as they chatted, well acquainted with the delights inside after four weeks of working together. Cora cleared her throat and Daisy plopped into a sheepish sit next to the bag. She nodded and mouthed “good girl” to her.
“I gotcha, I don’t want to force you into anything that might make you uncomfortable.” Wade shrugged his shoulders and paused a beat. “But I really think you should at least try.”
Cora laughed at his persistence, enjoying their camaraderie. “They want a résumé. I don’t have one! They want a headshot. I don’t have one! These are some major barriers to entry, Wade.”
“Actually they’re not. We can fudge a résumé for you, and Rachel can take your headshot. She’s got a great camera and beyond average skills, and we can use one of the backdrops I use for shooting. Done and done. Now what’s your excuse?”
“Uhhh . . . the biggest one of all: my skills. Or lack thereof.”
“Well, let’s figure that out right now. Maybe you’re right—maybe you’re not cut out for it. I’ll film you and that’ll decide it.” Wade pulled his phone from his back pocket. “Take Daisy and teach me something. I don’t care what it is, just pretend like you have an audience and you want to give them a lesson.”
“Right now? I feel stupid! This is weird!” Cora’s stress blush blossomed on her cheeks. She looked at Daisy, who was contentedly chewing on a bully stick pilfered from Cora’s bag. She could handle a family of six watching her work, but the thought of doing it in front of Wade and a camera made her queasy.
“Yup, we’re going t
o kill this beast. I’ll know if you’re a lost cause within three minutes, and if that’s the case I’ll find a nice way to break it to you and we’ll never speak of it again. Deal?”
“Bon sang,” she muttered to herself. “If this is the only way to get you to stop asking me about it, then okay.” Deep down, she was the tiniest bit excited to try, to know for sure if she had it in her.
She quickly thought about who she should channel for her first time on camera. Dr. York the Pet Vet, morning news correspondent, lovable geek, and friend to all animals? Skye Peterson, elegant pet stylist to the stars and creator of the Designer Doggy Diaper? Or perhaps Alice Goodwin, the beloved primatologist who radiated her warmth and compassion for animals through the TV screen?
Wade directed Cora to move to the center of the room with Daisy and pointed his phone at the duo. His wife Rachel’s decorating skewed Miami despite the fact that they lived in a quaint Craftsman-style bungalow, and the riotous yellows, teals, and pinks in their family room made for a cheerful setting for her first screen test. “Ready?” He snapped his fingers and pointed at her with a serious expression on his face. “You’re on.”
“Right now? I should go?”
Wade nodded, and Cora felt herself morph into dog trainer mode even though she felt queasy. She forgot all about channeling someone else, because she couldn’t be anyone but herself.
Her voice shook as she began talking, but after a few sentences she felt a sense of ease settle over her as the familiar words came tumbling out. She did this all day every day, and the well-worn grooves of habit, combined with her desire to impart the lesson, far outweighed the strangeness of having a camera pointed at her.
Daisy was a willing accomplice and performed every part of the “stay” training process with telepathic accuracy even though they had barely touched on it during their regular lessons. Normally Daisy was a clumsy, charming doofus during class, tripping over her own paws and drooling stalactites while she waited for her treats. But in front of the camera she was demo-dog perfect, as if in cahoots with Wade to make Cora look good.
Life on the Leash Page 6