by Jen Larsen
“Doggone it,” my father says, scooping up Toby under his armpits.
“Ha,” I say.
“Why do we have so many dogs?” my father says. Toby is hanging from my father’s arm, panting and smiling hugely.
“You tell me it’s because you’re a sucker with a heart of gold who lets your daughter collect them,” I say.
“I’m something,” he says.
“How was the open house?”
He’s got paint in his hair and on his dress pants and undershirt. He never remembers to change when he gets home, especially when things had gone poorly. He notices me looking at the stains and fingers the stiff splash of orange on the hem of his shirt. “It’ll come out,” he says. “You always get it out.”
“I always end up buying you new pants,” I say.
“They all look the same,” he says, and shrugs in that easy, fluid way that my older brothers have inherited, with the rolling shoulders and head rocking to the side. Toby starts wiggling under his arm and Dad is trying to get a better grip. “I’m going to drop him,” he says, and it sounds more like a threat than a statement.
“You could have left Toby at home,” I point out, setting Annabelle Lee on the step beside me and standing up. She’s investigating the big dinner bag, which is starting to turn dark brown with grease. “No more of that,” I say to her, and pick her up.
“What is that?” my father says.
“Dinner,” I say, tucking the bag under my arm. I’m already greasy from work.
“It doesn’t have much meat on its bones,” he says. Toby is hanging limp now from Dad’s arm but has started to whine, high-pitched and utterly forlorn. “I feel the same way, buddy,” my father says.
“I’ll clean her up and bring her in to the shelter in San Luis Obispo tomorrow,” I say as I settle Annabelle Lee against my shoulder.
My father drops Toby down and takes the bag of food from me.
“And then what?” he asks.
“And then I’ll bring her back because they have no room,” I say.
“Your grandmother isn’t going to be happy.” He frowns, but he drifts off. He’s looking off at the water like he just caught a glimpse of something.
“She’s never happy,” I say, and set off down the marina with Soto at my heel and Annabelle Lee under my arm.
Toby shoots by, dragging my father behind. “That’s not true!” my father says, out of breath. Toby jerks to a halt to examine a post and yanks my father to a stop. “Toby, why are you doing this to me? Why?” Toby lifts his leg. “I mean,” my father says, “there must have been a couple of minutes in 1984 where she might have thought about smiling.”
“History shows that she is unlikely to even notice another dog,” I say.
“It’s expensive,” my father argues, nudging Toby away from a small mound of something that came out of a seagull. “Isn’t it?” He’s never bought dog food or cat food or any groceries. “They eat like animals,” he says, and elbows me. Ha, ha. Big joke. Get it?
“It’s fine,” I say. “My paycheck covers it.” Soto bumps her head against my knee and I start walking again, too fast. My father is hurrying behind me, and Toby is trying to keep up on stubby little legs as we turn off Main Street and down the side roads toward home.
“That’s because they’re animals,” he says. “That they eat that way.”
“Yes, I got it,” I say.
He stops when Toby pulls to sniff at a lilac bush. My father stands there with his hands in his pockets, watching Toby demonstrate laser focus and slight bewilderment. The lights in the Victorian houses around us are starting to flicker on. Here they’re all freshly painted in whites and grays and sands and pale blues like they’re trying to remind you that the beach is never far away.
“You ever think about spending your money on something fun?” my father asks. “Buy a golf cart. Rent a bouncy house. Eat a lot of candy. So much candy. Be a little bit more laid-back, like your friend Laura.”
“Yes, I could go live like a bum in San Francisco,” I say.
“Why not,” he says absently, rocking back on his heels.
“I can’t do that,” I say, but I know he’s not really listening.
“Sure you can,” he says. He’s still wearing his dress shoes, and they’re scuffed. “You can eat all the candy you want.”
“Dad.”
“Eat thine candy whilst thy may,” he intones.
I sigh. “I don’t like candy very much,” I say.
“You never did,” he says, tugging Toby back into motion. He watches me juggle Annabelle Lee into the crook of my other arm and try to untangle my necklace from my hair. “Those parties your mother used to throw.” We both wait through his pregnant, before-the-joke pause. “She had a great arm.”
“The Easter-egg hunt, you mean?”
“Your brothers got so mad every year.”
“I was methodical!”
“Your mother would hide a metric ton of those plastic eggs all over the yard and the house and she’d have better places every year and kids from all over the neighborhood would go swarming but you’d find twenty of them in under twenty minutes.”
“I had a plan,” I say.
“Your brothers swore you were cheating.”
“I would never cheat!” I can feel my face getting hot just like it did when I was barely nine years old and my heart swelled with the injustice of it when they insisted, their baskets empty and mine overflowing, that I was somehow stealing eggs from them.
“Oh, I know you wouldn’t,” he says, slipping his arm around me and tangling Toby in my legs. “I saw your campaign maps.”
“I gave one to Mateo,” I mutter, stepping over the leash. “He didn’t even look at it.”
“Your brothers aren’t strategists, kid.”
“Well, that’s not my fault,” I say. I shift Annabelle Lee back over to my other arm.
