Later, with a different home video playing, she does her yoga. But she burns no incense. Hotspur hadn’t liked it. When she is done, Glenda turns off all but the lamp in the foyer and stretches out on the air mattress. Looking at the motionless dog, she feels sleepy.
When she wakes, early morning light fills the doorwall. She looks at the dog. In the night he has shifted to face away. She thinks he’s dead, then sees shallow breathing. Too rapidly, the dog’s rib rack is pumping. But Bill has made it through the night. And is she making it up? Looking down at what now strikes her as an embarrassing, ridiculous banquet spread out on the tile floor, she chooses to believe some of the sliced hunks of hot dog are missing. When she touches him, the dog raises his head, sighs and lowers it. When she repeats the cage-lifting, he comes all the way out before settling. She puts in the morning pill and keeps talking, stroking his neck, his back. He tries to shake her away when she squeezes the lotion in his ears, but doesn’t snap. Real or imagined, every small success strengthens her. She keeps trying to get him to look at her. She smells funky to herself, but is reluctant to shower. That he held on until morning has raised the ante, made her nervous, afraid to leave him. From time to time aware again of the buffet, Glenda wonders if she is having a breakdown.
“No, I’m not. I’m just giving it the old college try. And you will too, won’t you?” When she sits next to him and gets ready to give him the midday pill, she isn’t wearing the golf glove. Stroking his neck, she faces the bright doorwall. The steamy day hovers outside, grass and trees a deep green, true only in summer. For the first time since waking, Glenda realizes she slept through the night. “That doesn’t happen now. Almost never. It’s because of alcohol. It puts you to sleep, but it wakes you up.” She mixed no drinks last night.
SHE ISN’T WRONG about hot dogs. Bill likes them. Hot dogs or brats are something the mister grilled for himself when others wanted chicken. He always made one or two for the dog. And Bill drinks some water, the bowl smelling familiar, trustworthy. The woman’s voice appeals to him. He lies outside the cage, watching her in the kitchen. Then she does something sitting on the floor, in front of the big TV.
He sleeps, she makes him take the pills, fools with his ears. Whenever he wakes she is in the room. On the third day, he stands. She claps her hands, holds his head in both hands like the mister, and goes on talking. She opens the doorwall and coaxes him to come out. Like a true convalescent, he pads to the opening and looks out warily. It isn’t right, too full of scents and challenges he has no strength for. He turns away and goes back inside the crate.
She calls the vet, asking if this means Bill will live. “Dogs rally like people,” he says. “I’m surprised he got this far, but don’t get your hopes too high.” Pointless advice. Glenda is by now convinced. Possessed. Rally and then fail? Out of the question. She redoubles her efforts, goes back for more pills and a dietary supplement the vet suggests. She commits herself utterly to the dog, fully freed now of self-doubt or questions. She has become a fanatic, a zealot. Even before Cliff Gilmore’s death, she never believed in God. What, then, are you praying to? she asks herself that afternoon, under the shower and hearing herself doing just that, voice hollow in the tiled stall.
The one-on-one conversation on the porch does not lead to what Ruby’s stepmother calls rapprochement. After the talk Ruby is, if anything, even more unhappy. When Fred asks if she wants to make another visit with Ronald to the traveling carnival in Cadillac, she says no thank you. She keeps knitting and doing beadwork, isolating herself. She prefers her old friend the Game Boy to TV with others. After dinner, she still lets her grandfather sit her on his lap and work the wheel of the big pontoon boat. But it isn’t the same. Later, he sees her staring out at the dock.
Two days before the three of them are to go back to the temporary house being rented in Pennsylvania, his new daughter-in-law comes up from her afternoon swim. “Could we talk?” She is toweling her hair. They walk down the greensward to the Adirondack chairs. Seated with the towel draped around her shoulders, she sits back. “You know I’m in for the long haul,” she says. Fred does know that, it’s obvious. His son’s second wife is no short-ball hitter. “I have a BA from a good school and a law degree from a better one. Big deal. I need a few days to regroup and imagine how we’re going to manage this fall. Ruby just isn’t letting me in. I’d like her to stay with you for ten more days while we sort things out. She loves you both so much. It would mean a lot.”
