A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

The bookstore was empty. The lights on, the music playing. She went through the beads, and there was Elizabeth, brushing off her purple cape with a lint brush.

  She looked up and sighed a dramatic sigh and tossed the lint brush to the table.

  “That dog,” she said.

  I’m sorry was the first thought. Pattianne didn’t say it.

  She said, “Things are kind of a mess, huh?”

  “I don’t want that dog,” Elizabeth said. “He’s not even Frankie’s dog, really. He’s only had him a little while. He was just some stray. It’s not like it would break his heart to take him to the pound and let someone adopt him.” But she wasn’t talking to Pattianne. She was talking to herself.

  And Pattianne, talking to herself, said, “But he’s old and stinky, and they kill dogs if they don’t get adopted right away.”

  And then to Elizabeth she said, “I’ll take him.” Took a deep breath. This was crazy. But it was the first time she’d seen Elizabeth smile since everything went to shit.

  “You mean take him adopt him, or just keep him for a while? I don’t think they’re coming back to St. Cloud once they leave.”

  “I mean take him take him. I’ll adopt him.”

  Elizabeth said, “I’ll go get him right now,” and she picked up her purple cape, which wasn’t all that hairy, and she said, “No, I’ll call Frankie. He can bring him by.”

  Pattianne thought of calling Michael. She didn’t want to. She thought she’d just surprise him. She knew it was crazy. But there were dreams to be dusted and a stack of books on the beautiful chair and The Light of the World to tend to.

  She’d always had a dog. She’d had Starla since she was in grade school, and before that there was a beagle named Short Stop who slept with his nose at the crack under her bedroom door, wanting to get in. Her mother said, No dogs in the bedrooms. And then when they got Starla, she heard them one night after dinner, her mother saying, No dogs in the bedrooms, and her father saying, Oh, what can it hurt? That night, she learned something about her father. She was only little. And it was her bedroom, not Jen’s.

  She was just starting to realize that she really should call Michael, and maybe she should at least go buy some dog food and spend some time with Bullfrog before saying Yeah, I’ll take him to be my dog, but then there they were. And she wanted him, as soon as she saw him, all down low and wagging, and not shedding all that much, really. He was mostly white, just a few brown spots, and soft brown ears. She got down by him.

  “Well,” Frankie said. “Really? You’ll take him?” He got down too. “To keep?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “That’s what she said. To keep.”

  Then Frankie got all teary, and Pattianne did, too, and he handed her a brand-new red leather leash with the price tag still on it. It matched Bullfrog’s collar.

  “I have a twenty-five-pound bag of dog chow in the car,” he said. Teary.

  “Okay.”

  “And a big box of Milk Bones.”

  “Okay.”

  “And his rabies papers and all are in here.”

  He handed her an envelope, and then he hugged her, and they were a circle with Bullfrog in between them, Elizabeth laughing, although she didn’t sound very happy, but she was laughing. Michael would laugh too. Bullfrog was a funny guy.

  She put a blanket on the floor in the bedroom, and Bullfrog stepped on it, circled around, and then hopped up on the bed. He landed on the Loretta Young robe and circled around there and pawed at it and worked it into a nested heap and then plopped himself down.

  “Cool,” she said to him. “We can share it.”

  She poured a glass of wine and took it back in the bedroom, and dragged the robe out from under Bullfrog and robed up. She went back out and turned up the heat, and came back in and opened the envelope with the dog’s papers. They were folded inside a notecard, a watercolor of a wolf with St. Francis behind it. She could tell it was St. Francis by his knotted belt and the birds on his shoulders. A halo of blue glitter shimmered around them both.

  Wolf Spirit Tales, it said.

  “Cheers,” she said to Bullfrog. He watched her.

  St. Francis apparently rescued the town of Gubbio by convincing a marauding wolf to extend its paw in peace. Come to me, Brother Wolf, St. Francis said. In the name of Christ.

  Michael showed up at dinnertime with Reverend Rick and someone else. Their voices out there in the dark house were low, and they went through the living room into the kitchen. The leftover chicken was sitting in the sink, or maybe on the counter.

