by Grace Palmer
“If you don’t get out of my house right now,” the man he thought was his father growled through clenched teeth, “I’m going to kill you.”
Oliver said nothing. His breath was coming hard and fast, so he just laid there while his father glared down at him with pure and vicious hate in his eyes.
“You were supposed to be happy to see me,” Oliver whispered. “I’m your son.”
“You stopped being my son when I got rid of you.”
Silence took over. Absolute and unwavering silence.
Slowly, Oliver got to his feet. Jesse’s eyes followed him. The shirt he was wearing had been tugged at the neck during the struggle, so it hung limp and ragged. His teeth were yellowed, Oliver noticed, though still fairly straight.
Oliver backed up towards the door of the trailer. Their eyes never left each other. He got there, reached behind him, felt the handle in his grasp. Something occurred to him before he turned and left.
“What happened to my mother?” he asked in a quiet voice.
Jesse fell back onto the armchair, spat more tobacco juice, and lit another cigarette. He’d broken eye contact, and Oliver could tell immediately that the two of them would never look each other in the eye again.
“Been dead a long time,” he answered eventually.
That was the end of it.
There were many things Oliver could have thought about as he got back into his car and exited Valley Forge Trailer Park. He remembered a line from a sitcom about wishing there was a way to know that you were in the good ol’ days before the good ol’ days were over. The way he was feeling now was the exact opposite. He knew, firmly and irrevocably, that he was walking away from a moment that would forever define the rest of his life. It was like standing up from a plane crash somehow completely unscathed and realizing that you would never, ever fly again. He had left part of himself in that trailer. He wouldn’t be getting it back.
But of all the things that Oliver could be thinking of as the road merged onto the highway, he found himself thinking about his job interview next week. It was the culmination of a year-long search done half-heartedly, mostly late at night or early in the morning, when Eliza and Winter were sleeping. He felt as he sat at the computer, combing through job postings, that he was betraying himself in a way. Giving up on music meant giving up on the only thing that had never given up on him.
He closed his eyes and pictured wearing a tie. He pictured answering to a boss. He pictured boring meetings and acronyms and tepid coffee in paper cups. He’d spent two decades imagining those things as proof positive of failure. If he ended up in an office, it was because he quit on the only thing that mattered.
He didn’t feel that way anymore.
As he drove away, car aimed back towards Nantucket, he shed a skin, in a way. He was leaving one question behind and picking up another. He was picking up a million questions, actually. He was picking up “Can you help me, Daddy?” and “Do you love me, husband?” and “Can you protect your girls forever?”
The question he was leaving behind was, “Why did you abandon me?”
He hadn’t known that he’d wanted an answer to that. But he knew—suddenly, permanently—that he’d in fact wanted an answer to that forever.
Until he didn’t.
He called Eliza. She answered on the second ring, though it was still early in the morning and she was probably hoping to keep sleeping as long as Winter did. “Babe?” she asked.
“I love you,” he said. “I’m on my way home. I just wanted you to know.”
She hesitated. He knew she was biting her lip, trying to hold back the tide of questions he was sure she wanted to ask. But she didn’t ask any of them. She just exhaled and said, “I love you too, Oliver. I can’t wait to see you.”
He squeezed the steering wheel tightly. His family was in Nantucket. Everything behind him no longer mattered.
21
Brent
Henrietta slept through the night. Brent didn’t, not really. He woke up every hour to check her breathing, holding a hand in front of her nose to feel the puffs of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Dawn came and went. The sun peered through the slats in the blinds and prodded him in the eyeballs.
The sharp pang of worry ebbed away bit by bit, though he still felt that dull ache in his gut that he was learning to recognize as a kind of love and concern that wouldn’t ever leave him. Henrietta would be okay, he could tell. That was a good thing.
Marshall texted him to check in. How’s the pup, amigo?
Steady as she goes. She’ll still outrun you, even now.
I don’t doubt it, he wrote back. Back to the vet today?
