by Gayle, Susie
“So this is the only guy left for adoption, huh?” Jeff asks as he inspects the little dog in the kennel, a six-year-old gray schnauzer. “I dig the beard.”
“Don’t say ‘dig,’” Anna says quietly. “You’re a grown man.” The smile never leaves her face. Weird.
Jeff ignores her. “What’s his temperament like?”
“Oh, this little guy is great,” I tell them. “Good with kids and other dogs. Very playful.” There are two reasons this poor fella hasn’t been adopted today. One is that he’s already six, and even though schnauzers have a healthy lifespan, for most people that’s already too old.
The other reason… well, it’s a little more complex.
“What’s his name?” Jeff asks, sticking his hand in and petting the docile pup.
That’s the other reason. “His name is… Cheese.”
I wince. Anna winces. Jeff’s face breaks out into the biggest, goofiest grin I’ve ever seen.
“No. Way,” he says, almost reverently. “That’s perfect!”
“Huh? Why?” I blurt out.
“Because we have another dog at home… and his name is Crackers! Cheese and Crackers!” Jeff laughs.
“His name is not Crackers,” Anna says tersely (still smiling). “His name is Oliver. You call him Crackers.”
Jeff shrugs. “Same diff. I think we should get him.”
Anna stiffens. “And I think that we shouldn’t make rash decisions. They have other puppies here, and there are other places to look—”
“Look at that face!” Jeff points to Cheese, who blinks his big brown eyes. “This guy needs a home. No one else wanted him.”
“Can we maybe talk about this in private?” Anna asks. Her eyes flit from me to Jeff, as if I’m the one intruding on them.
Still, I take the hint. “You folks take a minute. I’ll be right over there.” I retreat to the counter. What a strange couple. They seem to me to be pretty mismatched.
I check in on Sarah’s progress with Karen, and I’m shocked to see the latter cradling our last shelter cat in her arms, smiling broadly and stroking her head. See, one of the big reasons that Karen drifted—the biggest reason, actually—was because the shop was doing well and she claimed that I loved the animals more than her. Not true. I was the sole employee of a thriving pet store; of course it ate a lot of my time.
And now, here she is in the same shop that she blames for the dissolution of our marriage, getting a pet?
Life can be funny. Though at the moment, I’m not laughing.
“So the adoption fee is eighty dollars,” I hear Sarah telling Karen. “And we’ll throw in a free personalized engraved tag for her collar.”
“Done,” Karen says.
“Really?” Sarah asks.
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah, really.” Karen inspects the cat closely and adds, “I think I’ll call you… Pookie.”
I wince. Sarah winces. There’s a perfectly good nickname, right out the window.
As Sarah helps Karen fill out the paperwork, I venture closer to the couple under the pretense of tagging some chew toys for sale and find that their “private conversation” has escalated into an argument of hisses and whispers.
“You never think things through,” I hear Anna accuse quietly. “You always want to jump in headfirst.”
“Sorry that I want to experience life!” Jeff counters. “I don’t want every moment of my day scheduled in a stupid little planner like you do.”
“My planner is not stupid,” she hisses back. “How many times would you have forgotten doctor’s appointments?”
“Look, we’re getting off-track again. Do you want the dog or not?”
She sighs. “His name is Cheese, for god’s sake.”
“I know, it’s perfect!”
“You’re such a child sometimes…”
“What?”
“I said, what if he doesn’t get along with Oliver?”
Okay, that’s about enough of that. I smile big and intervene. “Excuse me, hi. I couldn’t help but overhear your concern. Tell you what: I can keep Cheese here at the shop, and we can schedule a time that I can bring him to your home and we can see if he and Crackers—sorry, Oliver, get along.”
The couple looks at each other briefly, as if the term compromise has never been a part of their vocabulary.
“That could work,” Anna says.
“Yeah, that’d be rad.”
“Dear lord, don’t say ‘rad’…”
“Great!” I clap my hands together. “When’s good for you?”
