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Authors: Elizabeth Bass

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Steven must have found someone to take care of Iago. Or boarded him somewhere. She picked up her phone and dialed her brother’s cell number.
He picked up immediately, although his voice sounded harried. “Oh, Grace. I’ve got a cervical column seminar starting in five minutes.”
Typical Steven. No nonsense like
How was your trip
? “Sorry, just a quick question. Where’s Iago?”
“Iago?” he repeated.
“Dad’s dog. Big, black-and-white slobber machine. What did you do with him?”
The line went so still for a moment that she feared she had lost the connection. “Steven?”
“I didn’t do anything with him,” he said.
“Well, didn’t you have to make arrangements for him when Dad went into the hospital?”
“To be perfectly honest, I forgot all about him.”
Great. “Dad didn’t give you any instructions about him?”
“No—none. He never mentioned Iago.”
She frowned. Stranger and stranger. “I guess I should call him.”
“Shouldn’t you look around first?” he asked. “I mean, you wouldn’t want to upset him if he’s just temporarily lost.”
“It’s not temporary—he’s already been gone two days. Besides, Dad might know where Iago is. What if he left him at the groomer?”
“Then the groomer will have left a million messages on Dad’s phone. Does he have any messages? His phone will beep when you pick it up if he does.”
She picked up her dad’s land line. “The dial tone sounds normal. This is bad.”
Steven cleared his throat. “Sorry, Grace—I’m one minute to magic time here. Can you handle this? You might start by calling around to shelters.”
He hung up. She went to the shelf where her father kept his Yellow Pages and was about to start looking up shelter numbers when there was another knock at the door.
This time, she knew the visitor at a glance. “Peggy!” She opened the screen door and threw her arms around a small roundish woman with snow-white hair.
Peggy, a retired teacher, lived across the street and down a few houses, and had been Lou’s first wife’s best friend. She’d been Grace’s best friend, too. Her very first. As soon as Grace had been old enough to get on her tricycle, she had headed for Peggy’s house every summer morning to pester her while she worked in the yard. “Helping Peggy,” is what Grace had called it. Afterward, if she was lucky, she got invited in for M&Ms and a game of Old Maid. When her parents had divorced, Grace had missed Peggy almost as bitterly as she had missed her dad.
Peggy and Lou had stayed friends through all the ups and downs in their lives, and the closet romantic in Grace always waited for the call telling her that they had finally decided to tie the knot. Their ornery insistence on not getting married had frustrated her for years.
“I couldn’t believe it was you!” Peggy said, pulling back to inspect Grace’s travel-bedraggled person. “I saw you walking up the sidewalk and asked myself,
‘Is that Grace?’
I thought I was imagining things. It’s so good to see you.” Peggy’s smile collapsed. “I’ve been so worried about Lou.”
“Have you been to the hospital?”
Peggy shook her head and said the word
no
on an inhale, so that it caught in her throat.
“He’s doing fine,” Grace assured her. “He was eating smuggled barbecue and complaining about everyone’s footwear.”
“Truman told me he’d broken his leg.”
Uncle Truman
had told her? Peggy hadn’t even spoken to Lou on the phone?
“His leg’s in a cast. He’s supposed to be coming home tomorrow.”
“That’s good.” Peggy tilted her head in curiosity. “And you’re here for . . . ?”
“Just a week or two, till Dad’s on the mend and he can take care of himself.”
“Oh.” The older woman’s face pinched a little as she drifted off in thought.
Something felt peculiar. In the old days, visiting a sick friend in the hospital—especially if that sick friend was Lou—was something Peggy would have been all over.
“Is everything all right?” Grace asked.
Peggy snapped back to attention. “What?”
“I guess I was hoping you could fill me in on what Dad’s been up to. Whenever I call him, all he talks about are books and music.”
“I don’t know if I’m the right person to ask.”
Grace frowned. Who else
would
she ask, if not Peggy? “You and Dad haven’t gotten into an argument, have you?”
Peggy hesitated. “Well . . . in a way.” Her face registered a brief, agonizing mental tug-of-war. “I didn’t want to say anything. You know how I feel about your father—about all of you. And Lou and I have never had any conflict.”
“Until now?” Grace guessed.