Yeah. Just wanna be sure things are fine.
When you going?
Soon.
I’ll come scoop you. Make me some coffee.
Twenty minutes later, the two of them were in Marshall’s truck, headed towards the vet’s office. Henrietta had woken up, though the last of the sedative in her system kept her moored in a calm mood. She rested her chin on the car door and hung her nose out the window as they drove down the road.
Pulling to a halt in the parking lot of the office, Brent went around and helped his dog down to the ground. She was walking gingerly, kind of waddling almost. She looked a little bloated, too. Brent wondered if she was plumper than normal or if he was just imagining things. He made a mental note to ask the doctor to check her weight chart. He couldn’t remember off-hand what she normally weighed, but he could swear she’d packed on a few pounds of late.
They made their way into the small office. It smelled like animals in here, that sort of dirty funkiness of fur mingling with the blasé glaze of disinfectant. Dr. Dawson came out from the examination room to greet them. She looked the way she did yesterday: competent, professional. The kind of person you call in an emergency when you’re freaking out and you need someone who can still do things with a steady hand. Those were good qualities in a vet, Brent thought.
“Good morning!” Dr. Dawson greeted as they entered.
Brent was halfway to replying when Marshall butted in. “Morning, Doc,” he said with a wry smile and a tip of an imaginary hat. “Fancy seeing you here.” Brent could’ve sworn that Marshall was doing a horrible cowboy accent. It was awfully early for Marshall’s antics, but he knew better than to try and dissuade the guy. That usually only made things worse.
“Didn’t think you would be back quite so soon,” she answered, tilting her head to single out Marshall.
“Well, a pal needed my help, so I just thought—”
“— You called me and offered to drive, champ,” Brent butted in.
Marshall shushed him. “Simmer down, sport, the grown-ups are talking.”
“Please excuse my friend here,” Brent said to the vet, rolling his eyes. “He has a disease that prevents him from ever shutting up.”
“Maybe I oughta take a look at that.” She winked.
Brent groaned. Dr. Dawson was no help whatsoever. He could practically feel Marshall beaming at his side at the prospect of someone buying into his charm.
“Maybe you oughta indeed.” Marshall grinned.
“Doc, he’s beyond help, I promise you.”
“She’s got a duty to aid those in need, Triple B. Hippocratic Oath. Maybe you oughta go read a book or something while I get checked out.”
“Do vets even take that oath?” Brent asked. “Actually, never mind. We’re getting side-tracked here. I brought Henrietta back to see you.”
“Early birds,” Dr. Dawson commented with a half-smile.
“Well, I didn’t get much in the way of sleep,” Brent said. “She did all right, though. Seemed comfortable enough, for whatever that’s worth.”
“Good,” Dr. Dawson said, nodding. “Let’s get her back here and up on the table so I can take a look at everything.” She glanced back over to Marshall and smiled again. “We’ll get to you next, Mr. Cook.”
Marshall tipped that invisible hat again and settled down i
nto one of the seats in the waiting area.
“C’mon, girl,” Brent said, looking down at Henrietta. She whined back at him, a kind of throaty growl he almost never heard from her. But she followed him dutifully as the three of them went into the vet’s office. They left Marshall behind with a massive, goofy smile still glowing on his face.
“Right up here, Mr. Benson,” Dr. Dawson said. She patted the cold metallic tabletop. Brent bent down to pick her up, but when he looped a hand beneath her belly, she yelped loudly. He recoiled and looked at her oddly.
“What’s going on with you, darling?” he murmured to her. He felt Dr. Dawson’s eyes on him. He knew he was good to Henrietta, that she had a good life with him, but he still felt like there was maybe a chance that she was judging him. She hadn’t done or said anything to make him think that. Just one of those sneaking feelings where he was racking his brain to make sure he’d crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s when it came to canine care. Like how, when you ask someone with help for something, you wanna be darn sure that you’ve checked all the right things before the backup arrives.