“Tomorrow,” Jeff says.
“You can’t,” Anna says quietly, “you have a dentist appointment.”
“Then after,” he tells her.
She scoffs and rolls her eyes—still smiling that tight smile all the while. “Fine. Tomorrow.” She digs in her handbag and pulls out a black leather-bound day planner. “Let’s say… seven p.m.? Is that okay with you?”
“Sure is,” I tell them. “Tomorrow at seven.”
“Bye, Cheese.” Jeff gives the little schnauzer one more scratch under the chin. Sarah finishes ringing up Karen for her new cat carrier, food, and some other items, and the three of them leave together. The last thing I hear before they’re out of earshot is Jeff saying, “Pookie? That’s a dope name…” And then Anna groaning and reminding him not to say dope.
“Sheesh,” Sarah says, watching them go. “That woman is going to have permanent wrinkles forcing that smile.”
“Yeah. She seems wound pretty tight. And that guy Jeff acts like he’s ten years younger than he is.” I shake my head. “Some people are so strange. Why would they even be together?”
“I don’t know. Let’s just promise never to be like that.”
“Agreed. So hey, how’d all that go with the Bear?”
“Pretty well, actually,” Sarah admits. “She was very nice to me.”
“I don’t like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it makes me feel like she’s up to no good.”
“She adopted a cat.”
“True enough. Let’s just stay on our toes anyway.”
“Roger.”
“That’s a terrible nickname.”
She punches me lightly in the arm.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
The next morning I head down to the shop before opening time and perform my daily ritual of clipping half a dozen dogs to leashes and taking them all down to the small park a block away behind the store. It’s not as difficult as it sounds; most of the dogs are just pups, Cheese is small enough, and I’ve trained Rowdy to walk off-leash. Once we’re inside the fenced-in grassy area with the gate closed, I unclip them and let them run around for a while.
Normally Rowdy likes to play mother-hen to the puppies, corralling them if they stray too far and breaking up fierce little fights, but today he seems to take a liking to Cheese. The two of them bound around the grass, rolling each other over and nipping playfully at one another’s heels.
When we get back, I let the dogs run around the shop—with the front and back doors closed and locked—while I change out the bedding in the kennels and give them fresh water. Then it’s breakfast time, and back in the kennels for opening at nine a.m. After that, I set about feeding, cleaning and watering all of our smaller animals—the trio of kittens, a pair of ferrets, a handful of rabbits, a few guinea pigs, some hamsters and gerbils, turtles, parakeets, an array of small fish, and a few types of lizards.
Sarah comes in around eleven, having spent the morning at the animal shelter, helping them sort and file the adoption paperwork from the event. Around one we grab lunch from It’s-a Pizza down the road, and that’s when I decide to pop the question.
“Sarah,” I tell her, “I have to go to those weird people’s house this evening with Cheese. Will you come with me? I don’t want to be alone with them.”
“Do you really t
hink that’s going to make it any less awkward?” she asks.
“No. But at least we’ll be able to experience the awkwardness together.”
She snorts. “Yeah, I’ll come. But you already owe me big, buster. I’m having trouble coming up with new ways for you to make things up to me.”
***
Ordinarily we wouldn’t close the shop until eight, but because of our appointment with the Abernathy’s, we lock up at about quarter to seven and clip Cheese to a leash. I tell Rowdy to stay behind at the shop—this is, after all, about Crackers and Cheese. He whines a little, but I promise him we’ll be back soon and give him a rawhide to chew on. Then the three of us get into my SUV and head toward the hill.
The address Jeff gave me leads us to a part of town that all the locals refer to as “the hill,” though it’s no higher in elevation than any other area of Seaview Rock. We call it that because it’s where all the wealthy people live in these big, sprawling colonial-style houses.
“Aha,” Sarah murmurs when we pull up to the front of the Abernathy’s house, a veritable manor on the end of a cul-de-sac.
“Aha what?”