“Well . . . he’s seemed moody. Maybe I’ve been getting on his nerves. One evening we went to a Mexican restaurant and I guess I fussed at him a little too much, and he blew up.”
“Dad?”
Her dad enjoyed needling people, jokingly, but he didn’t
blow up.
Especially not in public. Especially not at Peggy. Blowing up at Peggy was akin to blowing up at the Easter Bunny.
But Peggy’s tale was still half-finished. “He left me there, actually. Just got into his car and drove off. And the restaurant was all the way over on South Congress.”
Grace lifted her hand to her forehead, where that ache was starting to get a little stronger. “What happened afterward?”
Peggy shrugged. “I finished my enchiladas and called a cab.”
“I mean
afterward
afterward. Did you talk to him about it? Did he apologize?”
“No. We haven’t spoken. Not for three months.”
Three months! Grace had never been at her dad’s house three days in a row without Peggy popping by once or twice. “I’m so sorry,” Grace said. “I hadn’t heard anything about this.”
Peggy nodded, and in that instant, something of her old breeziness returned. “Well! These little bumps in the road happen in all friendships, don’t they?”
Complete ruptures after fifty years? That seemed more than a
bump
to Grace.
“I hope you’ll come over and visit me while you’re here,” Peggy continued. “I don’t keep M&Ms anymore, but I can usually rustle up some Chex Mix.”
“I’ll be over,” Grace assured her. “You’ll be sick of the sight of me before too long.”
“I doubt that!” Peggy gave her arm a quick, strong squeeze. “Unfortunately, I need to run, and you probably have a million things to do, too. I just wanted to dash over and say hi.”
“I’m glad you did. But wait—you haven’t seen Iago, have you?”
Already halfway down the steps, Peggy turned. “No. Is he missing?”
Grace felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. “I was hoping that he’d left him with you.”
“No, not with me. Your uncle Truman hasn’t said anything about the dog, either.”
She bit her lip. Not with Peggy, not with Uncle Truman. “Can you think of anyone else around here he would have left Iago with?”
“Your father wouldn’t trust anyone with that dog,” Peggy said.
“I know . . . but why wouldn’t he have said something to Steven about taking care of Iago? Or me?”
Peggy frowned down at the floor. “Have you called shelters? Vets?”
“I was just about to start. I’m still hoping he’s not really lost. Dad might have just taken him to the groomer’s. . . .” She was back to clinging to that unlikely scenario.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” Peggy promised.
After Peggy left, Grace felt more uneasy. Not just about Iago. And not because Peggy and her dad had had a fight. It was that everything seemed the same, and yet not the same. She skipped the nap she so desperately wanted and spent the afternoon calling around to shelters and vet clinics instead. Later, when she returned to the hospital, she had to tell Lou that Iago was missing.
At the news, the creases in his face went slack with shock. “How can he be missing?”
“That’s what I was wondering. There’s the doggy door in the back, so he might have gotten outside, but the gate was firmly closed. And he couldn’t have dug out, or there would be a hole the size of a crater next to the fence.”
“He’s not a digger.”
As far as Grace could remember, Iago wasn’t an anything-er, except perhaps a sit-arounder. She returned to her original suspicion. “Did you take him somewhere Saturday? The groomer, maybe?”
Her dad looked almost offended. “I can still get out a water hose and wash my own dog, thank you very much.”
“I wasn’t saying . . .” She sighed. “He must have gotten out. Maybe the gate was open, and then someone came by and closed it later.”
“He’s never run away before.”
“He might have gotten panicked when you didn’t come home.”
Lou didn’t look convinced. “Someone must have taken him.”
“Dognapped him, you mean?”
She stopped just short of laughing. Iago, a lumbering black-and-white mass of tongue and ears and floppy skin, didn’t strike her as a canine theft object. He wasn’t even a purebred—at the animal shelter her father had adopted Iago from they described him as a basset hound-poodle cross, which just meant that he was a slightly taller basset with peculiar tufts of wiry fur on his eyebrows, his chest, and in a line along his back. He resembled a canine life form that had been haphazardly sprinkled with Miracle-Gro.
But of course her father would consider his companion of these past five years to be a highly desirable dognapping target. “The house on the corner turned into a rental and now it’s crawling with students,” he said. “They might be up to some kind of shenanigans.”
