“‘I guess you’d give it all back in a heartbeat if it could bring Dutch back,’” Dad finishes. “About one more time and I would have said, ‘Fuck him. No way.’ Just to see what they’d say then.” He laughs, but it doesn’t sound right, and Mom reaches over and squeezes his arm.
“Well, it’s over,” she says. “Thank God for that.”
They fall silent then. Mom dozes in the front seat; Jules dozes beside me in the back. I’m wide-awake. Somehow I’ve got to tell them about the puppy. I’ve got to tell them now.
I’ll offer to stay in Gramps’ house, I’ve decided. Actually, it’s not a bad idea. I can help by cleaning things up, getting it ready to be sold—and while I’m living there, I can look around for a place of my own. It seems like a sensible plan.
Still, my heart rattles wildly as I lean between the two front seats and say quietly, “Dad?”
He glances back at me.
“I’m thinking maybe I could move into Gramps’ house for a while,” I say. “I mean, it’s not a good idea to let a house sit empty—right? It would be good for someone to be there.”
“You don’t need to do that, Emma,” Dad says. “Thanks, though.”
“I want to,” I say. “Uh. The thing is—see, I bought this puppy yesterday, and—”
“You what?” he asks.
Mom jolts fully awake, and turns to look at me.
Jules acts like she’s still asleep, but I can feel her watching me through slitted eyes.
“I bought a puppy,” I say. “It’s on hold at the pet shop. I went in yesterday, after I got my dress for the funeral, and I saw him there. He’s so cute. You won’t believe how cute he is. A little yellow Lab. He was playing in the window and came right up to me—”
“And you just bought it?” Mom asks.
“Sort of,” I say. “Yeah. I explained to the manager about Gramps dying and the funeral and all, and she said, okay, I could pay for the puppy and leave it there for a few days as long as I signed this thing that said if anything happened to it they weren’t responsible. I’m going start apartment hunting first thing tomorrow morning.”
Mom’s face bears an expression of utter disbelief. “Emma,” she says. “Sometimes I think your dad and I were out of our minds to give you all that money. Your grandfather just died, for God’s sake—and you go and buy a puppy? You don’t think. Or maybe you just don’t give a damn. Maybe that’s what really scares me. If you’d thought about it one second, you’d have realized there is no way that you’re going to find an apartment and move in tomorrow. You’d have realized that you’re going to have to bring the puppy home.”
“I did too think,” I say in a wobbly voice. “I wasn’t going to bring it home. I was going to get a motel room until I found an apartment. But then I thought of living in Gramps’ house. I could help, you know? I’d keep it clean for when people come to look at it,” I babble on. “And mow the grass when it gets warmer.”
It gets real quiet then. Clearly, Mom is finished talking to me. So I say, “Dad?”
“Abby?” he says. But she won’t talk to him either.
I feel bad, putting him in the middle. But at this point, what can I to do?
“Dad,” I persist. “Please?”
“Goddamn it, Emma,” he says in a tired voice. “You shouldn’t have bought the puppy. You know better. But since you have, yeah, I guess you’d better take it out to Dad’s and stay there till you find a place of your own.”
His words resonate in the dark silence that falls among us all the rest of the way home. A place of my own. This is what I said I wanted, but until Dad spoke the words I didn’t truly understand that, buying the puppy, I’d taken the first real step away from him. Mom, too. And Jules. The only life I’ve ever known.
Twenty–five
A week later, I’m sitting in Gramps’ kitchen, arguing with Margaret about The Natural Dog. “The book says rewards are the answer,” I tell her. “And also keeping in mind the various aspects of your dog’s learning capabilities.”
“What on God’s green earth does that mean?” Margaret asks.
“I’m not exactly sure,” I say. “I guess, remembering a dog’s not a person. You know, so you can’t teach it like you’d teach a person.”
Of course, she pounces on that. “Exactly why you need a newspaper. That’s how I trained Butch, and that’s how I trained every other dog I’ve ever had. There’s no way around it. A little whack doesn’t really hurt them. You just have to convince them that messing in the house is connected to something unpleasant. Something they don’t like.”
