Why They Run the Way They Do

by Susan Perabo

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “There’s paperwork you gotta fill out, and there’s a form that needs signed by everyone in the household. I don’t want a dog coming back to me because someone here doesn’t want it.”

  “I won’t return the dog,” he said.

  “I know you’re thinking that’s true,” I said. “I know you—”

  “I won’t return the dog,” he said angrily. “No matter what.”

  “You feel that way now,” I said. “But you might change your mind if there’s someone harping on you about it every time it makes a noise or sheds some fur. Everyone has to sign off on the form. Everyone. No form, no dog.”

  He scowled. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  Here’s a fact: nobody wants a dog in November. Spring’s the best—no surprise there—and summer’s fine and early fall calls to mind pictures of happy dogs playing in leaf piles and even December brings out a few folks looking for a Christmas present. But nobody in the state of New Hampshire’s thinking about dogs those first weeks of bitter cold, leading up to Thanksgiving, when the threat of snow sits over every house big and small and it’s only a matter of time before simple things—getting to work, picking up groceries—aren’t so simple.

  Not that I didn’t knock myself out trying. I spent extra money for color ads in the local paper, taped signs in every store window, waived the twenty-dollar fee. This brought out a couple more people than usual, and after the home visits and the paperwork I was down to sixteen dogs by the middle of November. But I had to move faster. At this rate it would take well into the new year to find spots for them all, and I was pretty sure I didn’t have that long.

  My sister called, asking me to come down to Boston for Thanksgiving, but I told her I was too busy. I might have gone—there was something nice even thinking about it, a heavy meal and voices talking over each other and a football game on somewhere—but I was afraid if I went I would buckle and tell her about what was inside me, and I knew right where that would lead. By the time that turkey’s bones were simmering for soup I’d be in some specialist’s office and there’d be cousins and nieces and god knows who turning up with flowers.

  “Some day I’m just gonna come up there and kidnap you,” she said. “All alone in the old house with those dogs out back, it’s not right. You come live near me and we’ll go for lunch every day and play bridge with the other ladies on the block. Two sisters growing old together.”

  “What’ll Joe think of that?”

  “What Joe thinks of everything—that he should turn up the TV.”

  We’d thought, for almost a year when I was twenty-three and she was twenty-one, that her and I and the men we were fixing to marry would take vacations together, play shuffleboard on the deck of a cruise ship, ride donkeys down the Grand Canyon.

  “I miss you,” she said. “You might as well be a million miles away.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” I said. “Not now, but soon.”

  It was the next Friday, around lunchtime, when Jerry came out to my place. He drove a big pickup truck, shiny black and no more than a couple years old. He pulled past the dirt drive and onto the grass and on up to the kennel, which most people have the common courtesy not to do. He was already out of the truck and looking at the dogs by the time I’d gotten on my coat and gloves and made my way up there. He wasn’t dressed for the weather—it was twentysomething degrees, I bet—and he had his hands tucked into the pits of his flannel shirt.

  “Talked her into it, did ya?” I asked him.

  He didn’t look at me, just kept checking out the dogs. “Talked who into what?”

  “The one who didn’t want a dog. Promised her you’d take good care of it?”

  He rubbed his hands together and then blew into them. “Are there any fatter ones?”

  True, most of the outright strays were skin and bones. But there were at least three overweight dogs—orphaned by divorce or allergy most likely—standing not ten feet from him when he said this.

  “Look at that black one,” I said. A bit of dizziness blew through my head and I took hold of the fence pole to steady myself. “You want fatter than that?”

  “He a barker?”

  “They’re dogs,” I said. “They bark. But no, he’s not one that keeps you up nights. That one in the corner—he’s a fatty, too, and quiet. The two get on well. You want ’em both, I’ll charge you just for the one.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want two dogs,” he said. He still hadn’t looked at me.

  “You got a big yard, all fenced up. Shame to let it go to waste.”

  Now he finally turned. In the cold his face was a little gray, his eyes watery. “It’s not going to waste,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. “Come on down to the house and we’ll write it up.”

  I was stalling, really. The sky promised snow and probably no one else would come by today, and though being alone wasn’t something that’d bothered me for the last forty or so years, the truth was in the early afternoons it was starting to get to me just a little bit now. Plus maybe I could convince him if I gave him a cup of coffee. We walked down to the house. I hadn’t been much for picking up in the last couple months, and there was a lot of mess around the living room, including a couple empty boxes that the bulk Milk-Bones had come in that I’d just left lying near the front door.

  “You want a coffee?” I asked him, a little embarrassed by the state of things.

  “You’re moving,” he said, looking around the room.

  “No,” I said. “I just—”

  “You are. You’re moving. I saw the sign on the gate.” He pointed a bony finger at me. “You don’t want any more dogs because you’re moving down to Florida to live in a condominium. You’re going to get skinny and leathery and wear shorts with flowers on them.”

  I laughed a little. “All right,” I said. “Have it your way. Do you want a coffee or not?”

