by J. D. Robb
Over in the corner, my computer was humming. In sleep mode, but it was on, which was a relief; the button that activated it was in back, flush with the monitor, and I wasn’t sure I could’ve punched it in with my nose. All I had to do was press the space bar and . . . voila. The blue screen.
Now what? How could I write a message to Sam? First thing, get myself settled in the office chair so I could reach the keys. That took more time than I’d expected, owing to the fact that the chair revolved and sat on castors. I reminded myself of a seal balancing on a beach ball. But that was nothing compared to trying to get the computer into word-processing mode. I fell on the floor an embarrassing number of times, and failed in the end anyway because I simply could not push the mouse up to Word and keep it there while left-clicking with my chin.
Even if I had been able to, how would I have typed letters? My feet were too big. And my tongue—I’d noticed this already—was really clumsy and inefficient; it wouldn’t go sideways, couldn’t point or flatten; all it could do was go in and out, in and out.
Discouraged, I jumped off the chair and onto the sofa. Sam’s sofa; I’d never liked it, but that was because I hadn’t known how great the nubby fabric would be for scratching the sides of my face. And the top of my nose, between my eyes, those places I couldn’t reach very well myself. I curled up in the patch of sunshine coming through the window, resting my chin on the sofa arm. So I could think better.
The phone woke me. Charlie, Sam’s father, left a message on the machine saying he’d be over Saturday night about eight thirty, if that was okay, in time to say good night to Benny.
Maybe I could write a message to Sam in longhand. Of course! Getting the legal pad off the desk was simple; I just swiped it sideways with my nose. Ditto the cup full of ballpoints and pencils. Too bad there was writing on the top sheet of the legal pad. I couldn’t tell what it said; my eyes wouldn’t focus that close. Well, whatever it was, I had something much more important to write. Using tongue, teeth, and my bottom lip, I tore that page off and spit it on the floor in pieces.
I won’t recount how many times I tried to click on a ballpoint pen, just that I was unsuccessful. There were three pencils, and the first two broke in half in my mouth. I got the last one clamped between my molars, no easy feat since I only had about two-thirds the number of teeth I used to have. Now, what to write? Words were out of the question, I’d realized a pencil and a half ago. A symbol, then. A heart.
Crap, crap, crap. I couldn’t control the pressure. I pierced a hole in the paper with the pencil, and in the end all I got was a trembly rhomboid with drool on it.
I needed bigger media. Think. If I were the kind of woman who kept a lot of throw pillows on the furniture—someone like Monica Carr, say—I could spell something out with them on the floor. But I wasn’t, so I couldn’t.
Upstairs, I finally found a box of crayons in the rubble of Benny’s room. No sense figuring a way to use them up here; I could write the Gettysburg Address on the wall in finger paints and no one would notice for days. Back to the den.
Like the tongue, a dog’s toes extend and retract. That’s it. I gave up trying to write something with Benny’s crayons and concentrated instead on arranging them in some kind of shape. My initials! If I could make LS out of crayons, wouldn’t that tell Sam something?
I had to eat part of the box to get the crayons out, but that was okay. Cardboard had a pleasant woody taste; I wouldn’t have minded eating the whole thing, actually. How many crayons were in this box? Eight, ten, something like that; precise counting was no longer one of my strong suits. I nosed two crayons into an L, but that looked random, meaningless. Two on a side, that was better, a big L. Good. Now for the S.
It’s hard to make curves with straight edges. I kept getting a 5 when I wasn’t getting a swastika. (I could just hear Sam: “You’re Hitler? I know—Eva Braun!”) I did the best I could until hunger distracted me. That cardboard, it was like an hors d’oeuvre. I trotted into the kitchen.
Sam had served a mix of canned and dry dog food last night—surprisingly tasty—but today it was just a bowl of kibble. Boring but not bad, and the crunch was satisfying. I ate the whole thing.
I was sitting in the hall, scratching an itch under my collar, when a noise on the front porch brought me to full alert. Footsteps. I gave a low, warning bark, but it sounded self-conscious, rehearsed. Like what I was supposed to do. Then the screen door squealed open. Bark! That felt better. A cascade of envelopes and magazines pushed through the slot in the door. Bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark!
