by Nick Pirog
She nods lightly.
I ask, “How can I be a dog one moment and a cat the next?”
She blinks her eyes. “Hugo, do you know what a soul is?”
“A soul?” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t think so.”
“There’s a part of you that never dies. A part of you that lives on forever. This is called your soul.”
“Okay.”
“When you died, your soul stayed here.”
“I died?”
“Yes, Hugo. You died.”
I’ve seen plenty of dead things. Dead frogs. Dead bugs. Dead squirrels. Dead birds. I even saw a dead bear once. I know what dead is. And I know what dead smells like. But I never thought that I died.
I ask, “So how did my soul end up in a baby cat?”
“If we are good and we die, our souls become stars, living forever in the sky. But sometimes a soul stays here on Earth. It is very, very rare. You see, the exact moment your soul was heading up to become a star, a baby cat was in need of a soul. And since yours was the closest, your soul went into that baby cat.”
“So I became a cat instead of a star?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“There are many reasons. I cannot say why your soul stayed here. You will have to ask the Maker.”
“The Maker?”
“Yes, Hugo. The Maker of the souls.”
~
Calandia spends a few minutes trying to explain this Maker to me, but it’s all very confusing. Not only did this Maker make all the souls, but the Maker made everything: all the humans, all the animals, the Lake, the Mountains, the sun and the moon. I don’t know if my brain is big enough to understand all this Maker stuff.
~
I point to the lone mouse next to Calandia and ask, “Aren’t you worried those mice could have once been dogs or cats?”
She picks the mouse up in her paw and sucks it into her mouth, then chokes it down with a loud gulp. She says, “You remember how I said the good souls become stars?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the bad souls,” her whiskers twitch, “they become mice.”
Chapter 15
“BEACH DATE”
Jerry
“They seem to be getting along,” Megan says, nodding at Cassie and Wally chasing each other at the edge of the lake.
Wally is a one-year-old Shih Tzu-terrier mix. He has a teddy bear face and shaggy white, black, and tan fur. He’s very Ewok-y. He went wild the second he laid eyes on Cassie, dragging Megan forward like the pair was in the Iditarod.
At first Cassie was a bit wary of the overly excitable fifteen-pound dog, but she warmed up to him quickly.
“Yeah, they do,” I say.
The day after meeting Megan at the pet store, with my wits about me once again, I tracked her down on the internet. Jimmy’s Restaurant at The Landing had a Megan Klipp listed as the pastry chef and I found her on Facebook easily enough.
After learning she was only twenty-five years old, I nearly aborted the mission, but then again, in the short three minutes I interacted with her, she appeared markedly more mature than Brook, who was in her thirties. So I wrote her a message, asked if maybe she and her dog—who was prominent in most of her pictures—wanted to meet for a playdate sometime.
“How about Saturday?” she wrote back a few hours later.
And so here we are.
The beach is crowded to the point of absurdity, but there is a football field length of narrow beach—between the public beach and Hotel Row—that is only sparsely occupied. The temperature is in the low nineties, which is as hot as it ever gets in Tahoe. Megan and I are sitting in beach chairs, shaded by a beach umbrella in the sand. I picked up some sandwiches from a local deli and they are packed in a cooler with a few bags of chips and some sodas.
“Oh, a wedding,” Megan says, nodding toward Hotel Row, where a bunch of chairs are being set up in neat rows and facing a white arch.
Megan is wearing tan shorts, a yellow bikini top, and a green ball cap. Her hair is braided and falls onto one of her freckled shoulders.
“Did you know there are over five thousand weddings in Tahoe each summer?” I ask.
It isn’t uncommon to see three or four wedding ceremonies taking place on the beach on a Saturday afternoon. Tahoe is an ideal and easy destination wedding for the seven million people who live in the Bay area (San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose) just three and a half hours southwest. One day, after seeing six different weddings, I Googled the statistic.
“That actually doesn’t surprise me,” Megan says. “Sometimes there are three or four ceremonies a day at the beach in front of Jimmy’s. Jones-Rogers at noon. Smith-Johnson at two. White-Palmer at four. It’s like a wedding factory.”
“Does your restaurant do any of the receptions?”
“Yeah, there are two ballrooms at The Landing, so we pretty much have two wedding parties every Friday and Saturday night for the entire summer and most of the fall.”
“Are you responsible for the desserts?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you ever make any of the cakes?”
“I have.”
“Really?”
She pulls her cell phone from her knit beach bag, scrolls for a moment then passes me her phone. On screen is an intricate three-tiered wedding cake.
“You made that?”
“I did.”
“That’s incredible.”
“I’m very talented,” she says with a laugh.
I hand back her phone, then ask, “Did you always want to be a chef?”
“Well, initially, I wanted to be a princess, but it turns out that is a difficult field to break into.”
I smile.
“But I always loved to bake.” She pats a soft little curve of belly and adds, “And eat.”
I laugh and say, “Speaking of which.”
I pull out two turkey sandwiches and hand her one. Then I pass over a bag of chips and a lime club soda.