“I’ll make a tour around the neighborhood and check the animal shelters again,” she promised. “I’ll also make some flyers tonight on the computer.”
“There’s a good picture of him on my desk, in the office,” he suggested.
She gingerly segued onto another topic. “I asked Peggy if she had seen him, but she said she hadn’t.”
Lou’s jaw clamped shut.
“What’s going on, Dad? I can’t believe you’ve been fighting with Peggy.”
“Is that what she says?”
“She says you abandoned her at a restaurant.”
“I never did! Why would I do such a thing?”
“I don’t know. . . .” She lifted and dropped her shoulders. “But it sounds as though you two are avoiding each other now.”
“She’s always nagging at me. Of course I’ve been avoiding her.”
What was going on here? Peggy wouldn’t make up a story about being abandoned at a restaurant out of whole cloth. What would be the point? Yet Grace had a hard time believing her father would lie, either.
“It’s a shame, Dad. You were always such good friends.”
“A history of friendship is not an excuse to be irritating.”
Grace decided to let it drop for the moment, but in the back of her mind she set a rapprochement between Lou and Peggy as her goal for her stay.
“I should probably go now before the nurses kick me out. I’ll be back tomorrow.” She gave him a quick kiss on the crown of his head, which he endured with a wince. “Take it easy tonight, Dad.”
She was almost out the door when he stopped her.
“When you get home, Grace, could you make sure to give Iago a treat for me? Poor guy’s probably wondering where I’ve been.”
4
P
AINT
I
T
, B
LACK
J
ordan had lain in wait for the perfect moment, and Sunday that moment arrived. After oversleeping church and then eating the requisite two waffles when her grandparents returned, she crawled back into bed with the cheap MP3 player she’d bought at Wal-Mart. Later—how much later it was impossible to say, because she was in a Mick Jagger-induced trance—she felt a hand on her shoulder and found herself staring up into Granny Kate’s face. Her grandmother’s lips were moving, but Jordan had no idea what she was saying until Granny Kate reached down and yanked a bud out from one of her ears.
“We’ve got to get to Bonny’s.” Her grandmother’s voice was tight. She’d been on edge ever since their last trip to Midland.
“What for?”
“Bridge club. Why else do you think I made lemon squares?” She gave Jordan an exasperated nudge. “You’re not even dressed yet!”
“I have a headache,” Jordan lied.
“It’s from listening to your music too loud. Those little ear thingamabobs aren’t good for you. You’ll go deaf.”
“What?” Jordan asked.
“I said—” Belatedly, Granny Kate caught on to the joke. Instead of laughing, she heaved a sigh. “You can’t be too careful when it comes to your ears. You might not care now, but you will when you’re being fitted for your hearing aid, believe you me.”
“It’s just I’ve got this throb in my temple,” Jordan explained. “If I went with you to that bridge club thing, I’d be
seriously
cranky.”
“But honey, I can’t just abandon you. Your Pop Pop is playing golf and won’t be back all afternoon.”
“I’ll be fine. Swear to God.”
Granny Kate hadn’t really trusted leaving her alone since she learned that Jordan had seen a psychologist back in Austin. In Granny Kate and Pop Pop’s world,
seeing a psychologist
equaled dangerously unbalanced. But over the past week, ever since Jordan had escaped in Midland and made tracks for the nearest hair salon, Granny Kate had seemed more open to the idea of not carting her around everywhere. In fact, the few times they had been out together in Little Salty since Jordan had shown up with Deep Cerulean #68 hair, her grandmother had walked around with a permanent wince on her face.
“Well . . .” Her grandmother’s gaze slipped in the direction of Jordan’s scalp.
The tide was turning in her favor, Jordan could tell.
Deep Cerulean #68 saves the day again!!
Granny Kate relented. “I’ll just be over at Bonny’s. You know where that is.”
“Bonny’s,” Jordan repeated. “Gotcha.”
“The phone number is on the list taped to the refrigerator. So’s your Pop Pop’s cell phone number.”
“On the refrigerator. Check.”
“There’s chicken salad in the fridge for your lunch. Don’t just eat ice cream.”
“Ice cream. Lunch. Check.”
“I said
don’t
eat just ice cream.”
Jordan laughed. “I know. I was just messing with your mind.”