But I can’t make myself whack Harp. Or rub his nose in the mess he’s made, which is the other thing Margaret says I should do. She knows it, too, and goes for the jugular. “Honey, it’s starting to smell bad in here,” she says. “I hate to be a bossy old lady, but you’ve got to let that puppy know who’s in charge. And soon.”
I watch her walk back to her house, Butch following obediently behind her. As if on cue, he stops and pees against the big oak tree before trotting through the back door she’s holding open for him. I kick the floorboard and mutter a few choice phrases I know would shock the shit out of Margaret if she heard them.
There’s no way I’m going to admit to her what I hate admitting even to myself: the reward system does not appear to be working. The few times Harp just happened to pee outside, I praised and petted him and gave him a Milk Bone treat or his special squeaky toy, but so far he’s still clueless. I just need to be firmer, I tell myself. I lift him from his bed, fast asleep, and take him outside, where he instantly becomes fully awake and ready to play.
“No way, dude,” I say. “Pee.” I point to the grass. “This is where you pee. Outside. Not in the kitchen.”
Startled by my harsh tone, Harp looks up at me, his little head cocked, his eyes liquid and pleading for my approval, and I remember the part in The Natural Dog about how puppies can be traumatized, just like people. You can screw them up so bad you have to take them to a dog psychiatrist. Even then, they might not get over it. That makes me feel so guilty that I kneel down and ruffle Harp’s fur and let him lick me.
But I know I have to do something. In an hour or so, Mom and Dad will be here to start sorting through Gramps’ things, getting the house ready to put up for sale. No way are they going to be as polite about the smell as Margaret’s been. I leave Harp to play in the fenced-in yard, go in and fill a bucket with hot water and ammonia, and wash the kitchen floor for about the hundredth time. The average puppy pees once an hour. I didn’t need The Natural Dog to tell me that. At least I had the good sense to take Margaret’s advice and put a barrier at the doorway so Harp couldn’t get out of the kitchen and pee on the carpet. And to replace the plaid cushion in his cute wicker bed with a couple of old, crumpled-up sheets that can be thrown in the washer when they get smelly.
This is not turning out quite the way I planned. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted a dog. A dog would love me no matter what I did; a dog would always be glad to see me. I used to imagine myself rolling around in the yard with a yellow lab just like Harp, hiking through the woods with it, curling up on the sofa with it to watch TV. Even sleeping with it.
Actually, I have been sleeping with Harp—on the kitchen floor. Because if I don’t he stays awake half the night whining.
Still, I totally adore him. Harp is my dog; I knew it the second I saw him in the pet shop, and I still feel exactly the same way. Just watching him cavorting in the backyard, barking at squirrels, makes me happy. Now, as if he knows what I’m thinking, he bounds over to me, tilts his head expectantly, then yaps a couple of times. I swear he’s smiling. I open the sliding glass door to let a little fresh spring air into the kitchen, then throw myself down on the warm grass and let him crawl all over me. I wrestle with him a while, then sit him in my lap, holding h
im by the collar. He yaps and tries to twist out of my grasp, nipping at my wrist with his sharp little puppy teeth.
“Ouch,” I say, yanking my hand away from him. “Ouch! Okay, that’s it. I know conversation is not one of your various learning capabilities, pal, but you and I need to talk. What are we going to do here?”
Harp yaps at me one more time, then nuzzles his head into my lap and falls fast asleep.
“Well, shit,” I say. I can’t stay mad at him for two seconds. But it’s exhausting, being a dog owner. I close my eyes, let the warm spring sun wash over me. I’ll just lie down in the grass a second, I think. Rest. The next thing I know, I hear Mom’s voice.
“That damn puppy,” she says.
When I open my eyes, she’s wiping something off of her shoe. And she does not look happy. I sit, clutching Harp, who’s been sleeping on my chest. When I set him down, he rushes toward Mom, barking. “Harp,” I yell. “Stop that. Harp!” I look at my watch, glance at the sliding glass door, which is wide open. “Jeez, I guess I fell asleep. I meant to—”
But it’s too late to explain. Harp’s bed is next to the door and as soon as Mom steps in that direction she wrinkles her nose. “Emma,” she says ominously, and goes on inside.