He always flies down in late August to check on the Naples house. As usual, there have been storms and he worries about damage to the appliances. Lightning strikes can fry the wiring and turn complicated circuits into blobs of plastic and silicon. “Why not take Ruby?” his wife says. “Would you like that, sweetheart, just the two of you? Take the plane with grandpa?”
Maybe she is just bored, or perhaps her experiences in Florida have resonated in some way. She nods yes. The following night, they take the 7:20 Spirit flight, arriving at the Fort Myers airport at ten. They take the limo to Donegal, and then Ruby helps roll up the hurricane shutters. Everything in the close, sealed house has survived. The air conditioning is left on to prevent mold, but the rooms are musty. Reset at a lower temp, the system begins to clear the house. Ruby and Fred share a frozen pizza, then go to bed. In the morning, they are eating toaster waffles on the lanai when the pool girl comes.
“You had a dog,” she says using the tile brush. “Bill?”
“That’s right. We had to give him up.”
“You took him to the shelter?”
“We thought maybe it was best.”
“Can I go inside, Grandpa?”
“Sure, sweetie.”
As the doorwall slides shut, the pool girl reaches down with glass vials. She takes water samples and holds them up, checking the PH level. “I don’t know what happened.” She watches the vials change color. “He must’ve got out. He came back. He was right where you’re sitting, under the table last week when I came. I called Animal Services. I was down doing the Gilmore’s, I told her about it.”
HE GOES INSIDE and calls Glenda. He has never learned about Hotspur and she tells him. She explains about going to the shelter and bringing Bill home. “He’s very sick, Fred. Please come, it might do him good.”
“DO YOU WANT to see Bill?” He puts down the cordless phone. Ruby is on the sofa in the living room with the Game Boy. “Come on. Let’s take a walk and see old Bill, what do you say?” Reluctantly, Ruby sets aside the toy. They leave by the front door and start up the block. “You liked him,” her grandfather says. “You two always got along.” She keeps silent. When he explained earlier in the summer to both grandchildren why he and grandma had decided it was best to give up Bill, Ruby had been knitting. Just because of the stupid baby, she said. He gets kicked out of his house. His wife tried to convince her someone would be sure to adopt a nice dog like Bill, but Ruby knew her grandmother had not much liked the dog. You don’t know that, grandma, she said. You’re just saying it.
The doorbell is still echoing inside when Glenda opens the door. “Fred—” She steps into his arms as is her way. It’s a generational thing, all this hugging. Glenda’s approach to greeting behavior has always made other Donegal wives furious. Unable to do anything about it, they are forced to watch their geezer husbands looking proud to be hugged so thoroughly by someone so much younger and thinner and the rest of it.
As the hug goes on, with Ruby waiting for what will soon follow, one of the standard token greetings for children—And who’s this, or My, how you’ve grown—the vigorously circulating air in the Gilmore house now carries information to all corners of the interior. It is information at the molecular level, most of which would not mean anything to humans.
The vet has said that sick dogs, like sick humans, sometimes rally, then decline rapidly. With Bill, it’s too soon to tell. He is eating almost nothing. He drinks water, he fusses about the ear treatments, then lies flat again, panting. But when the infor
mation floating now over the receptors still at work in his nose join what is coming to his ears, he stops panting and raises his head. It confuses him but is real. That voice, that scent. He struggles to undo his stick legs. His paws skitter and scratch, seeking purchase on slippery tile. He is shaking but up, looking to the foyer when the mister sees him.
“Oh no—”
Why doesn’t he come? Here I am, Bill thinks. It’s me.
“That’s just awful.”
Now he comes, his walk, his scent. “What’s this, what’s this, Bill?” That’s what the mister says whenever he finds something dug up, or catches Bill on the furniture. I didn’t dig, he thinks. I’m too weak. The man gets down and is touching him, scratching but very lightly, as though afraid. Where was he? Why was he gone?