I used to like the postman, a nice guy named Brian, but now I hated him. What fun! Barking was so invigorating, pure self-expression, like singing at the top of your lungs. I kept it up till Brian was barely a memory; then I went back to the den and took a nap.
The key in the front door woke me. Sam! I ran to the door, heart soaring. Sam was home! Joy! Bliss! I jumped up high, trying to lick his face, tail flying, barking, spinning, not peeing, not peeing—
“Down!”
Where had he been? I could smell plastic . . . car exhaust, people . . . some chemical-l y smell, like a new carpet—
“Down! Damn it, dog.” He wasn’t as glad to see me as I was to see him. He looked tired and tense at the same time. Oh, baby, I thought, sobering fast, and followed him into the kitchen. He saw the chair, the door. “Oh, for the love of . . . How the hell did you . . .” His shoulders drooped. Mine, too. He got a beer out of the refrigerator and took it into the den.
A beer? What time was it? Clocks didn’t tell me anything anymore. Too early for a beer, though, I knew that from the sun. When had Sam started drinking during the day?
“Oh, jeez. What did you do?”
Stop! Don’t, don’t—
Too late. He didn’t even read it. He just bent over, swept up all my carefully placed crayons, along with the broken pencils and ballpoints, the torn paper and the crayon box remains. Damn it, Sam, do you know how hard I worked on that?
“Bad dog! Bad Sonoma!” He shoved the evidence under my nose. “Shame on you. Bad dog.”
Okay, okay, I get it. I lay down and put my paws over my ears. I’ve always hated criticism.
I heard the heavy, hopeless sound of Sam dropping down on the couch. A sigh. A gulp of beer. When I sneaked a glance, he was shaking his head at me. But smiling. Just a tiny bit.
I meant to be subtle, but my heart turned inside out with gladness and I pounced to him instead of slinking. I didn’t jump up next to him—I had enough self-control to stop short of that. I sat at his feet, and after a few minutes Sam put his hand on top of my head and just rested it there, heavy and trusting, and we stayed that way until it was time to go get Benny.
By week’s end, I had the run of the house. Sam decided the incident with the pencils and papers was an anomaly brought on by separation anxiety. Since then I’d behaved like Perfect Dog, and on the third night he moved my bed to the upstairs hall. No more closed kitchen doors for me. It didn’t matter, though; as soon as they were asleep, I’d sneak into Benny’s room, then Sam’s. I slept lightly, and never got caught again.
Saturday was housecleaning day. It used to be Tuesday, when the cleaning lady came, but evidently those days were over. Now it was just Sam, with Benny’s “help,” trying to bring order to a week’s worth of laissez-faire living—that’s putting it charitably. Benny’s room was beyond shoveling out; what they needed was a backhoe. How could one five-year-old boy make such a mess in only seven days?
I wasn’t completely blameless, mess creation-wise. I should have felt guilty, but it wasn’t in me anymore. And to think, I used to be such a fastidious person. “Persnickety,” Sam called me. I’d had food aversions, too; I was picky about textures, smells, certain flavors. Ha! Now I’d eat anything. Anything. If I was thirsty enough, the toilet bowl was not off-l imits. When my butt itched, I dragged it across the carpet. Dog hair everywhere? Pfft, life was too short to obsess about such trifles.
Benn
y and I went outside when Sam started vacuuming. What a diabolical machine; the noise alone was painful, but there was something menacing about the moves it made, that predatory back and forth. I wanted to get away from it as much as I wanted to shred it into metallic pieces.
Sam had started to build a fort for Benny last spring. When I’d seen it last, before the accident, it was a three-sided plywood lean-to abutting the oak tree at the bottom of our backyard. In the past two months, Sam had enclosed the fourth side, put in a door and a window, and painted it gray-blue with white trim. A dream playhouse and, needless to say, Benny’s favorite place. I wasn’t surprised when he headed straight for it after Sam said, “Thanks, buddy, good job,” and released him from his chores.