  He came into the bedroom and turned on the ceiling light, stood there in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “What’s that dog doing here?”

  “He’s our new spirit guide,” she said, funny, this sleepy old hound being anyone’s spirit guide. “Meet St. Francis’s Brother in Christ.”

  Michael said, “Why are you in bed?”

  “I’m not. We’re just hanging out. Who’s out there with you?”

  But she’d never seen a face like that on Michael.

  “Michael, what is it?” It was like no face. His mouth was a straight line. His eyes were another straight line.

  “Get dressed,” he said. His voice was flat. “Come out here.”

  The floor was like ice. The sweater she pulled on over her T-shirt was instantly too hot, and she balled it up and stuffed it back in the drawer. She looked in the mirror. Her lips were wine-stained purple, and sometimes that got Michael all nibbling and sweet. This was not one of those times. She couldn’t tell who was out there with him besides Reverend Rick. She combed her fingers through her hair, did what she could. A green blouse straight off a dry-cleaner’s hanger, a hair clip, she even found some green socks. The blouse smelled like dry-cleaner fluid. She shut the bedroom door, shutting Bullfrog in there.

  The living room was dark. She turned on the deer lamp, banged her elbow on the doorjamb of the kitchen, where they were gathered like the three witches, Michael, Reverend Rick, and Herman Walters. Michael held the bag of coffee. The chicken cacciatore was on the counter next to the Sears bag.

  “Here,” she said, and moved toward the sink, the coffee maker, the chicken. They all watched her. Herman Walters sat in a chair, his legs crossed, one bony knee poking up above the edge of the table. Next to him, Reverend Rick stood stiff and straight like a Boy Scout. The fluorescent light made sharp-edged shadows on the shiny walls. She put the pan in the sink. Reverend Rick put his hands on his hips. Asshole. She got a spoon from the drawer and took the bag of coffee from Michael. Measured coffee into the filter. Poured in water. Behind her nobody moved. Her hands shook ever so slightly. Her elbow throbbed. The coffee smelled like dry-cleaner fluid.

  “May I speak?” It was Herman Walters.

  “Sit down, Pattianne.” That was Michael.

  Reverend Rick just looked at the floor.

  Then Michael said, “Please.” His voice was choked, and the air inside her dropped through her to the gray linoleum. She was dizzy for a flash and then not, and when she looked at his face, he faced away. She couldn’t think of what she even wanted from him.

  Herman Walters slowly unfolded himself from the kitchen chair, and when he stopped unfolding himself, his arms hung down loose and his face did, too, the shadow of his head on the wall, his tall body and his great nose. Then his watery gray eyes went upward, and the threat of prayer filled the air. The dizzy feeling flashed again, but mad dizzy, she wanted to throw the spoon on the floor, and she didn’t say How dare you pray in my kitchen?

  It was Herman Walters’s fine, deep voice. “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” Not his squeaky allergic-to-coffee voice. “A great tragedy has occurred in our midst, and we feel it redeems us all if you speak out.”

  He was talking about Angela, but what he said made no sense, and she waited for it to either become clear or else for him to say more. She tried not to look at his shadow on the wall. The light around his he
ad was buzzing.

  “Mrs. Park,” he said, “has spoken at length to the attorney we provided for her, and she has implicated you deeply.” Maybe the fluorescent light was going out. “Your moral culpability demands an explanation to your family and your community, and forgiveness from the Lord.”

  She set the spoon on the counter. She said, “What the fuck?”

  That did it. Michael’s hands landed on her shoulders from behind and spun her around. “Have you lost your mind?” His face was twisting, his eyes opening and squinting, and his mouth wasn’t his mouth. “Pattianne, a man has died.”

  And with his hands on her shoulders and his face right at her face some voice that snapped out of her said, “I know that, Michael. I went to the funeral, remember?”

  Michael pushed her into the chair and leaned over her and said, “What did you say to Angela?”

  Her breath was fluttering, stuck at the bottom of her throat. “What did I say to Angela when?” It felt like he was still grabbing her shoulders.