“Well, don’t! My mind’s been in enough of a mess since the menopause.”
When Jordan finally heard the front door shut, signaling her grandmother’s departure, she bounded out of bed and practically did a jeté across the room. A whole afternoon to herself. This was too good to be true!
First thing after throwing some clothes on, she padded over to the room they called Pop Pop’s office, which actually was just a large closet with an antique computer and a lot of old fishing magazines in it. She perched on the computer chair. Usually when Jordan was on-line, her grandmother would find a million reasons to breeze through, checking on her. Granny Kate had read an article about on-line predators and teenage girls uploading naked photos of themselves, so naturally she couldn’t imagine that Jordan would be doing anything on the Internet but making herself a target for pervs.
First she looked up the hours for the local hardware store. It was open Sunday afternoons. Excellent. She took a quick visit to her e-mail inbox.
Today there was a message waiting from Dominic. Nothing from her dad. Nothing from Lily.
Seventeen
magazine wanted her to subscribe, and
Amazon.com
thought she might be interested in something called
I Wasn’t Ready to Say Goodbye
because she’d bought
Healing after Loss
, but
Amazon.com
had its head up its butt. She’d only bought that stupid book because her therapist had told her to. Did a company really think people wanted to sit around consuming grief books one after another, like bonbons?
She ticked off the two messages she didn’t want and pressed the delete button, then turned to Dominic’s message. In his e-mails, her brother tended to spit out his ideas in little disjointed bursts. He was like a painter Jed had shown her once, that French guy who painted with dots. Seurat. If you gathered Dominic’s correspondence from about three months together and read it all at once, you might actually get a coherent narrative out of them. But reading just one random e-mail was like looking at a couple of dots from that painting
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
and trying to decide if they belonged to an umbrella or a monkey.
Today’s e-mail was a case in point.
hi. how r u? i’m okay i guess but its boring here! lily took me to see a movie but i fell asleep in it and she said it was a waist of dads money and her time to take me to movies that she doesnt want to see in the first place if i’m just gonna conk out.
oh. i went next door and the guy’s not dead after all. the lady told me his legs just broken. now I have to give lefty back or figure out a way to keep him but i wonder how that would work.
when are you gonna come home? egbert fell off the wall the other day for no reason. it was so weird!!! bye, dominic
What was Dominic talking about? Who was
the guy
? Who was
the lady?
Who or what was
Lefty?
She typed a quick reply, then grabbed her purse and headed out the door. It was a blazing sunny day, so hot she could feel the heat of the road burning through the soles of her sandals.
What was the deal with Egbert? Last year at arts camp, Jordan had painted a melted smiley face in oils. It was meant as a joke for Nina, who was always complaining that, because of the configuration of their beds, she ended up looking at Jordan’s dismal midnight blue side of their room, while Jordan woke up with a view of light yellow painted walls, posters of pro tennis hotties, and picture frames with hand-painted daisies and smiley faces all over them. At arts camp, Jordan had decided to make a warped smiley face to hang on her side of the room for Nina to look at. It was sort of a goth smiley that looked as if it were melting.
Nina had laughed when she saw the painting. She’d named it Egbert.
Dominic didn’t say whether Egbert had suffered any damage. Jordan felt a sharp stab at the idea of anything happening to that painting. Then she told herself that was completely stupid. It wasn’t a Van Gogh or anything. It was just a dumb picture she’d made. A joke.
Her errand at the hardware store took practically no time at all because she’d plotted it all out in advance. She whizzed through the aisles grabbing Styrofoam paint pads and a plastic tray. She’d halfway expected the guys in the store to look at her funny when she asked for the black paint, but the stares they gave her weren’t different from the ones she’d received from everybody else in the week since she’d dyed her hair blue. Their eyes followed her while they continued their conversation about how the guy at the register had had a fight with his girlfriend and ended up at a bar watching the Rangers game and drinking
way
too much Jack Daniel’s.
When the guy behind the register finished bagging the pads and the tray, he handed them to Jordan with the barest of smiles. “That’s the bluest blue I’ve ever seen.”
Taking her stuff, she pinned a puzzled gaze on him. “Blue?”
“Your hair.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jordan said. “I’ve been a blonde all my life.”
“Girl, I’m telling you, your hair’s blue.”