She gives me a flat glance. “Look at this place. It’s enormous. No wonder they stay together.”
“…For the lifestyle?”
Her next look says duh. “If you were used to living like this, wouldn’t you try to make it work?”
“I guess so.” I shift uncomfortably in my seat and ask casually, “Is that… something you’re interested in? Living like that?”
She laughs. “No way. Could you imagine cleaning a place this big? And the electric bills… I can’t imagine.” She takes Cheese’s lead and we head up the long paved walkway.
When we ring the bell, the man who answers the door isn’t Jeff at all. He’s tall and lean, with boyish features and dark hair.
“Hi!” he says warmly. “You must be the people from the pet shop. I’m Steven, a friend of the family’s. Come on in.”
Sarah and I exchange a glance and smile and follow the stranger into the house. The foyer alone is magnificent; marble floors with a winding staircase leading up to the second story. The living room is bigger than the entire first floor of the house I rent, and the furniture looks so immaculate I feel like I shouldn’t sit on it. Poor Cheese looks desperately out of place against the stark-white carpet.
The other guest in the room, however, seems to have no problem making herself at home.
“Will, Sarah, so nice to see you again so soon,” Karen says, seated on a white sectional sofa with a glass of red wine in hand—the combination of which makes me terribly nervous, and it’s not even my couch.
“Hi, Karen,” I say, somewhat strained. “What brings you here?”
“Oh, Jeff and Anna had me and Steven over for dinner.” She blanches a little and quickly adds, “That is, had me over, and Steven over. Not us over.” She blushes deeply.
“Uh, anyway, Jeff’s in the backyard with Crackers,” Steven tells us. “Right through there.”
As Sarah and I head out the French doors that lead to the patio, I whisper, “Any idea what’s going on here? I’m lost.”
She grins. “Obviously Jeff and Anna are trying to set up Karen and Steven.”
“Oh.” I grimace. “Why would they do that to that poor man?”
“I don’t know. Misery loves company, I guess.”
The Abernathy’s backyard is, as expected, exquisite, enclosed with a tall, white vinyl stockade fence and lined with perfectly manicured trees and shrubs. A sizable shed, steel and shiny, sits in the rear corner of the yard. Jeff smiles broadly and waves to us as a German shepherd the size of a small horse barks a few times and comes bounding over to Cheese.
“Hey guys!” Jeff greets. “Welcome to mi casa. Crackers is totally friendly. You can let him off the leash.”
I unclip the schnauzer and the two animals, almost laughably on opposite sides of the size spectrum, sniff each other precariously.
“This is a really nice place you have here, Jeff,” I say, trying to sound casual. I’m not very good at small talk.
“Yeah, it’s alright,” he shrugs. “I’ve been fixing the ol’ place up here and there.”
I almost laugh, trying to imagine what would possibly need to be fixed up in this house, but I hold back.
Cheese and Crackers (Jeff’s got a point, it does have a ring to it) complete their sniffing appraisal of each other and take off into the yard, chasing one another wildly.
“I think they like each other!” Jeff announces excitedly. “Cheese and Crackers! They could have their own sitcom. Oh, this is great. Wait ‘til I tell Anna. She’s going to be so mad!” He wags his eyebrows at us and grins.
I’m usually not one to get involved in other people’s stuff; it makes me really uncomfortable. Luckily Sarah comes to the rescue.
“So Jeff,” she asks, “What do you do?”
“Oh, I run a company that installs commercial floors,” he tells us proudly. “Grocery stores, department stores, offices… stuff like that. A couple years back we nailed a contract with Sprawl-Mart, and that’s when we bought this place. In fact, I just installed a parquet floor upstairs. Freakin’ gorgeous. You wanna see?”
“Love to,” I say tightly. I’m not exactly handy myself. Once I fixed the doorknob to my bedroom and it was one of the proudest moments of my life. “But we shouldn’t leave these two alone.”