“Do you want me to put that thing in my pocket?” He gestures at Annabelle. “Or make Soto useful. Let’s strap her on top.”
“She’s fine,” I say. Then I realize she’s snoring. She looks like a dishcloth and sounds like a blender.
“You didn’t have to sell your extra candy back to them, though,” my father says.
“I was saving up,” I say. You’d think I’d have saved enough for college by now, but it’s funny how much it costs to support my father, who refuses to ever ask Grandmother for cash.
He glances over at me. “You know, my place is hiring,” he says.
I am startled. “What, the brokerage?” The real-estate company my father works for has only had three employees since the dawn of time. This is mostly because their clients are the kind who have a half-acre parcel of land they need to sell fast and cheap to buy a kidney, or cabins hours from the coast with no running water, which have to be sold as quickly as possible in order to cover legal fees for assorted issues that are never quite clarified. My father takes the clients with hard-luck stories, the hard-to-sell houses that none of the big companies would ever touch. Those guys are trading multimillion-dollar Victorians back and forth between their buyers and sellers—the houses we’re strolling by now. The kind of house where the front landscaping looks as if a team of garden specialists descended with measuring tapes and calculators and geometry fetishes.
“Do they have enough business to actually hire someone?” I say, mostly because their business strategy never fails to fascinate me.
“Gloria is retiring,” my father says. “I don’t know when she got tired in the first place.” Toby slows down to a crawl, his nose pushed to the ground and working overtime as we walk past the Alvarez house, where his boyfriend, the German shepherd, lives. The love is not mutual but that will never stop Toby. We stop and watch him inhale the essence of Duke.
People tell me all the time my dad doesn’t look old enough to be a dad, and that’s probably true. He doesn’t have any gray, and when his face relaxes he looks so much like my brothers.
“It wou
ld make more sense to just split everything up between you and George,” I tell him.
“Hmm?” he says. He looks over at me. “Don’t you think they should paint this place purple?” He tilts his chin at Duke’s house.
“Wouldn’t that lower the resale value?” I say.
He shrugs. “Does it matter?”
“Dad, why are you even in the real-estate business?”
“It’s a living,” he says jovially.
No, not really. But instead I say, “Is she selling? Or is she just not working anymore?”
He shrugs. “Who knows. She does what she wants.”
“Right, but do you even have a job?”
“Sure I do,” he says. “She would have said something. It hasn’t really come up.”
“It ‘hasn’t really’?” My voice seems to bounce off the sky, and a group of birds flap off from the topmost branches of the oak a few yards down.
“You worry too much, honey. It’s fine,” he says comfortably, patting my shoulder. Toby sighs and snorts and starts waddling forward, ready for dinner. All the light has leaked out of the sky when we turn onto our gravel-scattered road.
“Right, but what happens when I graduate?”
“You could come work for us,” he says. “Eh? Then it’s all in the family.”
“I would need—I’m not old enough. And I would need a license.” I am talking like I’m taking his meandering seriously, and I hate when I do that.
“I think eighteen is plenty old enough,” he says. “When is your birthday, is it Saturday? Is that tomorrow? This week went by fast.” He’s shaking his head.
“Seventeen,” I say. “I’m going to be seventeen.”
“Then you hang out for a year. Take a couple of classes at that two-year college in Santa Maria. That ought to be a walk in the cake for you. And wouldn’t it be nice to take a year off? Your grandmother would be thrilled to have you stay around. She would be rattling around in that old house like a ball bearing if you went off somewhere for college.”
I start with, “You’ll still be living there” and “She’s actually never home,” but he’s still talking.
“I bet you’ll be a natural,” he says. “You’ve got the Perkins charm. You’ve got your grandmother’s drive and go-getterism, don’t you think?”
“I’m getting my medical degree,” I say slowly and carefully. I do not want my voice to shake in the wake of the whistling hollow in my chest.
“You’re so much like your mom,” he says, beaming at me. “But Santa Maria has a first-aid certificate!” my dad says. “A lot cheaper, I bet, than Princeton.” His face is a pale blue-white blur in this light and my eyes hurt looking at him. Annabelle Lee huffs in the crook of my arm and I loosen my grip and I don’t say anything, because my father is a rushing creek and anything you toss in there will be swept away, Ping-Ponging in the current and bobbing its way out to sea.
“Right, is that what you told Mom?” I find myself saying. I don’t know, or even care, where that came from.
He frowns at me. “I couldn’t tell your mother anything.”
In the picture of her at Harvard, with her Harvard T-shirt stretched over her pregnant belly and barely covering it, she’s grinning maybe because she will be back when things settle down, when life is smooth, when my father’s landed a full-time job and the twins are old enough to make their own sandwiches or at least be cared for by someone else. And then I came along and it was too late.
I imagine that when she left us it was to go back to her real life. The one she should have had without my father.
“She never went back to school,” I say.
“She didn’t need to,” my father says.
“Could she have?”
He laughs. “She could do anything.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
I can suddenly picture my father with his arms around her and dream-light conviction and confidence in his voice telling her everything is just fine, just fine right here and now and always. My mother, swept downstream under a sunny sky, trying to make it back to shore.
