The Patron Saint of Lost Dogs: A Novel (12 page)

Frieda catches my eye, like a kid making sure I’m watching what she’s up to. I remove my hand from her head, pause, and allow her a few seconds of disbelief before scratching her backside, my delinquent petting duty apparently forgiven because her tail perks up. I hate to admit it but it feels good to have the company of someone I can trust. She gives me her smile, and I wonder if she’s a dog who will always “seem” happy, no matter the circumstances. I can’t reciprocate, and it’s not just because of the anonymous article. For me to share Frieda’s happiness, I need to know she will be safe back where she belongs. Now seems as good a time as any. I pull out my cell phone and press redial.

I’m greeted by a different, smaller voice on the other end of the line, reciting the number before adding, “… This is Emily, speaking.”

“Hello, would it be possible to speak to Mrs. Small.”

“Mommy’s not here right now.”

There’s a silence because Emily knows it is my turn.

“Is your daddy around?”

“My daddy’s dead.”

I hesitate, missing my turn.

“Brendon’s in the shower. You want me to get him?”

Emily splits the syllables in Brendon, placing the emphasis on “don.” Is this Mr. Charcoal Suit? It could be a relative or a boyfriend but given my line of questioning, I’m betting the man in the shower is Emily’s stepfather.

“That’s okay.”

“Mommy went to Wal-Mart to put up some posters.”

I hate to ask the next question but I sense Emily hopes I will.

“What posters?”

“Posters of my dog, Frieda, Frieda Fuzzypaws. She’s a golden retriever.”

“What does she look like?”

Emily takes her time, as though she wants to get this just right.

“She’s eleven years old, golden, with gray around her mouth and eyes. She’s fat. That’s my fault. She has enormous fuzzy paws and that’s why I call her Frieda Fuzzypaws. Daddy brought me a picture book when I was little called
Frieda Fuzzypaws
, which is about a cat, but it turns out I’m allergic to cats, so we adopted a dog instead and Daddy let me name her.”

“I see.”

“She has a pink collar. It has her name on it. She’s very, very friendly. Mommy says someone will find her very soon.”

“Where is Wal-Mart?” I’m wondering if Mrs. Small will get back before “Bren-Don” gets himself toweled off.

“It’s in Patton. She should be home soon.” And then, as though she realized she has gone off script, Emily asks, “May I ask who is calling, please?”

I take a deep breath. It’s time to give Emily my cell phone number and have her mom call me back. It’s time for Anne Small to hear how the man of the house does not share her daughter’s love of Ms. Fuzzypaws.

“Emily, I need you to write down my number for your mom. Do you have a pen and paper?”

“Just one moment, please.”

The line goes silent and then she’s back. I recite the number.

“Have your mom call as soon as she returns, okay?”

“Okay.”

There’s a knock on what passes for my front door, and instinctively Frieda lets loose with a series of short inquisitive barks. I can tell Emily’s still listening and slowly the little voice gets even smaller as she says, “That sounds like …”

Though it pains me to do it, I hang up, lock Frieda be hind the kitchen door, and find Doris, still wearing her ski jacket, standing at the top of the private stairway to the second floor.

“Do I have a patient waiting?”

Doris huff s in disbelief, “I didn’t know you brought a dog with you.”

I want to tell her there are a lot of things she doesn’t know about me but she’s already moved on. “Doc Lewis dropped by and left these for you.”

She hands over two items, a folded piece of paper and a digital pager. I hesitate to take them, wondering why wouldn’t he deliver them in person. Then I read his note, written in chicken scratch cursive.

Dear Cyrus
,

Sorry about the late notice but the wife suggested we treat ourselves, get out of town, catch dinner and a movie. To be honest, it’s been a long time since we’ve escaped from the practice, even for a few hours. We should be back by ten, eleven at the latest. I’m leaving you with the on-call pager. Doubt there will be anything to worry about. Most nights I forget I’m even carrying it. I’ll switch the hospital answering machine back to my home number when I get back
.

Have a quiet night and many thanks
,

Fielding

PS. See all the posters around town—now what?

I turn on the pager and slip it into my pocket. I can’t believe the way Lewis has abandoned me so early in my veterinary rehabilitation.