She grinned. “You really did drink too much Jack Daniel’s last night, didn’t you?”
His coworkers laughed and Jordan could hear them ribbing the counter guy as she strolled out of the store.
She smiled halfway back to Granny Kate’s, until she realized that the exchange with the hardware store clerk seemed like the first real human interaction she’d had in months. At least interaction that wasn’t all bogged down by tension and guilt and other emotional dreck.
It didn’t matter. Anyway, she didn’t have time to think about stuff like that now.
She had been thinking about her painting project for days, imagining it, wondering how she could pull it off. Now it turned out to be not so difficult after all. True, the last time she’d painted a room—her room at home—she’d had more time and Nina had done all sorts of prep. But she doubted taping and laying down plastic made all that much difference anyway. As long as the walls got painted, who cared?
Two hours later, she realized she maybe should have cared. Though she was pleased with the room, even she had to admit she’d been a little sloppy. Dribbled black dots speckled the robin’s egg blue carpet, and in a couple of places trickles of paint streaked black teardrops down the wall. Still, as she stood back, she surveyed the result with satisfaction.
Three walls of her bedroom were glossy black, and in the center, over her bed, she’d used leftover white paint she’d found in the garage to create her ode to Bob Ross. It looked like one of his signature snowy cedar trees, only in negative. The effect was heightened by the fact that the black paint hadn’t thoroughly dried when she’d done the tree, so its branches were a smudgy gray in some parts. In an arc over the tree, she’d written
HAPPY LITTLE TREE
! in thick, blobby letters.
She smiled. It felt like eons since the world around her had actually lifted her spirits.
Thank you, Nina. Thank you, Gandhi.
She did anticipate a little dismay from the grandfolks. Black was a major change from the pastel walls they were accustomed to. Also, the black didn’t really go with the curtains, which were yellow with little bouquets of violets embroidered on them. (Now they had little black polka dots, as well.) Maybe her grandmother would let her make new ones.
When the front door opened, she braced herself, especially when she heard voices and realized Granny Kate had brought a bridge club crony back with her for coffee. Evelyn Webb—a woman with a long face that pinched up in disapproval whenever she was around Jordan.
“I smell fumes!” Granny Kate’s voice sounded alarmed.
“Smells like paint!” Evelyn exclaimed, knocking herself out with her Nancy Drewiness.
Seconds later, the two ladies appeared at the doorway. Both women’s faces slackened in shock as they stood at the threshold, slowly scanning the room. Their gazes froze when they reached
HAPPY LITTLE TREE
!
“Oh . . . my . . . word,” Evelyn breathed.
Granny Kate rotated her head, as if reading the letters at another angle would make the whole thing clearer to her. Her expression was hurt, almost offended. It was as if Jordan had scrawled profanity all over the walls, or drawn a huge swastika.
“You told me to make myself at home,” Jordan said, waving them into the room. (One good thing: they both were too wigged out to notice the carpet splatters.) She attempted to talk them through it, assuming the tone of the guide at the art museum Jed had taken their class to last summer.
In this work, Claude Monet was attempting to express . . .
“I wanted to make my room a little more me,” she continued. “I mean, I’m not really beige walls and violet sprigs, am I? So I tried to inject a little of my Little Salty experience into the décor. It’s like, what do you get when you cross Bob Ross with Mick Jagger?”
Something caught in her grandmother’s throat. Jordan looked at her and saw there were actually tears standing in her eyes.
Evelyn Webb saw it, too. Concern for her friend emboldened her to march right up into Jordan’s face. When she spoke, her voice had the fake urgency of adult concern. “Are you taking drugs?”
Jordan looked into the woman’s weasel eyes and then burst out laughing.
After that, the situation deteriorated rapidly. And when Pop Pop walked in a few moments later, things only got worse. Jordan had hoped he might defuse the situation, but instead, as he stood in his green golf pants and gawped at the black walls and
HAPPY LITTLE TREE
!, his face went crimson, as if he was going to burst a blood vessel. She’d hardly ever seen her grandfather angry, except maybe at baseball umpires on television, or at Congress. Certainly never at her. But now he was practically quaking. Evelyn Webb fled before he could explode; Jordan wished she could scuttle out, too.
“What the Sam Hill were you thinking!” her grandfather shouted at her.

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