Must Love Dogs: New Leash on Life (21 page)

"
Phoebe's all of them," Michael said. "Even when I hate her, she's all of them."

"
Nobody's all of them," Carol said, "at least once the happy horseshit stage is over and everybody stops being on their best behavior."

"
They should at least put the male castaways through a beauty contest, too," I said, "just to balance things." I took a long sip of beer. "I would so vote for the professor."

"The professor would never win," Michael said. "He's wearing white socks with his boat shoes."

"
He actually reminds me a little bit of your Jack," Carol said.

"
His name is John," I said. "And I don't want to talk about him."

There was a moment of silence.

"Woof," Carol said.

"
Rrrrrrruff," Michael said.

I shook my head.
"Knock it off, you two. I said I don't want to talk about it."

"
We're not talking about it," Carol said. "We're barking about it."

"
Did he really ask you to eat out of a dog dish?" Michael asked. "I mean, if John Anderson is some kind of a sicko, I want to know about it."

"
So you can beat him up?"

"
Don't think I couldn't. He's not that big."

Carol wanted to take a long hot bath by herself without anyone bothering her, so we
'd borrowed a flashlight at the front card table and managed to find our way to the resort golf course. I'd suggested it. Michael was nervous about tomorrow and I knew golf ball hunting always relaxed him.

"
It's okay, Michael. He's not a sicko. And it doesn't even matter anymore. It's over."

Michael worked the beam of the flashlight back and forth across the golf course. 
"I just don't get why nothing ever lasts."

I looked up at the sky full of stars.
"Maybe things will get better for us. Maybe Mercury's just been in retrograde."

"
For what, our whole lives?"

I laughed and Michael joined me. He scooped up a golf ball from the base of a big clump of ornamental grass. I opened the plastic bag I
'd brought so he could toss it in.

A sweet smell cut through the night. Orange trees? My pe
rfume? Tucked against a palm tree I found two golf balls, nestled side by side. I gave them a little kick to separate them. They bounced against the tree trunk, then rolled into each other and stopped, a couple again.

Michael bent down and scooped them up, tossed them into the bag together.

"Holy shit," I said. "Was that an alligator that just ran by?"

We strained our eyes to see it, but it was long gone.

"Should we be afraid?" I whispered.

"
Nah, I don't think so. Getting eaten by an alligator wouldn't even be the worst thing that's happened to us this year."

"
Thanks for reminding me."

"
I think it's pretty much what alligators do at night, hop from lagoon to lagoon."

"Maybe we should try it. Kind of like bar hopping, but without the hangover."

"
It's a thought." Michael found another ball. He was really good at this, especially for someone who didn't golf. And didn't have any real use for golf balls.

I held the bag open.
"Michael, if you were seeing someone and she didn't get along with Mother Teresa, what would you do?"

"
Get another girlfriend?" Michael and the flashlight started moving in another direction.

"
Great," I said. I jogged a few steps to catch up with him. If my brother and I were going to get eaten by an alligator, I wanted to go out together.

"
I feel the same way about Mother Teresa as I do about Phoebe. Well, not exactly the same way, but you know what I mean. It's till death do you part."

Chapter

Twenty-eight

I shook my head. "I can't believe Dad didn't even call to say he wasn't coming home, I mean here, last night."

"
No kidding," Carol said. "He would have grounded us for a month if we'd pulled a stunt like that."

Michael rubbed his wet hair with a towel.
"Hey, at least I got a decent night's sleep. All I can say is good luck to Sugar Butt with that snoring of his."

We
'd stayed awake long enough to eat our sandwiches last night, flipped through some more old shows, turned in pathetically early. "Hey, Carol," I'd said right before we fell asleep.

"
What? And hurry up, I'm almost asleep."

"
Do you think it's really true that dogs and kids know who's a good person and who's only pretending to be?"

"
Absolutely. Their bull crap detectors are extremely fine-tuned. Kids grow out of it once they get old enough to start lying to themselves, but dogs remain shrewd judges of character for their entire lives."

"
So, if John Anderson's dog hates me, does that mean I'm not who I think I am?"

"
Not necessarily. It could be that something's standing in the way and causing interference, and his dog can't get your true essence."

"
Now
that
sounds like bull crap. What does it even mean?"

Carol
's only answer was a snore. I tossed and turned, trying to think things through, then trying not to think, then just trying to get some sleep.

I finally drifted off, straight into a Technicolor dream. John and I were standing across from each other in a mansion dripping with spider webs. At first I thought we were in a room at
Necromaniac, but then it morphed into the set of
The Addams Family
.