  “You’re not going to like it down there,” he said. He sat down at my kitchen table, which was covered in junk mail and paper napkins.

  “Now how could you know that? You don’t even know my name.”

  “You’re not going to like it,” he said. “This is your home. Look at this place. Nobody in Florida lives like this.”

  “Where’s your paperwork?” I asked. “In the truck?”

  “I don’t have it,” he said. “And I’m not going to have it. But you’re going to give me that fat black dog anyway, because you’re moving to Florida and you want to get rid of those mutts as soon as you can.”

  I thought about making a deal. I thought about saying, okay, mister smarty-pants, take two, the black one and his pal, and I’ll take your word for it that you won’t change your mind, that you’ll keep them no matter what that crackly woman might say. I thought about it for five or six seconds, probably, which is likely the longest I’ve taken someone’s word for in thirty years. But then I remembered, and felt like a fool for forgetting: you never knew what a person will do. They’ll tell you one thing and five minutes later do something else. I’d seen it again and again.

  “She needs to sign,” I said, pushing back from the table. “I’ll get you another copy if you—”

  “What will you do down there?” he asked. “Bingo?”

  “You really got me all figured out,” I said.

  He finished his coffee and set the cup down on some yellowed envelopes. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “You’re a rich man with a fenced yard big enough for a half dozen dogs who’s afraid to ask a woman to sign a piece of paper.”

  He scoffed. “And you’re too scared to give me a dog without a guarantee. What do you care? You’ll be sunning yourself by the time the dog knows which door he goes out to pee.”

  “My dogs,” I said. “My rules.”

  It’s almost always something tiny that fouls things up, ruins your plans big or small. A couple days later I was at the grocery store and feeling a little woozy
. I hadn’t been eating very good, had been sick to my stomach if I put much more in there than a few cookies, so sometimes I swayed a bit on my feet and had to find a spot to sit. So I was pulling out a bag of dog food from the bottom shelf and I felt that wave wash over me and stood up and then all the colors came rushing at me at once and that’s the last I remember.

  “Ma’am,” the nurse said. “Do you know where you are?”

  Well, I thought, I’m looking at a gal in a nurse’s uniform, so unless it’s Halloween I guess I’m at the hospital. But I didn’t say this, only nodded.

  “You hit your head,” she said. She was a black gal, cute, with the braids in her hair. “Do you remember?”

  I nodded again. What I was trying to figure was if they’d already given me the once-over. I was thinking, by the look on her face, that they probably had.

  “The doctor will be back shortly,” she said. “Just stay here and rest.”

  “The place is only two miles from my house,” my sister said.

  In the hospital room there were cards and flowers and bright balloons bobbing in the corners, all the things I’d been hoping I could be spared.

  “I can come up every afternoon,” she said. “It’s the best care in Boston, which you know means the best care anywhere. There’s a lake with ducks. And the big goldfish.”

  “I’m sure it’s nice,” I said. I was watching the local news, on the television way up high. I’d turned off the sound but I knew well enough what they were saying, and all in all it was better than anything coming out of my sister’s mouth.

  “A man came today while I was packing,” she said.

  I turned away from the news lady. “Did he take a dog?”

  “He didn’t come for a dog. He came for you. You got a boyfriend you didn’t tell me about?”

  “Who was it?”

  “He didn’t say. He brought you this.” She handed me a beach towel. It had a flaky picture of a golden retriever on it. It was one of those towels you might get at Kmart, rough to the touch, ready to fall apart the first time you put it in the washer.

  “He said you could take it to Florida with you, to remember your dogs. I said you must be thinking of somebody else. My sister’s not going anywhere. I said . . .”

  “Don’t,” I said. I turned back to the TV. The weather map was bright blue with snow. “I don’t want to know what you said.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if I talked out of turn. I didn’t have a clue in the world who he was and why he was bringing you a present. It didn’t occur to me until he was driving off that he might be your—”

  “He was just a man who was thinking about a dog,” I said.

  “He seemed awfully sorry to hear about your trouble.”

  I kept my eyes on the TV. “That what he said?”

  “No,” she admitted. “He didn’t say anything. He just seemed. Then he took his truck and left. But I guess he still wanted you to have this, even after I told him about . . .”

  She held the towel out to me.

  “Just pack it away with everything else,” I said.

  “Why don’t I leave it for now?” she said, tucking it beside me. “I’ll just leave it in case.”

  That night I wrote him a postcard. I still had his address from when I’d gone up to his house. I was thinking twelve dogs was better than thirteen. I was thinking all the guarantees in the world didn’t mean anything. I’d had a life full of them now, paperwork stepping-stones from the time I was twenty-four all the way to this hospital bed. And now I could see the path in front of me, down to Boston, and then the end of it.

  I had that rough towel across my cold knees.

  “Jerry,” I wrote on the card. “Take the black one. I trust you won’t bring it back.”

  Yesterday my sister came to tell me the dogs had run off.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “When I got there the kennel gate was standing open and they were all gone, every one of them. I’m sorry, honey. I know—”

  “It’s all right,” I said, patting her hand. “There’s nothing you could do.”