He puts his arm around me and squeezes. “You’re a good kid,” he says to me. “You know that?” Annabelle Lee huffs again.
“Careful!” I snap, and shift her to my other arm, pulling away from him.
“Whoops!” he says cheerfully. “Did I flatten her? She’ll spring right back. She’s just a big fluff.”
We stop in front of our house, the rattiest on the block. All the lights are on, in every room, bright enough that it looks like the sun has come back up. I will walk through the whole house and turn them all off, one by one. The overhead lights and the table lamps and the wall sconces and the standing lamps and the desk lamps and the task lights, all of them except the one on the end table next to the couch my father will stretch out on to supposedly go through new MLS listings but actually fall asleep.
“Everything will be okay,” he says suddenly. He’s looking at the blazing bright house instead of me. The refrain of my childhood and every year of my life and every bump and scrape and bruise inside and out. Everything will be okay, or could be. I knew it wasn’t true. Not everything was okay. But for my father, it’s still an unshakeable, unassailable fact about the world.
“Right, Toby?” he says. Toby barks and spins in circles.
I trust Soto’s judgment more, and her face is as sad as ever.
“Toby knows what I’m talking about,” my father says.
“Toby might be the only one,” I say, and he elbows me.
“Chip off the old blockhead,” he says, and takes the front steps up two at a time, the dogs bobbing along in his wake.
CHAPTER 6
On Saturday I wake up seventeen years old and the first thing I do is run to the bathroom and drop to my knees. It’s the gift that keeps on giving—I’m sick for a long time, hanging on to the side of the bowl with my eyes closed and my heart jittering, holding my hair back with one hand. I can hear Soto snuffling at the bottom of the door, and then the jangling of her collar. The sound of tiny claws on the wood floor tell me Toby and Annabelle Lee have joined the party.
The doorknob rattles and then the knocking starts, louder than my heart.
“No,” I say, hunched over the bowl and resting my forehead on my arm.
“What are you doing?” my brother says. His voice is muffled and loud, like he’s smooshed his face against the door. Soto makes her tiny happy yelp. “Aw, hi, honey. Hallo. You are such a good girl. What is this thing? This is a dog?”
“Mateo?” I say. My brothers are supposed to be at college. My stomach lurches.
“Best surprise ever,” Mateo says. “Are you throwing up?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do you have bulimia?” he asks.
“Shut up, Mateo,” I say. Nausea is oozing through my body, up my throat, and I am trying not to let it out again. I swipe away the strands of hair that are sticking to my forehead.
“Aha, you do have bulimia!”
“I don’t have bulimia, Mateo.”
“Oh okay,” he says. He sounds disappointed. “I’ve heard good things about it.”
I grimace. “Why are you here?” I slump back against the wall and rub my eyes.
“It’s your birthday,” he says. “Surprise! Are you coming out of there? Clara wants you to come down for breakfast. Why are you throwing up again?”
I cover my face with my hands. Maybe if I am quiet and it’s dark he’ll go away. But he’s like a tick, or my conscience. I scrub at my cheeks with the palms of my hands.
“Are you really sick?” he says, and he sounds concerned this time. “Did you eat bad clams?”
“I’ll be out in a second,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. “Hurry up. Waffles!” He goes thumping down the hallway, Soto’s toenails clacking along behind him, and Toby and Annabelle Lee scurrying to keep up. I can hear him shouting at Lucas, the shaking of the house as they all thunder downstairs.
&n
bsp; Both my brothers are here, then. Everyone is downstairs waiting for me. I drink a glass of water, tepid from the tap, and then refill it again and then one more time. I brush my teeth and wash my face and avoid looking in the mirror. Even through the bathroom door I can hear my brothers shouting over each other and pans clattering and chairs being dragged screaming across the old linoleum.
When I appear at the kitchen door, Soto makes a happy circle and Toby yaps and races around the kitchen island. Annabelle Lee yips from the crook of Mateo’s arm. Lucas takes two long strides over from the center island and hauls me into a hug. “Ashley!” he says. He rocks back, lifting me just a tiny bit, and goes, “Oof!” and I push away. Soto circles around me and I scratch her head until she huffs and wanders off. Mateo’s sitting at the island with a plate of bacon in front of him, feeding strips into his face like he’s a wood chipper and ignoring Annabelle Lee’s tiny bark, which is vibrating her entire body. My father’s hair is sticking straight out from his head in all directions. He is practicing his pancake flips while my grandmother sips coffee out of a World’s Best Grandma mug, which the twins bought her for her birthday last year because they thought it was hilarious. It suits her the way a propeller hat would suit a Tibetan monk. She uses it only when they visit, and that’s because they take it out and put it in front of her. She is perfectly pulled together even though it’s not even nine in the morning. The rest of us look like animals who just crawled out of hibernation.
“I thought we were having waffles,” I say, tightening the belt of my big fuzzy pink robe.
“Happy birthday, kiddo!” my father says, glancing away from his pan. “Will you please shut that little thing up?” he says to Mateo.
“Dad thought waffles would be too messy,” Mateo says, his mouth full of bacon. He hauls Annabelle Lee up against his chest and scratches the back of her neck while she squirms.