I follow her. “I know. It smells horrible. I’m sorry. I was going to clean it all up before you came. And the dog poop in the yard. I really was. But Margaret got me so upset when she came over. She says I have to hit Harp with the newspaper to get him to learn about peeing and all that, and I just can’t. I can’t. It’s too mean. And smushing his face in it—”
“Well, what are you going to do then?” she says. “Reason with the puppy? You know, Emma, if I’d reasoned with you every time you took a fast break for the deep end of a swimming pool, you’d probably be dead right now. Drowned.” She sits down at the kitchen table and puts her head in her hands.
I look at Mom, who refuses to look back at me. I look at poor, traumatized Harp, who gives a little bark and nudges the sliding glass door with his nose. I open it and, amazed, watch him trot out into the yard and pee, just like he’s been doing it this way all his life.
“Thank you!” I shout. “Thank you, Jesus!” And do a little dance around him, dropping Milk Bone treats at his feet. I feel about ten years older than I felt when I got up this morning. But I feel—in charge. Of Harp, anyway. But it makes me feel like maybe, maybe I can see my way to taking charge of myself, too.
I need to find my own place. I made the leap, it was my choice. Now I have to land somewhere and start moving forward. Plus, it’s depressing to be in Gramps’ house; I keep coming upon things that make me feel even worse about his being gone. Like the newspaper from the last day of his life, folded to the comic section. The photo of Dad in his Little League uniform that he taped just inside the drawer of his bedside table. I can hardly stand to go into the garage at all, because it’s so full of him. His Harley, his workbench cluttered with various automotive parts that he never figured out what to do with. Its smells like Gramps out there: some combination of soap and dust and motor oil.
But it’s where Dad fled when he heard Mom start yelling at me, so I go out there and dig in to the major task of helping him clean it out. We don’t talk. Both of us thinking our own thoughts, we go through an old battered cabinet where we find a drawer with nuts and bolts and screws, all thrown in together. In another drawer, there’s a jumble of instruction manuals—for cars, snowmobiles, chain saws, lawn mowers—all of them heavily fingerprinted with grease. These are Gramps’ fingerprints, I think, pitching the manuals into the trash. Nobody in the world will ever have these same fingerprints again.
Methodically, we throw things away. Boxes and boxes of things. Other things we set aside for Goodwill: dozens of pairs of brown work gloves, bright orange mechanic’s jumpsuits, boxes of clay pigeons, rakes, shovels, hoses. All through the process, Harp snoozes peacefully on some old towels in the corner of the garage.
After a while, Mom brings out some lemonade. And Harp’s water dish, a kind of peace offering. She sits on the seat of Gramps’ Harley. “It’s so strange taking a house apart,” she says. “Like dismantling a universe. All those beautiful antiques your mother spent a lifetime collecting, and here they are gathered together in the middle of the floor, like refugees. And that old sofa in the living room. I remember sitting on it and feeding Julie a bottle!”
It’s nearly six o’clock by the time we finish, and we decide to go for Mexican food at a place in the Village we like. It’s a nice evening, balmy, and we decide to eat outside where we amuse ourselves by watching a bunch of skanky high school boys practicing tricks on their skateboards.
“Freshman boys,” Mom says in a melancholy tone of voice. “Oh, I know. By this time of year I was always up to my ears with kids. Ready for summer. But watching these goofs makes me miss my students. I miss having students. Knowing them, watching them grow.”
“I think I know of something that will cheer you up,” Dad says.
“What?” Mom looks wary.
“You’ll see,” he says mysteriously.
“Dad,” I say. “Remember? Mom doesn’t really like surprises.”
He beams. “She’ll like this one. I guarantee it. Come on, you’ll see.”