“As per your new instructions, Dr. Mills, these are for you.” She passes me a handful of “while you were out” phone messages. There’s one from Tidy Town Refuse Collection informing me that they will no longer collect our trash; one from Bank of New England offering the practice a platinum credit card; and one from Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue, suggesting I “be on lookout for a dog answering to the name ‘Fritter Frosty Pause’!”

“That’s their phone number for the last one,” she says. “Hope you can make sense of it.”

“That’s okay, Doris. I don’t suppose anyone stopped by to sign a euthanasia consent form?”

Doris’s glare makes me feel sorry I asked. “Naturally I would have informed you, Dr. Mills.”

She pretends to grovel, which only heightens my discomfort. We stare at one another. Maybe she’s hoping for an explanation, but at that precise moment I realize I must find a way to work with this woman, to use the talents Cobb saw in her to my advantage.

“After twenty years, I expect you know better than most how to separate the genuinely strapped for cash from the gratuitously delinquent. I wonder if you could compile a list of our clients with bad debt, dividing them into these two groups. And when I do see a case, maybe you could warn me which group the owner belongs to so I know whether to get on them for money
before
they leave the building.”

Doris eyes me with even greater suspicion, mutters “uhhuh” as though she will be pleased to consider my request, and disappears down the stairs, Zippo and Marlboro in hand before she hits the bottom step.

I read the message in my hand one more time. For now Fritter Frosty Pause is safer staying with me than being reunited with certain members of her extended family. And then my cell phone rings.

“Lewis?”

After a pause a gravelly voice I recognize says, “You’re in this as much as me.” There’s a slow click, the line goes dead, and in my mind I see the man in the charcoal suit finding a note addressed to “Mom” with a number to call. Brendon Small is clearly a man on edge, a man who knows he’s made a terrible mistake, and quite possibly a man who’s found the kind of leverage in an old newspaper article he believes will guarantee my silence.

Rather than spending the evening alone, I decide to head into town and grab something to eat at the Miss Eden Falls Diner. Sitting alone might prove uncomfortable for some. Not me. Whether it’s a movie theater or table for one I really don’t care, so long as I bring along some reading material to fill the time and make me look like I have a purpose. Normally I’d grab a scientific journal, but my subscriptions have lapsed and I can’t afford to renew them. This forces me to dig out an old magazine from the waiting room—
Field & Stream
. Hey, the alternative was
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

If I’m being honest, Doris’s recommendation to act like a stranger has me worried. It makes me wonder exactly what and how much Bobby Cobb shared with his receptionist and his community. Cobb’s spin on our estrangement probably included something about me abandoning him in his hour of need, spurning every attempt he made to reach out to me. If the pet owners of Eden Falls have already bought into their beloved Doc’s side of the story, there will be no uptick in business, no bonanza of cash, no good faith payment, and my prospects for selling Bedside Manor are doomed. Trying to pass for a stranger might be my best chance to turn a profit and run, but it won’t fly. So let’s just say I’m headed to the diner out of curiosity with a hint of nostalgia, to see if any of the patrons recognize me as the momma’s boy who went there for lunch with her every Sunday.

When I flew up here, it was not with the appropriate clothing to fend off the extreme cold. Hardly surprising, since a South Carolina winter is practically a Vermont summer, right? Consequently I’m forced to borrow some of Cobb’s clothes, and after all these years, it’s a necessity that still makes me feel awkward. When I needed help with homework, felt sick, or got into trouble, I always went to Mom. Kids gravitate to the parent who will always be there, not the one who says, “Catch me when I’m done,” or “Busy now, Son.” If fatherhood was a class, Cobb’s report card might say his attendance was spotty, always sat at the back, never disruptive but easily distracted. You see he’d let me in from time to time, only not enough. That was the most frustrating part, knowing he had so much more to give. Rightly or wrongly, it made his disinterest feel personal. Enough to notice, enough to hurt.