Not the movie from the
'80s, but the original TV series I'd watched as a kid. John reached for my hand and kissed it. He wanted me to speak French to him.
Sarah est une jeune fille insouciante
, I said as I batted my eyes at him. How had I not realized that John was really Gomez before this? That Wednesday and Pugslie had been our children all along? I breathed a long, luxurious sigh of relief that the kid thing had already been resolved, and all that stress flew right out the window. I gazed at my Morticia-self in a dusty mirror. When I flipped my long straight black tresses, they rippled the full length of my back. I wasn't too sure about that middle part in my hair, but other than that I looked great. In my tight black sheath, you'd never even guess that I'd gone through not one, but two, pregnancies.

"
Bonus points," a familiar voice yelled. Out of nowhere, the floor tilted and all these annoying bells started to ring. Soooooo loud. We'd been in the pinball game all along. An enormous Keli with one
l
and an
i
hovered over us, hands on the flipper buttons, aiming a big orange ball right at me.

I choked on a scream and woke up. Somehow I
'd managed to slide off the bed and onto the questionable hotel carpet. Carol was still snoring. It was close enough to morning, so I tiptoed into the bathroom for a long dream-purging shower. Then I took the rental car to find coffee and breakfast for everyone.

I figured our dad had come back after I
'd fallen asleep, so I bought four of everything.

"
Whatever," I said, once we all realized he wasn't there. "Anybody want dibs on his egg sandwich?"

Michael held out his hand, so I tossed it over.

"You sure you don't want company today?" I asked Carol.

"
Nope, I want to spend the whole day wandering around all by myself, without a care in the world and without having to worry about anyone else. No offense."

"
None taken," I said. "I love you, too."

"
I can drop you off somewhere though."

"
No, I'm fine. I think I'll just walk the beach and hang around."

Carol crumpled the wrapper from her breakfast sandwich and reached for her coffee.
"Just make sure you're both back in time for dinner. I made reservations at The Jazz Corner since it's our last night."

"What time do we have to leave for the airport tomorrow?" Michael asked.

"
Our flight's at 9:17 A.M.," Carol said without even having to look it up. "We've got another stopover in Charlotte, so we'll arrive in Boston at 1:31. I wanted to make sure we'd get through Boston and be back in Marshbury before rush hour."

"
Good thinking," Michael said.

"Okay, I'm out of here." I grabbed my father's coffee so it wouldn't go to waste. I walked all the way down the endless hallway again. I stepped off the elevator, smiled at the two women behind the card table in the makeshift lobby for the third time this morning, wove my way along the construction zone. It felt like I'd been walking for days.

I still couldn
't wait to walk the beach.

Just past the PLEASE PARDON OUR MESS sign Michael had taped to my back, I found a stash of paint cans and used one to prop open a door to the pool deck.

"Good morning," I said to the copper pelican stretched out in the fountain reading his copper book. I walked around some scaffolding so I didn't have to risk bad luck by going under it. I worked my way to the gate at the far end of the pool deck.

I stopped for a sip of coffee and a breath of salt air, reached over the gate to unlock the latch. I followed a weathered gray boardwalk through another gate framed by a high curved arbor. A tall tassel of dune grass, summer green and rustling in the wind, greeted me from a softly mounded sand dune. I cut between two rambling lengths of storm fencing, some of the wooden slats snapped off like broken teeth, and kicked off my flip-flops. The warm powdery sand caressed my feet gently, so different from the coarse massage of the sand back in
Marshbury.

The long stretch of beach was peppered with walkers and ru
nners, but it was still early enough that most of the beach goers hadn't showed up yet to stake their claim.

I stepped over the high tide line down to the hard-packed sand. I waited for a couple on bicycles to pass, returned their smiles, then closed the distance to the ocean. When I stepped in up to my a
nkles, it felt like a warm bath to my rugged New England feet. I took another sip of coffee and watched a seabird I couldn't identify disappear behind a puff of cottony cloud.

A green Frisbee sailed by. I watched it soar like some kind of tropical bird, then drop into the curl of a wave.

A streak of chocolate brown dog caught me by surprise, splashing water all over me. Somehow the water didn't feel so warm when you weren't expecting it, and the cold shock made me scream.

"
Easy, Coco," a man's voice yelled behind me. The dog had the Frisbee in its mouth already and was swimming it to shore with the precision of a lifeguard.

"
Sorry about that," the man added in a softer voice. "She gets a little bit excited."

When I turned around, I had to admit I got a little bit excited, too. The guy before me was about my age, give or take, with windblown dark hair and ocean blue eyes framed with thick dark eyelashes. He was on the tall side and in good shape, but in an ou
tdoorsy way, as if he parasailed rather than worked out at a gym. He flashed me a big white smile.