I climb into the back seat of the car with a sense of impending doom. Five minutes later, he pulls up in front of this big white frame house—two stories, with green shutters and a brick sidewalk. Surrounded by a wrought iron fence, thick with ivy. Mom’s favorite house in the world. And there’s a FOR SALE sign in front of it.
“Is this amazing, or what?” Dad says.
Mom just looks at him. “You’re bringing me here because—?”
“You’ve always been crazy about this house. Now we can buy it.”
It’s ominously quiet for a long time. Then Mom says, “Mac, are you crazy? In less than five months we become millionaires, we quit our jobs, Dutch dies—and you want to talk about moving?”
“You hire a moving company and move,” Dad says. “What’s the big deal about that?”
“I can’t think about moving,” Mom says. “I can’t think of one more single thing than I’m thinking about now. Okay?”
“But you love this house,” Dad says. “It’s what you’ve always wanted.”
“It’s what I used to want,” she says. “I wanted it so bad I could taste it. I’d drive by it sometimes at night, when the lamps were on, and I could see inside to the living room and I’d imagine us all there. It scared me, it seemed so real. Like it was a life I’d lost. Or the life I should have had. But you didn’t give a damn about houses then. You thought buying a big house like this would be stupid. Jesus, wouldn’t it be even more stupid now? Buying a big house like this for just the two of us?”
“I thought it was stupid then because we couldn’t afford it.” Dad says. “Now we can. Who cares if it’s just for the two of us? We can have whatever house we want.”
“Well, it’s too late,” Mom says. “The last thing I want to do is buy a big house and have to decorate it, buy stuff to fill it up, get used to living in it.” She turns to me. “Am I missing something, Emma? Or is it not at least a little insane to think you can just decide to buy what’s probably a million-dollar house like you’d buy, I don’t know, a kitchen appliance?”
“It’s kind of—sudden,” I say. “But, Mom, everybody knows how much you’ve always loved this house. Why wouldn’t Dad think you’d like to have it?”
She doesn’t answer.
I think it’s over at this point. Finally. I think, surely, Dad has the sense not to pursue this any further. But I am completely, totally wrong.
He says, “Abby, listen. I know I’ve been driving you nuts ever since we got the money. I know you’re afraid I’m going to spend the rest of my life just fucking around. But I’ve been thinking. You know how I’ve always
said I wanted to build kit cars? Custom cars. Do it right, make them perfect? Well, when I drove by this morning and saw the house was for sale I noticed it had a four-car garage—”
I look at the house again, notice the big garage for the first time and have the feeling I’m about to see a train wreck.
“It would be a great place to set up in,” Dad goes on. “I could do one at a time in the beginning. See what happens. If I like it, if I can sell them.”
“Oh,” Mom says. “The four-car garage. So that’s what this is really about.”
And I wish I were anywhere but here. I don’t want to hear this ugliness between them, don’t want to be scared by it, to think for the first time in my life that there might be something really wrong between them.
I really don’t want to hear Dad say, defeated, “Abby, I don’t need to pay seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars for a fucking four-car garage. I can rent one for a hell of a lot less than that if I decide I want to build the cars. I just thought the house would make you happy.”
Twenty–six
“Emma, I’m so sorry,” Mom says when she calls the next day. “Your dad and I arguing in front of you like that. I know it upset you. We were both exhausted. Physically and emotionally. We all were, after having to go through all those things in the house.”
I’m still in bed, paralyzed with said exhaustion. Mostly emotional, in my case.
“Emma?” Mom says. “Honey, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Fine. So, are you and Dad speaking yet?”
She’s quiet a moment. “Not exactly,” she says. “Emma. About the house. I lay awake all night thinking about it and, the truth is, that house was the house I wanted to have grown up in. You know, a ‘Father Knows Best’ house. Where everyone’s always happy, where everyone always knows exactly the right thing to do. That’s why I had such a thing for it, when I was younger. But see? What I’ve figured out is that there is no such house. Anywhere.” She laughs, kind of. “Which seems like progress to me. I don’t need the house now. And one thing I know for sure is that I don’t want to move, at least right now. I was telling your dad the truth when I said I couldn’t face the hassle of that.”
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