Jeff waves it off. “Eh, they’ll be fine. Look at ‘em, best of friends already. Come on, let’s go tell Anna the great news. Watch her right temple; you’ll see a little blood vessel start throbbing.”
I gulp. Sarah takes my hand and squeezes it tight, as if to say, We’ll get through this together.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
“We’re… not… getting… the… dog,” Anna says forcefully, punctuating each word with a stroke of a long kitchen knife as she slices strawberries for whatever sort of dessert she’s preparing in their ample kitchen. She’s dressed to the nines, which I imagine after seeing her twice is just the way she normally dresses, and wears a spotless white apron as she busies herself with her task.
Behind her, Jeff scoffs loudly. “Then what was the point of even having them bring him here? You’re wasting their time.” He turns to us, me and Sarah, who stand timidly in the entrance to the kitchen. “Tell her she’s wasting your time.”
She turns sharply, holding the knife in her fist. “I told you I wanted to shop around. I told you I wasn’t going to just jump into a decision. And frankly, I think the idea of getting a second dog is dumb!”
“It’s not dumb. Crackers is lonely.”
“It’s Oliver. And it is dumb. And you know why,” she says. She directs her tight-lipped smile at us, as if that alone would take any of the tension out of the room.
At that moment, Steven walks in with an empty wine bottle. “Hey guys, we’re empty. You want me to—”
“Cellar!” Anna barks at him. He shoots us an apologetic glance and meekly heads toward what I assume is the cellar door. “And another thing,” she continues, “who’s going to take care of this dog? I know you won’t. All you do is play with them. You don’t feed them, or pick up after them, or…”
“Hey, you know what?” Sarah says to me over the din. “I think I’m going to go talk to Karen.” She backs away from the argument slowly. Man. If the situation is so awkward that Sarah actually wants to go chat with Karen, you know it’s bad.
Left alone with the two of them, I stand there stupidly for a few more moments while they fire back and forth at each other, until I clear my throat and say, “Uh, excuse me… bathroom?”
“Up the stairs, to the right,” Anna says sharply. Then without a missing a beat, she turns back to Jeff. “You can’t even put your socks in the right hamper. How in the world are you going to take care of two dogs…?”
I trudge up the stairs and close the door behind me, glad to be out of th
ere. I use the bathroom and wash my hands, all the while thinking that when I go back downstairs, I’ll just tell them that they obviously need some time to talk it out, and that I’ll keep Cheese at the shop for another day or two until they can come to a decision. If they can come to a decision.
Their bathroom is disconcertingly spotless and adorned in a beach theme—seashells on the toilet tank, sand dollars and starfish framed in shadowboxes on the wall. The only things in my bathroom are an online pet supplier catalog and a poster of miniature dog breeds.
I glance out the small window, which looks out on the backyard, to make sure the two dogs are doing okay. Sure enough, Cheese is scoping out the massive area, pausing here and there to pee on a shrub. Oliver follows close behind him, interested in every little movement the smaller dog makes.
Then I catch a glimpse of Jeff storming across the yard in long strides, as angry people tend to do. He slides open the door of the steel shed and disappears inside.
Guess the fight is over.
Back downstairs, I join Karen and Sarah in the living room. They seem to be having an amiable conversation about cats.
“No, no, you don’t want to get her declawed,” Sarah tells her. “See, they actually cut a piece of the toe off. It’s terribly inhumane.”
“I didn’t know that,” Karen admits. “Thanks.”
Steven enters the room behind me with two bottles of wine, one in each hand. He smiles at me. “I thought you two might want a glass,” he says.
“Yes, please,” Sarah says quickly.
“None for me, thanks.” I’m not much of a wine drinker. I’m more of a beer guy. Give me a Whale of an Ale from the Runside and I’m a happy camper. Wine is something I reserve for fancy dinners and anniversaries.
Steven disappears again for about a minute and then returns with two glasses, one for himself and one for Sarah. He just barely hands it off to her when Anna enters, her white apron now spattered with red juice from the strawberries.