After a bite of sandwich, she asks, “Did you always want to be a writer?”
“Not really. I mean, I always loved reading, but I never thought of myself as a good writer. But then my junior year of college, I came up with this idea for a story.”
“Pluto Three?”
I cut my eyes at her. “Are you stalking me?”
“Hey, you’re the one who tracked me down on Facebook,” she pauses, “stalker.”
I feel my cheeks redden and she says, “I’m just kidding. Getting your message was a nice surprise.” She throws a potato chip at me, then says, “So, you come up with this idea—”
“Right, I came up with this idea for a story, but other than a rough outline, I never did anything with it. After graduating, I started writing an hour here and an hour there and after four long years, I had this finished book. It took me another year to find an agent, then another year for my agent to sell it. Then the book came out and it was this surprise hit. I ended up winning the award for best sci-fi book of the year and I got a book deal and a big advance.”
“Then what?”
“Then I moved to San Francisco.”
“And how did you end up in Tahoe?”
“I grew up coming here each summer when I was a kid. My parents bought a second home in Tahoe in the mid-eighties and since my mom was a teacher and had the summers off, we would stay here the entire time.”
“That sounds amazing.”
“It was.” At least until I was ten.
“What about your dad?”
“He would drive down each weekend and stay with us.”
“From Oregon? Isn’t that a long drive?”
“Medford is twenty miles from the California border. It’s only a six-hour drive.” I take a bite of my sandwich, then continue, “Anyhow, it turns out that San Francisco is ridiculously expensive and after my second book flopped—not to mention a movie deal for my first book
falling through—I had to move. And since I’d blown through most of my advance, I moved into my parents’ house here.” I decide to leave out the part about my getting my heart ripped out of my chest by Avery.
“What about you?” I ask.
“I grew up here in South Lake, then moved to Sacramento for culinary school. After graduating, I worked at a restaurant in Sac for a couple of years, worked my way up to head pastry chef, then I got tired of the city—and the heat. A hundred and ten degrees in the summer? Ugh. I wanted to be back in the mountains and landed a job at Jimmy’s.”
“Parents? Siblings?”
“Parents split when I was little. Dad moved to Reno, where he still lives. After I graduated from high school, my mom moved to Tennessee of all places. I see my dad maybe once every couple months and I spent last Christmas with my mom. No siblings. What about you?”
“One brother, eight years older. Lives in Michigan. We aren’t very close.”
“And your parents? Are they still in Oregon?”
I laugh.
“What?”
“They still live in the same house I grew up in, but at the moment, they’re here in Tahoe, living in the house across the street from me.”
I spend the next ten minutes explaining my parents’ and my unorthodox living situation. Then I proceed to disclose my parents’ late-stage hippieness and how they dropped the open marriage bomb on me at dinner. When I confide how I matched on Tinder with my mother, Megan falls out of her chair laughing.
Cassie
Wally looks like a dog and he smells like a dog, but I’m not so sure. I think he’s at least partly hummingbird. Which would explain all the zipping around he does.
Some small dogs are mean. The meanest dog I ever met was half the size of Wally. It was when we lived in the City. She lived a couple of houses away from us. A tiny little white dog named Rainbow. (Which is odd because rainbows are a lot of different colors and white isn’t one of them.) Every time Jerry and I walked by Rainbow’s house, she would push her head through the metal fence, show her little teeth, snarl, then yap, yap, yap.
But Wally is nothing like Rainbow. Wally is just energetic. He’s maybe the most energetic little dog I’ve ever seen.
I bite at Wally’s back leg and he goes tumbling into the sand. For a moment, I think maybe I hurt him, but he pops up, shakes the sand from his fur, then runs toward me. I roll onto my back and Wally nips at my face and ears.
I realize how much I miss this.
How much I miss playing.
Jerry
“I saw another dog in your Facebook pictures,” Megan says, following my gaze to where Cassie and Wally wrestle in the sand. “A Bernese Mountain Dog.”
“His name was Hugo,” I say with a crampy grin. “He was such a stud.” A montage of Hugo swimming in the water and rolling around with Cassie plays over my eyes.
I point to Cassie, fight back a sniffle, and say, “Wally is the first dog I’ve seen Cassie play with since Hugo died.”
Whenever my dad took Cassie to the beach, I would ask him if Cassie played with any of the other dogs, but he always said she never seemed interested.
“When did you lose him?” Megan asks. She’s scooted her chair a couple of inches closer to me.
“Back in February. His collar broke and he ran into the road after a rabbit.” I glance at her and say, “I’m trying to get over it, but it’s been hard.”
Megan goes silent for a long moment, then says, “You won’t get over it, so don’t even try. You will grieve forever. You just have to learn to live with it.” She grabs my hand and gives it a light squeeze. “You will be whole again, but you will never be the same.”
I don’t know if these words are her own or if she stole them from a greeting card, but they burrow through my flesh and into the marrow of my bones.
A tear runs down my cheek.