He doesn’t remember much of it, just the mister himself. No bitterness or silent treatment comes into play, no payback, none of the devices that would figure at such a moment, were Bill human. Hardly able to stand, what he experiences now is, in human terms, a simple sense of recovered congruity, of order restored. And the child. She is there now, at the mister’s side, looking at him. He knows nothing of her, doesn’t remember her lying on the carpet with him. But she shares something of the mister’s scent. She is part of him, and therefore heaven.
“I suppose it’s crazy,” Glenda says. “I just couldn’t leave him there. I knew when I left the house it was a mistake. ‘Don’t go, Glenda,’ I told myself. ‘Go down there and you’ll be sorry.’” As Fred sits stroking the dog, Glenda explains about the bowls. What the hell—she tells him about the home videos. She is confessing to him, sharing her tormented self, hoping for an ally.
“I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” he says. “What else is there? Who knows what goes on with them?”
Ruby kneels with the soles of her feet under her butt, hands on her knees. “You can smell the medicine,” she says.
“It’s become very important to me,” Glenda says. “Too important. I know it has to do with Cliff. With Hotsie, too. That really is crazy, but it’s true. Cliff got him one of these microchips they put under the skin. When they called, it was like I had failed everything.”
They stay an hour. Back at the house, he makes them tuna-and-cheese melts, one of her favorites. “He liked these,” she says looking at her half-eaten sandwich. “I remember.”
“He liked everything.” His own sandwich tastes bad to him. He can still smell the dog.
“He didn’t like corn.”
“Neither do you.” She smiles at him. “I see, I get it,” he tells her. “He was your cleaner-upper under the table.”
“Just corn. And liver. But he ate that.”
“We’ve never had liver when you’re with us.”
“Once,” she says. “Could we go back?”
“Home? We just got here, sweetie. In a few days.”
“I mean to Bill’s.”
He watches her drinking her Coke. For some reason he can’t remember, she and her brother aren’t supposed to drink carbonated beverages. Letting Ruby have a soda represents one of several small conspiracies they enter into. They subvert what he sometimes thinks of as the well-intentioned but overly protective policies of both the kids’ parents. Everything seems so dangerous to them. His grandchildren wear helmets for everything. Bikes, Razor Scooters. Every time they go in the pool, they have to shower. So much information on the hazards of just being has entered the public domain. Nearing the end of his own life, it seems to him childhood has been turned into a no-man’s land littered with biochemical land mines.
“Sure,” he says. “Why not?”
“Right now?”
“Well, sweetie, I imagine Glenda has things to do.”
“She said any time. She said she wanted us to come.”
He knows what Ruby is thinking: If we go, he’ll get better. He actually thinks Glenda might believe the same thing. He sees her opening the door, grabbing him. She’s always been just a little over-the-top. But you can explain that in terms of being anxious to please in a place where you’re viewed with suspicion and contempt. Today, though, she looked, well, crazy doesn’t seem far off the mark.
As for Bill’s getting better, it doesn’t seem likely. The dog has too little left. As they were sitting with him, he lost control. A really awful, sick-smelling urine spread out from his hind quarters. Glenda cleaned it up, talking in the soothing way an especially decent nurse might treat a terminally ill patient.
WHEN SHE ANSWERS the door half an hour later, her face lights up. You’re with me, it says. You know I’m nuts but you’ve hired on. She can’t know his own feelings of guilt and anger at seeing something he loved so reduced, drained. The simple truth is, Bill meant more to Vinyl than he realized. The dog’s vitality, his loyalty and trust had worked like an antidote for Time, the daily paper, the evening news. Seeing his dog on the floor, he felt ashamed. Responsible. You saved something and then threw it away, he thought.
When the two of them walk back to the dog, Ruby is already there. She is kneeling again, unwrapping the other half of her tuna melt. She breaks it in small pieces in her hand. Then—always a neat child—she puts the pieces on the paper towel she brought it in, saying nothing. She pushes the towel in front of the dog and sits back.