“Look, Sonoma. This is where I keep stuff.”
The fort was roughly a five-f oot cube, smelling of wood and earth. Benny opened a plastic chest in a corner of the cube and showed me his toys. “Brontosaurus puzzle. See, look. I can do it fast.” Indeed; he had the dinosaur assembled in about one minute. “Then it goes back in this egg, see?” He took it apart and put it away in its plastic cup. “I got a preying mantis one in my room, but it goes back in a box, not an egg. Look at this.” He showed me his plastic bulldozer and his magic deck of cards. His special marble, his lion mask.
“Okay, now,” he said in a different voice, bending into the toy box and pulling out a smaller one, metal: an old cookie tin. I went closer.
He whispered, “See this, Sonoma?” He held out an item I didn’t recognize at first. “My mom owned it. It’s a secret. I took it out of her car. It’s for coffee, you put coffee in and then you drink it when you’re driving. Going to your job in your car, and it won’t spill.” He demonstrated how to drink from my old coffee cup.
“It says the name of her job right here.” SHANAHAN & LEWIS REALTORS. “She went every day. They sell houses to people. She got rewards because she was good. She was the best.”
Well. I was, but I didn’t know Benny knew it. I felt proud, but also as if I might’ve been caught doing something slightly embarrassing. Bragging.
“This is her mouse pad.” He was whispering again. He did that adorable thing he did with his face when he was thinking hard: He scowled and pursed his mouth and wrinkled his nose. I knew exactly what he was thinking: How do I explain a mouse pad to my dog? In the end he decided not to bother. “It has a picture of us Dad took, me and Mom, then he had it put on this thing. It’s us sledding down York Lane. I was a little boy. I couldn’t go on my own yet. This is Mom and this is me.”
I loved that picture. Benny, three years old, sat in front of me on the sled, both of us red-f aced from the cold and laughing like loons. He had on his silver snowsuit, the same outfit he’d worn at Christmastime that year to sit on Santa’s lap. Outgrown long ago.
He held the mouse pad photo closer to my face. “It looks like we have the same color hair, but we don’t.” No, we did—he’d forgotten. His hair had darkened in the past two years, and mine stayed the same. He’d just forgotten.
The mouse pad went back in the box; out came something wrapped in a piece of cloth. Something special, I could tell by the way he held it.
“Look,” he said, and opened the last treasure.
Earrings. Cheap metal hearts with MOM engraved on each one—he and Sam had bought them last Mother’s Day at a kiosk in the mall. “She liked them a lot. She said they were beautiful. When she wakes up, I’m giving them to her again. As soon as she wakes up.” I leaned my weight against him; he put his arm around my neck. “I told Dad, and he said she might not remember. That I gave ’em to her before, but I think she will. Don’t you?”
He wasn’t crying, but I licked his cheek. I know she will.
I’d always liked Sam’s father, even though he was as unlike his only son as could be. Where Sam was a quiet man, unassuming and kind, often reserved around strangers, Charlie was the kind of guy the phrase “good time” was invented for. He sold insurance before he retired a few years ago, and I used to like to imagine what a nice surprise people were in for who invited him over to discuss premiums on their whole life. What I hadn’t known was how much fun he was if you happened to be a dog.
Pretend-growling was great fun, too, sort of like constant gargling. Charlie played tug-of-war with me and my toy pheasant almost as long as I wanted. Almost. We played in the kitchen until he dragged me out of the house by his half of the toy and collapsed on the front porch step. I let him pry my mouth open, hoping he would heave the bird out into the dark front yard. He did; then he did it again, and then again, but not enough. He tired out—they always do. I could’ve retrieved that pheasant all night.
Sam came out with a couple of beers, handed one to his father. “Hot,” he said. “We can sit inside if you’d rather. Cooler in the air-conditioning.”
“Not me, I like it. The dog days. Benny go to sleep?”
“Finally.”
“Seems to me like he’s doing pretty well.”
“You cheer him up, Pop. I think he’s too quiet.”