  He looked up to the ceiling. “I don’t know when, whenever you told her she should burn down the clinic.”

  “The date was December sixth.” Reverend Rick spoke very softly. “It was the middle of the day.”

  The Seasons of Minnesota calendar showed a snow-covered field, an old red barn at the field’s crest, a brilliant blue sky, December in green Gothic letters. December sixth was a Wednesday.

  Reverend Rick sat down and folded his neat, square hands on the table, speaking softly. “Angela has been under a doctor’s care for years.” He opened his hands toward her, as if he were showing her some small thing. “She shouldn’t drink, but she does.”

  “So,” Pattianne said, trying to work past the breath stuck in her throat, her turn to speak, her kitchen, Seriously, you guys, what the fuck are you talking about? “Angela really set the fire?”

  Herman Walters’s shadow on the wall nodded.

  She said, “How?” Like that mattered.

  “Pattianne.” Reverend Rick’s voice, hey hey, easy now, like he was talking to Navarre. “We need to know what you two talked about that day.” His hands seemed so relaxed. Her hands worked the bottom button on her blouse. “I came over here,” he said. “You and Angela were drinking. You had red lipstick and a feather in your hair. She had red on her face like war paint. You were both in your underclothing.”

  “It was nothing.” She pushed her hair back, how it never stayed up in a hair clip. “We talked about makeup. She just dropped by and we talked about makeup.”

  He folded his hands back together. “You were both drunk,” he said.

  “She brought stuff to make some fancy drinks.” Foamy purple champagne cocktails.

  Herman Walters breathed deeply through his nose. Michael stood next to the refrigerator behind her, back there somewhere far away.

  “She talked about a field catching on fire right there once,” she said.

  Herman Walters sank neatly back into his chair, his watery gray eyes level with hers.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “She ‘implicated’ me. ‘Deeply.’”

  Herman Walters nodded. “Did you speak of saving women from the sin of murder?”

  “We talked about abortion, I guess. She had some more of those leaflets for you, flyers about some protest you guys were doing. She stopped by to pick them up for you.”

  Reverend Rick sat back in his chair.

  “We didn’t talk much about it. More about lipstick. Then you came and picked her up. You drove her home. I don’t know, what did she say to you?” The coffee was dripping into the pot. The heater vent rattled. “We were just trying on lipstick. There was no war paint.”

  Michael got out four cups and set them on the table.

  “Coffee makes him sneeze,” Pattianne said. They all jerked their heads up like their heads were on strings. “Coffee makes Herman sneeze,” she said, turning to Michael. “I was just waiting for you to call. You went to New Jersey, and I was waiting for you to call. You never called.”

  Herman Walters cleared his throat. He said, “Did you tell her a fire would solve the problem?”

  “No,” she said. “I would never say that.”

  The district attorney’s office was in a low brick building that looked empty this time of night. Coming in from the cold, her eyes watered, and a young man with a very clean face met them in a shiny, wood-paneled lobby. A security guard was standing in a corner next to a fake ficus tree.

  The young man with the clean face was the lawyer that Reverend Rick had arranged to meet them there. He shook her hand, his hand soft and plump, and he said, “Just tell the truth,” and then they walked down a long, wide hallway that stretched out like it was moving. Fake ficus trees next to each door were strung with twinkly white lights that broke into prisms. There was a snowman thumbtacked to the door of Room 112. He had a row of thumbtack holes in his black top hat from Christmases past.

  Angela was charged with arson and manslaughter.

  Room 112 was a fluorescent white room with beige carpeting and a bare desk and two chairs, and Michael was in some other room with Reverend Rick and Herman Walters.

  A woman in a cheery red blazer came in and said hello to the young man, and it sounded like she called him Davy. She told Pattianne what her name was and then opened a file folder and sat down. Davy stood back by the door. The woman asked how she was doing and said how this was a tragic situation and she wanted to talk about Pattianne’s relationship with Mrs. Park and their work with Project Life. A huge rhinestone Christmas-tree pin hung on the woman’s lapel, weighing it down and pulling the collar crooked and twinkling madly with jerking colors that ended up being red.