  “I bet they’ll get taken in,” she said. “Some of them, at least. They’re good dogs. They’ll find homes on their own, honey. They’ll find little boys who—”

  “Shhhh,” I said, because I could hear something in the distance, gravel crunching under tires, claws scraping on metal, a man cursing me. I smiled. I could see it now, clear as day: the gate hanging open, the dust kicking up, thirteen dogs crowded in the bed of that black truck. Old Jerry was scowling. Where were they all gonna sleep? And what was he supposed to tell that woman? He was going to have to do some fast talking, that was for sure, but he’d work it out. He’d been living in that big empty house for fifty years. Once he was set on something, he wasn’t the type to change his mind.

  WHY THEY RUN THE WAY THEY DO

  Ginny, the cleaning woman, knows what I’ve been up to. How could she not? For almost two years I’ve been bumping into her after midnight, at least twice a week; she looks up from her vacuuming or polishing, smiles congenially but not warmly, then returns to her work. Sometimes she’s on the elevator when I get on, and we ride down eighteen floors in silence to the gaping, vacant lobby. Sometimes she’s got a bag of trash that’s bigger than she is, and I wonder how she’s possibly going to get it to the dumpster. But my purse is heavy and I have wadded underwear in my pocket and I have to be back in this building in six or seven hours, so I don’t offer to help. When I feel guilty about this, I remind myself that cleaning is her job, that she wouldn’t walk past the reception desk at Wrona, Blake, Mulcahey and Kramer Law Assoc. and see me juggling six impatient clients and offer to lend a hand.

  “Do you really think she knows?” Donald (he’s the Mulcahey) asks me. We are on the foldout in his office and he’s shuffling his feet around under the covers trying to locate his socks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, though of course I know, of course she knows, of course everybody in the office knows, and probably half the people in the damn building, not that they care. But Donald lives under the delusion that we are being discreet, that if we don’t leave the premises together at 2:00 a.m. or make extended eye contact during working hours that no one will be the wiser, and I allow him to enjoy this delusion because if he knew all the people who know, it would make him sweat. And he’s a big man, and he doesn’t need to sweat any more than he does already.

  “One of these days he’s just going to keel over,” Tommy says, clutching his chest and tipping over onto the couch. “And then what’re you gonna do? You’ll have to get him off that foldout bed, prop him up at his desk with a pen—”

  “Okay,” I say. “Enough.”

  “You’ll have to dress him.” He howls with laughter. “You’re going to have to ask that housekeeper to help you. The two of you are going to have to—”

  “Okay,” I say. “I get it. You can stop now.”

  “Just don’t call me,” he says, grabbing a fistful of Cheetos. “I don’t want any part of it.”

  On nights I do not stay late at the office, Tommy and I sit in my apartment in sweats and slippers and watch television for hours and hours. It is hard to find a friend who loves TV as much as you do, who is not ashamed to admit that he watches television for six to eight hours every single day, that he watches truly indiscriminately, moves seamlessly from Gilligan’s Island to the History channel, from Seinfeld (the seventh or eighth viewing of most episodes) to Nightline, talk shows, game shows, reruns of old game shows, decorating shows, C-Span, soaps, even the occasional sporting event. We watch without excuses, without pretexts or apologies, without fear of judgment. We just watch. Christ, do we watch.

  (Devoted Gay Friend + Adulterous Affair = Simplicity and Contentment.)

  Tommy’s partner of four years, Gil, is a doctor. He’s one of these appallingly high-energy people, works in the ER, almost exclusively the graveyard shift. This plays out well for all of us. When I am at work Tommy is with Gil. When Gil is at work T
ommy is with me. When both Gil and I are at work, Tommy rides his bike. To see him splayed across my couch in the evenings, his hand buried in a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, you would never know he logs forty miles every morning. He is a competitive racer. He was in the Olympic trials when he was eighteen. Now he competes in local races where he wins trophies and gift certificates to Applebees. He doesn’t have a job. He defines himself not as independently wealthy, but as independently comfortable. And except for his racing gear, he and Gil can live off what Gil makes at the hospital.

  The fourth letter from Mariela arrives on a Monday. Donald flashes me a glimpse of the flimsy gray airmail envelope when he passes me after lunch; he is bursting with excitement, but it is a rule that we can not open the letter until the office is closed and we can do it alone, without fear of interruption. At 5:00 Donald sends me the official signal that he can stay late—he opens his door halfway. This means I should go kill a few hours, until much of the office has cleared out, and then return. Sometimes I go to the movies, the rush-hour special, though because I am still in my work clothes—fitted blouse, gabardine pencil skirt, heels—the movie feels like another part of my job, and I find myself sitting unnaturally straight and smiling pleasantly regardless of what is on the screen.

  Mariela was Donald’s anniversary gift to me. When we had been together one year he presented me with her picture and her paperwork. She is ten years old and lives in an orphanage in Paraguay. Every month we send her twenty-eight dollars (less than a cup of coffee a day!) to help pay for her food and clothes and school books.