I was just launching into what I hoped would be a moderately flirtatious smile of my own when a swathe of wet fur hit me from behind, practically knocking me over. I took a big step forward to catch myself. The guy reached out and put his hands on my shou
lders to steady me.

His dog circled around in front of me, dropped the Frisbee at my feet, and shook, long and hard.

"Coco," the guy yelled.

"
It's okay." I pulled my wet T-shirt away from me so it didn't stick to all the wrong places. Coco sat down on the sand and offered a paw. "Aww," I said as we shook. When I started scratching its chest, it wagged its tail like a maniac and gave me a pleading
don't stop
look with its big brown eyes.

I stopped scratching so I could reach for the Frisbee. Coco nudged me with its nose. I went back to my scratching.

"Wow," the guy said. "She sure likes you. She doesn't act like that with just anyone."

"
Really?" I said. I hoped it didn't come out sounding quite as needy to his ears as it did to mine.

He grinned.
"Coco has a built-in bullshit detector. She's very picky."

I grinned back.
"Smart dog. They're not always so discerning."

He bent over to pick up the Frisbee. His back muscles tensed under his thin gray T-shirt, and I resisted the urge to start panting myself.

He threw the Frisbee way out into the water. Coco flew after it, crossing the sand in three long leaps. With her head just visible over the water, she looked like a seal pup as she paddled away.

"
So beautiful," I said. "What kind of dog is she?"

"
A Labradoodle. Half Lab, half standard poodle. At least we're pretty sure. She's a shelter dog."

"
I love shelter dogs," I said. "And Lab crosses are the best. We had a Lab/shepherd growing up, and also a Lab/Doberman." I started to mention that my assistant teacher had a Lab/shar pei, but I was stopped by an irrational and completely paranoid thought that he'd somehow know how pretty June was and ask me for her number. "I always wanted a chihuahua/dachshund," I said instead, "just so I could call it a chiweenie."

He laughed. Our eyes went to each other
's ring fingers at the exact same moment. He stuck out his other hand. "Paul Ridgefield."

"
Sarah Hurlihy."

"
Hey," he said. "You don't want to go grab a cup of coffee, do you?"

I held up my coffee cup.

"You could dump it out and start all over again." He tilted his head and opened his eyes wide when he said it. In that instant I knew that he knew how good-looking he was, but it didn't make it any less true.

It would make a great story one day. That summer my family had dragged me to Hilton Head. I
'd helped my brother reconnect with his ex-wife, chaperoned my father on a first date with a woman with canary yellow hair named Sugar Butt. Then, as was so often the case with my family, as soon as they were all squared away, they dumped me like a hot potato. So there I was, all alone, single again thanks in large part to a bully of a beast named Horatio, when a kinder, gentler dog showed up out of the blue to lead me to my future.

I could almost believe it. I could see myself standing here now. I could picture telling the story one day. But the space between the two was daunting, and I wasn
't sure I was up for all that peddling.

Still, it wasn
't like he was asking me for a date. It was only a cup of coffee. Plus, I was leaving tomorrow, so I'd be safely home before I knew it and anything that happened, on the off chance that anything actually happened, would be slow and gradual and long distance and not at all like jumping back into the dating fray, which I was really bad at and the thought of which made me want to go back to the hotel room and climb back into bed. Alone.

Perhaps I hesitated a moment, or twelve, too long. Perhaps Paul Ridgefield simply had a bad case of shiny object syndrome. In any case, Coco came charging out of the water at the exact same m
oment a bikini-clad woman was walking by. Coco cut her off at the pass and dropped the Frisbee at her feet. The woman smiled. Coco shook. The woman screamed. Then she giggled, her still perky breasts jiggling adorably.

Paul Ridgefield turned away from me.
"Coco," he yelled.

"
It's okay," she said. She bent down to give Coco a pat. Coco sat and offered her paw. I watched Paul Ridgefield watching her breasts try to escape the inadequate fabric of her bikini top. It was as if I'd dropped off the face of the earth. It was as if I were
invisible.

"
Wow, she sure likes you," I whispered to myself as I walked away. "She doesn't act that way with just
anyone
." I grabbed the hem of my baggie T-shirt and twisted it until water dripped to the sand.

The sun was higher now. Even with a breeze off the water, I was starting to sweat. I walked the length of the beach, not really thinking,
not really not thinking either. There were lots of kinds of men in the world. There were lots of kinds of dogs in the world. There were lots of men who acted like dogs in the world.

A dark-haired woman in shorts and a T-shirt carrying a bright pink leash strode quickly in my direction.
"You haven't seen a big chocolate brown Labradoodle running around, have you? What part of no dogs on the beach between 10 A.M. and 5 P.M. does my idiot brother not understand? I don't care if it's my dog, he's going to pay that five hundred dollar fine if he gets caught."