  Pattianne said, “I hate Project Life.”

  The woman tapped her pencil.

  “I don’t know anything about Project Life. Except that Michael’s father is in it.”

  She moved a piece of paper in the file. “That would be Michael Bryn?”

  “Senior. His father. In New Jersey. Not my Michael.”

  Except maybe he’s not her Michael anymore, and maybe she doesn’t get to say that anymore.

  The woman had dark hair with gray at the roots, and when she wasn’t looking down at the folder, she looked straight at Pattianne. She tapped the eraser of her pencil on a yellow notepad each time she spoke.

  “Can you tell me about your work with the Ecumenical Men’s Prayer Circle?”

  She pictured the door behind her, pictured getting up and just leaving. “I’m not even involved in this,” she said. “Any of it.”

  The woman didn’t tap.

  “I believe in abortion,” Pattianne said. “Not that. I mean, I don’t believe in it.”

  The woman tapped. “You don’t believe in it?”

  Pattianne couldn’t remember the woman’s name. If she saw her somewhere else, she might think she was someone’s aunt. She was that in-between age, older than her, not as old as her mother.

  “No.” She was starting to cry. “I don’t believe in it. But it’s private.”

  The woman opened a drawer and took out a box of tissues and set it on the bare desk, and it was too loud for a box of tissues.

  “What do you remember about your conversation with Angela Parks on December sixth?”

  Purple champagne and red lipstick, Angela’s big blue eyes full of tears about saving babies.

  Pattianne closed her eyes and tried to swallow, her heart beating sharp, right at the bottom of her throat. There was the smell of her blouse, sharp, like it was burning the skin of her throat.

  “Angela came over to pick up some flyers with rules for a protest they were having.”

  She remembered Angela crying. She remembered her talking about finding homes for babies. She remembered her talking about a field that was on fire once right behind the clinic, how she hoped it would burn the clinic down.

  “I said how that would solve the problem. I was just joking.”

  “Not very funny.”


  Pattianne got out of the chair and turned away from the cheery red blazer and the Christmas-tree pin. The clean young man said, “Mrs. Bryn?” He got out of her way and she fell against the door and opened it. Michael was at the far end of the long tilting hallway. The twinkling lights on all the fake ficus trees stabbed at her eyes. The door behind her shattered shut and she whispered, as far away as he was, “You have to help me,” and she threw up, red wine on beige carpet.

  Reverend Rick drove. The Urgent Care Center was in a strip mall, neon letters everywhere, and the doors rushed open. She kept her hands over her eyes, and Michael’s arms around her guided her in where she knew the lights were too bright, red lines of light through her fingers.

  A woman asked Michael questions while the small gray waiting room pulsed its sharp light through her closed eyes, pulsed like her head, each pulse not quite cracking everything into pieces.

  Any allergies?

  Michael said, “Strawberries.”

  History of blood-pressure problems?

  He said, “I don’t think so.”

  Family history of heart disease, stroke?

  “Her grandmother had a stroke,” he said.

  “Do you smoke?”

  Michael said not really. He said she used to. He said maybe occasionally.

  “Any medications? Allergies, antidepressants, birth control?”

  Michael said no.

  Pattianne said yes.

  They didn’t get home until one in the morning. She went to bed and slept hard. He kept looking in at her. She was piled in the blankets, and that dog was there. It was lying on her bathrobe on the floor. It wagged its tail when he looked in.

  She had been taking them since before the wedding. When they’d been using condoms. He’d kept a box in the table by her bed in her apartment. She would laugh at him when he shook it to see if there were some in there. Like a game.

  He felt sick to his stomach. He’d eaten a meatball sandwich yesterday. He couldn’t remember where, but he had never eaten a meatball sandwich before.

  He packed clothes in the small gym bag. Folded his T-shirts carefully. Jeans and two blue sweaters. He hung a pair of dress slacks and two dress shirts in the hanging bag. His ties hung on the tie rack on the door of the closet. The blue one with the monogram of his initials. His father’s initials.