She didn’t say anything, though. So, bending over once more, he grabbed Henrietta with a different hold and hefted her up carefully. She didn’t yelp this time, though she did lick her chops in what Brent thought was a kind of uncomfortable fashion. Maybe he was just reading too much into things now.
Dr. Dawson took over once Brent stepped back out of the way. He watched her hands glide delicately over Henrietta’s snout, her legs, her belly. Her fingertips were probing, but in the gentlest way. There was a lot of care and love in that touch. He could feel it coming off her like heat waves. It helped to settle his own stomach a little bit, to beat back the last vestiges of the worry that had kept him up all night long.
“Think she’s looking all right?” he asked as Dr. Dawson continued her examination.
“Nothing that’s alarming me right away, but I do want to run a couple tests. I hate to kick you out, but it’d make my job a little easier if I could have the room to myself.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said, nodding. His dog was in good hands. It was okay to be a few feet away, just over there in the waiting room. That was what he told himself. He closed his eyes and pictured Rose touching his forearm, her honey-gold eyes absorbing him, her saying, Brent, baby—breathe. He exhaled and let the anxiety ripple out with his breath. “I’ll just go wait with Marsh then.”
Dr. Dawson nodded and shut the door behind him after he’d stepped through.
“How’s our prized pooch looking?” Marshall asked. Brent settled into the seat next to him. His foot was tapping erratically on the ground. He felt Marshall eye him and note the remaining nervousness, but thankfully, his friend said nothing.
“She’s a good doc, I think,” Brent replied.
“Yeah,” agreed Marshall. “I think so too.”
They fell silent for a couple minutes. There wasn’t much noise coming out of the exam room. Just intermittent footsteps, the shuffling of papers and metal equipment, the electronic beep of a monitor. Brent tried not to think too much about it. She was going to be fine, the doc had said. He had no reason to doubt her.
“You know something,” Brent said after a while, “we never had pets growing up. Not even one. Isn’t that the strangest thing? Dad of all people was against it. You’d have thought that he would be the first guy to take in a stray or whatever. He loved other people’s pets. But we weren’t allowed to have any. Not even a fish.”
“Why’s that?”
“I think that he just couldn’t bear the thought of an animal being trapped inside. Or of anything being trapped inside, come to think of it. He loved his freedom so much. Hated when Mom tried to put him on a schedule or told him where to be. And if he hated it, he figured everything and everyone else hated it, too.”
“How do you square that with fishing?”
Brent laughed and scratched the back of his head. “Fair point. Maybe Dad’s philosophies weren’t always one hundred percent thought through.”
“Heart was in the right place, though.”
“That it was. But you know the craziest thing about all that? It means Henrietta is basically the first living thing to ever trust me to take care of them.”
Marshall chuckled low and said, “And here you had me thinking she was a smart dog. Guess not.”
Brent slugged him in the shoulder, but he was laughing too. “Smarter than you.”
Marshall raised his hands in admission. “If I was half as smart as that dog, I’d be doing just fine.”
“She’s a good one.”
“Yeah, man. She is. She’s gonna be all right, too.”
“You think so?” Brent didn’t mean for the question to sound so hopeful and uncertain coming out of his lips. He sounded like a little kid looking to his parent for confidence in an outcome that was still far from decided.
But for his part, Marshall didn’t seem to acknowledge that. Or if he did, he didn’t show it. He just gripped Brent by the shoulder, looked him square in the eye, and said, “Yeah, man. She’s gonna be just fine.”
Brent hadn’t realized how much he’d needed an answer like that.
He had a flashback to elementary school, or maybe it was early in middle school. He couldn’t remember. But whenever it was, he’d been assigned a project of growing tomato plants under different conditions—lots of water, little water, salty water, lots of sun, little sun, on and on like that—and seeing which did best. His classmates had all come back at the end of the semester with at least a few of their plants flourishing. Some even had little budding tomatoes weighing down the branches.
All Brent had to show was barren soil.