“I never thought of it,” Glenda says. “I never thought of tuna. Hotsie loved it.”
“He’s eating—” Hands in fists on her knees, Ruby is rocking slightly. “He likes tuna fish.”
Why haven’t you called?”
“Why haven’t you? It works in both directions.”
“Because you do,” she says. “You go down to check on things and call.”
“Well, I didn’t, all right?”
His wife can hardly miss the edge in his voice. He wants to pin the rap on her. None of this would’ve happened if she hadn’t gotten all bent out of shape about nothing. The dog wouldn’t hurt anyone.
“How’s Ruby?”
“Good.”
“Good how? Give me details. Have you been anywhere? How’s she eating?”
Why do all women believe everything can be understood in terms of food? “She’s eating fine,” he says. “We’ve had pizza, toaster waffles, tuna melts. How’s that?” He tries to control his anger. Be fair, he thinks. If his wife never really liked Bill, she didn’t hate the dog. One day you just sprang him on her, he thinks. Showed up and said, Meet Bill, our new family member.
“Well, all right, then. Is she there?”
“At the club. They have a summer program.”
“You’re kidding. Since when? What kind of program?”
“Some kid thing for grandchildren. Lesley Rauch told me about it.” She is very good at catching him in small lies or half-truths, but this is the story he has decided to use. The odds improve when he gives details, so he adds, “Something to do with crafts. Pottery, I think.”
“Ruby would love that,” his wife says. “I’m surprised. I don’t remember anything in the newsletter.”
“Lesley said it was spur-of-the-moment.” He wants to get off the topic. On it much longer, and he will screw up. “Listen, honey, I need to keep the line open. The cable’s out. I don’t want to face too many more hours without the Cartoon Network. I’ll call tomorrow.”
She says goodbye. He hangs up, making a mental note to cook up more specifics related to the spur-of-the-moment summer program for grandchildren. “The cable’s out” he thinks was inspired. He doesn’t mind telling his wife about Bill. But what he really won’t be able to sit still for is a sarcastic monologue about Glenda, or interrogation about his visits there. He saw the incense sticks and empty liquor bottles, not to mention Glenda herself. All those dishes, he thinks. Home videos. If she weren’t both a good person and desperate, she wouldn’t be doing any of it.
PROBABLY BILL WOULD make it now anyway. He is getting large doses of a drug to counteract the poison in his blood stream. His ears are responding to the lotion, he is passing the parasites. Gle
nda refuses to believe it. She knows the return of his owner and Ruby have tipped the scales. “You’ve made the difference,” she keeps saying. “You and Ruby.”
The girl asks if she can stay. She is on the floor with the dog and looks up at Glenda. He sees they worked this out when he was at the house lying about pottery classes and cable failure. He really does now feel committed, involved. He lets her stay, goes back home and sleeps well.
At Glenda’s, a landmark moment comes that night when Bill stands. It’s after dinner. By now, the area around his cage is bunkered with plates heaped with flaked tuna. For good measure, Glenda also opened sardines and a can of mackerel in tomato sauce. And slices of both Gouda and New York Extra Sharp cheddar. Then she made spaghetti for herself and Ruby. It’s one of the few things she feels confident serving to others.
“Graciella did the cooking,” she says. “She was really good at it, a great housekeeper. As you can tell, I’m a shitty cook.” She looks at Ruby across from her at the butcher-block table in the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” Glenda says. “That just slipped out.”
“It’s okay.”
“I apologize. Models don’t always watch their mouths.”
“Are you a model?”
“Was. That’s how I met Cliff. You know what Lands’ End is? A catalog company. They make sports clothes, bathing suits. I modeled for them. I had a lot of work because of the Baby Boomers. You know, looking good even though you’re not so young anymore? That’s what they wanted me for. We were here doing a shoot for the catalog. This guy with a dog kept throwing a Frisbee. It was really amazing, I’m telling you. “Did you know Hotspur?”
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