Frieda at my side, nuzzling into my thigh, I stand at the doorway of what was my parents’ bedroom for the first time in twenty-five years. A hint of lavender hits my nose, the aerosolized remnants of a hand cream my mother used through the dry winter months. I (we) head to a dresser on my father’s side of the bed before my parents started sleeping in separate rooms. There is a series of framed photographs from my childhood set out above the top drawer, and the recollections hit me like flying shrapnel. Mom pushing me on my old swing set, the two of us playing catch with a Wiffle ball in the backyard, and an enlarged candid close-up of her smiling face. I take in Ruth’s cheekbones, her nose, the prominent philtrum, that deep vertical indentation above her top lip, and it’s like looking at my reflection. But where it counts, where it haunts me, we differ. The photo captures Mom’s green eyes with almond flecks. Mine are a forgettable washed-out shade of blue—their shape, the lids, the brows, the lashes, identical to those of the late Bobby Cobb.

There’s one photo I’ve never seen before, me running track at a meet during my freshman year, before I went down south to boarding school. Strange. Mom never used the camera, a Leica M6 Classic that was Cobb’s pride and joy, and I don’t remember him attending a single sporting event during my entire education.

I open the top drawer, and to the right of a neatly folded collection of flannel shirts, there are dozens of envelopes bound by a thick elastic band. I instantly recognize the handwriting—mine. From the time I went to boarding school, Mom and I would exchange weekly letters. It became a ritual, a tradition. Even at veterinary school I couldn’t afford or justify a cell phone, and the phone in my dorm was on the first floor and I lived on the fourth. The guy with the apartment next to the phone hated taking messages, and whenever I called out, there were always other students around, making noise and listening in. Letters proved unhurried, contemplative, and best of all, private. I stopped writing two weeks before finals because Mom insisted I focus on my studies. What would be her last letter to me arrived only a few days before her death.

I close the top drawer, open the one below, and discover Cobb’s collection of sweaters. This stuff is going straight to Goodwill as soon as the house is sold. Settling on a thick white woolen number, I pull it over my head and inhale deep. Mothballs, maybe a hint of a fabric softener. No nasal nostalgia. Perhaps that should tell you something right there. I catch myself in a mirror on the other side of the room. Not good. Naked cheeks and chin still come as a shock, there’s a stubborn cowlick of hair sprouting from the back of my head, and now I look a bit like the Gorton’s Fisherman.

The diner is a fifteen-minute walk from the practice, if that, so rather than drive there in the Silverado and be forced to abandon it in the middle of the road because I can’t reverse into a parking space, I make my apologies to Frieda, finish bundling up, and head out on foot.

Ruth Mills and I made this trek to the diner come rain, sleet, or snow. It became our thing; then again, though it pains me to say it, pretty much all the good stuff growing up was our thing. There was this one time, back when I was seven or eight, that has always stayed with me. At that age Mom and I walked hand in hand, a custom I never questioned until, on this particular Sunday, I spied a couple of classmates off in the distance. For the first time in my little life I felt a twinge of embarrassment being tethered to my mother, a twinge countered by a sense of guilt for wanting to let go. Long before we converged it was Mom who dropped my hand, pulled off her glove, and pretended to bite a painful hangnail. We crossed paths with the two boys, greetings were exchanged, no one giggled, and to my relief, the prospect of ridicule at school was averted. Though it went unsaid, we were careful not to hold hands in public again. I imagine Mom nodded a sad and silent good-bye to the innocence of a son growing up. Thing is, I never got to thank her.

Near the center of town, hidden behind another snowbank monolith, adjacent to the gas pumps, is a pay phone, and standing in front of the phone, under the yellow streetlights, are two figures I recognize, the incomparable Mrs. Silverman and her husky, Kai.

Mrs. Silverman is being swallowed by plumes of her own dragon breath, and on her head she wears a hand-knitted blue pom-pom hat pulled down over her ears. It’s Kai who has my attention, though. He’s sitting by Mrs. Silverman’s side. Still. Not scratching. Of course this could just be the soothing, numbing effect of the bitter cold or, more likely, that dose of steroids Lewis insisted I give him. Even so, I catch myself hoping it’s his change of diet beginning to kick in.

“It’s going to be a while,” says Ethel Silverman, cupping a big black mitten across the mouthpiece as she sees me heading her way, staring with wide-eyed curiosity, refusing to continue her conversation.

“It’s okay,” I say, “I don’t need it.” I smile and point across the street toward the diner.

Mrs. Silverman slips in another quarter, still looking as though I might be about to mug her for her change. As I cross the street, from nowhere, a snowplow rattles by, spraying me with frosty slurry. I have time to notice the driver’s smile and dust myself off thinking,
what’s wrong with this town?