“So what made him such a stud?” she asks, giving my shoulder a light shove.
I wipe the tear from my cheek and I tell her about Hugo. I tell her how big, goofy, and lumbering he was. How much he loved Cassie. How when I said the word “cheese” he would get so excited that sometimes he would pee a little. How he would roll over on his back and whine until I kissed his belly. How he would sleep with his head on the pillow like a human. How uncoordinated he was as a puppy. How he would slobber in his sleep. How he would sort of gallop when he ran. How in the winter he would nose his way under the comforter. How when he was thirsty he would plop down next to the water bowl and basically put his entire head in the bowl. How wherever Cassie went pee, he would have to go over and pee on her pee. How he would tap my leg, just every so softly, over and over again until I played with him. How he had no boundaries; how he wasn’t satisfied just sitting on my lap; how he wanted to breathe the same air as me.
I tell her about how Cassie and I picked him out at a farm in Sacramento. About how he and I have the same birthday and how last year I got him fifty of his orange tennis balls and by midnight he’d already destroyed more than half of them. I tell her about the first time he got in the lake and how I’ve never seen anyone or anything so happy.
I haven’t spoken to anyone about Hugo since he died and celebrating his life is therapeutic. The well of sadness I thought may never go dry feels less full.
Megan holds my hand the entire time I talk.
~
“Desert Island,” I say a few minutes later.
Megan’s dimple flashes and she asks, “Are we talking food here because I’m bringing a hot tub-sized tub of peanut butter.”
“I was thinking more book, movie, and TV show, but I fully endorse your peanut butter decision.” I pause. “Wait, are we talking chunky or creamy?”
“Uh, creamy.”
“I don’t think this is going to work out,” I say, shaking my head.
“You’re a chunky?”
“Extra chunky.”
We both laugh, then she tilts her head back and says, “Okay, give me a minute to think here.”
“Do you always lean your head back when you’re deep in thought?”
“Only when making life or death decisions.” Thirty seconds later, she snaps her head down and says, “Okay, I got it.”
I rub my hands together and say, “Let’s hear it.”
“What should I start with?”
“Book.”
She lets out a long breath and says, “Don’t judge me.”
“I make no such promises.”
She grins, then says, “Okay, the book is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.”
I cringe.
“What? Don’t tell me you don’t like Harry Potter. Because I will go grab my dog and leave right now!”
I hold up my hands to calm her, then say, “When the last Harry Potter book came out, I was twenty-six years old and I waited in line at midnight at a Barnes and Noble with all the little kids dressed like wizards.”
“Really?” Megan snickers. “Then why did you cringe?”
“Because everyone knows The Chamber of Secrets is the worst of the seven books.”
“How dare you!”
“Come on, Goblet of Fire, Prisoner of Azkaban, Half-Blood, or even the first one. But Chamber?” I shake my head in disapproval.
We both laugh, then she says, “So you standing in line with a bunch of kid wizards is sort of embarrassing, but I have you beat big time.”
She lifts her hips and unbuttons her shorts. Underneath is a matching yellow bikini bottom. She folds down the yellow fabric on her hip, revealing a small tattoo of a wand and the word, “Expelliarmus!”
“Holy smokes!” I roar.
“Yeah, not my best decision.”
We both give a good laugh, then she asks, “How about you, what book are you taking to this island?”
“To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Really? You’re going to spend your eternity with Scout and Atticus. I would have thought you wo
uld have picked some science fiction book.”
“There are a few science fiction books that are in my top five. I mean, Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favorites. But if you go back and read Jurassic Park, you’re gonna react to it the same way you reacted to it when you read it the first time. Every time I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird—probably five times—it’s always moved me, changed me, in a different way than before.”
Now, Megan cringes.
“What?”
“Nothing, it just makes me think about how sitting on that island rereading Chamber of Secrets over and over again is going to get old really fast.” She puffs out her cheek and says, “Can I change my answer?”
“Nope, it’s Quidditch and Dementors for you until that rescue boat shows up.”
“But I have a TV series and a movie right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so TV series is hard, can I take two?”
I shake my head. “Rules are rules.”
“Okay, well, it’s between Friends and Cupcake Wars, but if I have to choose—”
“Wait, did you say Cupcake Wars? This is a show?”
“The best show.”
“What do they do?”
“Um, they bake cupcakes.”
She spends the next couple minutes explaining the premise, which is exactly what it sounds like, a cupcake bake-off. In the end, she picks Friends because “looking at all those cupcakes is just going to make me hungry.”
I tell her my TV series is The Office, which she’s seen but isn’t crazy about. Then we move to movies. She makes me go first.
“Shawshank Redemption,” I tell her.
“Oh, good one!” she says, clapping her hands.
We talk about how great the story is and how amazing his escape is. Then I ask, “Did you know that the movie is based on a short story by Stephen King?”
“Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.”
“Wow, look at you go.”
She smiles and says, “Okay, so my movie is The Princess Bride.”
“That’s inconceivable,” I shout, and we both laugh.