It wasn’t that he thought he was cursed or anything like that. He was just a black thumb, he figured. Not much use for caring for things.
But, out of nowhere, he’d stumbled into a season of his life where caring for things was starting to matter more and more.
You were great with the kids today.
That implied question was still swimming in the back of his head. It wasn’t even a fully formed question, actually. More like a raw hope. Like the seed of a question, still nestled underneath the soil. Light and water and time might make it grow into something that had shape, substance. Not yet, but soon, he’d have to have an answer.
So, when Marshall squeezed his shoulder and looked him in the eye and said, “Yeah, man; She’s going to be just fine”—well, it felt like maybe he’d be able to look Rose in the eyes one day and answer the question that she wanted to ask but didn’t dare put to words yet. It felt like maybe that seed was growing.
The door to the exam room creaked open again, interrupting his thoughts. Dr. Dawson ushered him in. She had a cryptic smile on her face that confused him. It didn’t look like a bearer-of-bad-news smile. What could it be?
Henrietta looked up at him and whined when he entered. “Hey, babe,” he said, petting her where she liked on the chest. She was lying on her side. From this angle, she looked even heavier than she had when they were walking in. That, plus the ultrasound device still lying on the table where Dr. Dawson had set it down, clicked together at once.
He looked up at the veterinarian and his jaw dropped.
“She’s pregnant,” he said.
Dr. Dawson smiled bigger.
“So what’re you gonna do with all those puppies?” Marshall asked as they neared Rose’s house. All of Henrietta’s stuff was still there since they’d spent the night, so he was going to go collect it all before heading back to his apartment.
“That’s a good question,” Brent said. He was still a little taken aback by Dr. Dawson’s discovery. Henrietta being pregnant explained so much, though. He still didn’t know how he’d missed the signs. It was so obvious in retrospect. Sleeping and eating at weird times and in weird amounts, growling at Susanna, the weight gain. He should’ve known. He felt a little guilty for not recognizing it, but that paled in the face of having a perfec
tly normal explanation for her behavior. Between that and getting the all-clear on any lingering effects of the snakebite, Brent was super relieved.
But Marshall’s question remained: what would he do with the puppies? He’d have to figure that out when the time came, he supposed. Not much he could do about the situation right now, after all.
Marshall dropped him off out front and waved goodbye. Brent ducked inside real quick to gather up Henrietta’s and his things, then piled it all in the back seat of his truck. He helped Henrietta into the front seat and headed out. He had a few things to take care of at a couple of his work sites, so he’d have to drop her off at his place and leave her alone for a few hours, though he didn’t much love that idea.
It occurred to him as he packed up the car and put the key into the ignition that he wouldn’t be doing this two-home thing for much longer. He spent most nights with Rose now, but as with everything else in their tender new relationship, they’d decided to take it slow. This step of moving in together felt momentous.
And it wasn’t just that they were moving in together. They were moving in together into a house, one that Brent was in the process of buying. The house he had grown up in, no less! His own father had built the thing with his own two hands. That filled Brent with the strangest blend of pride and longing. He wished, not for the first time, that his dad was around to see him turn this corner in his life. He’d be proud.
Brent’s head and heart were full as he pulled out of the driveway, one hand on the steering wheel and the other resting gently on Henrietta’s back where she sat riding shotgun next to him. He stopped just before leaving when he noticed something sticking out of the mailbox. Weird—they never got mail here. He hopped out to grab whatever it was. Probably some junk.
But when he got back into his vehicle and looked at it, he froze. It wasn’t junk, not at all. It was a postcard from Bali, Indonesia. The front showed a massive rock outcropping sticking out into the bluest ocean water he’d ever seen. It looked like a dolphin made of stone that had been frozen halfway into its dive. Green grasses clung to the top and side, giving way to gray granite just before the water took over. The whole scene was otherworldly. So much color, so much vibrancy. He turned it over, smiling softly, and saw exactly what he expected to see.