“You were like that.” Charlie took a sip of beer and then belched a few times, softly. He still had a full head of sandy hair, but he was going soft and round in all the places Sam was hard and angular. “Quiet kid, you were. Always figured that’s why you took up magic.”
“But Benny’s a talker.”
“That’s for sure. Nonstop. But he’ll be okay. He will be, Sam.”
“Sure, I know.”
“Hey, getting that dog was a great idea.”
“Well . . .”
Well, what?
“No leash—you’re not worried she’ll run off?”
“No way. She sticks to us like a shadow.”
“What about when you and Benny are gone all day? Him in school, you at work?”
I stopped sniffing around in the grass and trotted over. What work? Sam had work?
“She’s housebroken,” Sam said.
“Yeah, but cooped up in the house all day, that’s no life for a big dog.”
I thought of myself as medium.
“I’d take her for you myself, but they’ve got a weight limit on pets.” Charlie lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring. But what a sweet offer. I nuzzled his hand in gratitude.
“I’m more worried about Benny than the dog.” Sam set his beer on the step and pulled out the deck of cards he always kept in his pocket. “I hate it that I won’t be here when he gets home from school.”
“So what’ll you do?”
“There’s a neighbor who’s offered to keep him. She’s got two boys his age, so it should work out.”
Monica? “Mupf?”
“Hush, not now,” Sam said, thinking I wanted to play.
“Well, that’s good. Yeah, that sounds like it’ll work out all right. Kids adjust,” Charlie started saying. “When they’re little, they can adapt to almost anything . . .” So on and so on. I quit listening. Monica Carr was going to take my child after school every day? Why? Where was Sam going to be?
“Queen of spades.”
“So tell me about your new job,” Charlie said, pulling a random card from the flared deck Sam held out to him. “Queen of spades,” he confirmed without surprise, and handed it back.
“It’s not what I wanted. I was hoping for something part-time, but that was a dead end. There’s been a lot of downsizing and merging since I got out of the field. I had to take what I could get. Two of clubs.”
Charlie picked a card and nodded. “Two of clubs. But you hate this job.”
“No, Pop. Don’t say that.” He gave a weak laugh and concentrated on his overhand shuffle. “Anyway, it’s irrelevant. I have to make some money.”
“I was real sorry to hear about the cabin.”
Sam nodded, shrugged.
“I know you had high hopes,” Charlie said gently. “Spend more time with Laurie and all.”
Really? I tried to read Sam’s face in the dimness. That wasn’t why he’d wanted the cabin. Was
it?
Charlie patted his knee. When I came over, he started ruffling my ears and blowing into my face. I wagged my tail, ready for a game. “Kinda ironic,” he said.
“How so?”
“Laurie always wanted you to go back to work.”
I wheeled away, out of Charlie’s reach. That’s not true. Even if it was, Charlie never knew it. Sam never knew it—because I never said it. Not out loud. I looked at Sam, waiting for him to deny it.
“Laurie . . .” he said and stopped.
Yes? What?
“She thought she was marrying an actuary. It’s not her fault she ended up with a part-time magician.”
“Oh, yeah?” Charlie sat up straight. “Well, the way I remember it, you didn’t think you were marrying—”
“Hey, now, Pop.”
“—a type-A workaholic go-getter who—”
“Pop.”>
“—lived for making dough and setting sales records. Okay, okay. Sorry. But if she was disappointed in you, I say that went two ways.”
Charlie! I thought you loved me!
Oh, this was so unfair. I slunk farther out into the yard, beyond the circle of the porch light. If only I could disappear. I found a patch of dusty-smelling ivy and burrowed down in it.
What was wrong with liking your job? I was not a workaholic. Charlie was right about one thing—when I met Sam he was working in one of the biggest insurance companies in the country, climbing the actuary ladder, taking the competency exams, passing with freakish ease. A math geek. As it turned out, he hated math, but I didn’t know that. But it didn’t matter! We were glad to switch gender roles, especially when my salary tripled and quadrupled during the real estate boom. When it went bust—okay, that was when I might have said something to Sam. Not nagging, though; more pointing out the obvious. Tactfully. Lovingly and supportively.