Year of the Dog (14 page)

I put away the flyers and poured myself a cup of coffee. I'd let Good Dog out of her crate, where I thought she should be
when they arrived, in case they made her (as well as her person) build anxiety. Now, happy to be out and to see me again, she sat at my feet, looking up at me and then with interest at the New People—who paid her no mind whatsoever. How could they not exert even the smallest effort to make the acquaintance of my sociable companion? A word, a touch, at the most minimal, so my patient lab didn't wear herself out waiting for cues. “We'll go right by the church when we
walk Beulah
downtown,” I told my mom, thanking the miracle of accidents that the town's sole Methodist Church happened to be directly on our way.

“You got TV?” Daddy asked, looking around, suddenly waking to the fact he couldn't locate one.

“No,” I told him, and got up and put on the Dixie Chicks, in case the silence bothered him and having a need to hear them sing about leaving home for wide open spaces. But the phone rang, and they froze while I retrieved the cell from my parka pocket.

“THIS IS ORVILLE,” a voice yelled in my ear. “JANEY? IS THAT YOU?”

“Mr. Sturgis,” I answered, worried but at the same time glad to hear his voice. “Is this you?” I knew he'd got my number from my daddy when he'd called about Bayless's funeral, and I'd been calling him regularly, keeping up with everybody's medication, but he'd only called me that one time with bad news.

Mom and Daddy looked at one another, and Daddy put his hand on his chest, which looked like he was thinking of mortality.

“You got to help me out here, Janey,” Mr. Sturgis said, dropping his voice to a normal range, having realized he didn't have to shout through the air from Carolina to nearly the Canadian border.

“What is it?”

“This is Orville, like I said. It's old Grady. He's taken a turn, and they've got him in the hospital, not in good condition, they're trying to figure, his old doctor, you recall, passed . . .”

“Bayless.” I nodded as if he could see me. “Bayless died.”

“Ex-actly. Me and Grady were pallbears. But this, now, came on sudden. He's taken a turn—Janey, what do you reckon he could've been on? He hadn't refilled anything since the funeral, near as we can find.”

“Let me think. My parents are here, Mr. Sturgis, on a visit.”

“Say hello, will you. That's nice. Listen, what could that old man have been taking he shouldn't have?”

I went over in my mind the combinations that Bayless had given Mr. Grady, pills he might have put on his shelf and forgot he had, then, rummaging around, thinking he needed something, maybe he'd had a right smart amount of pain, or felt short of breath, or had a sudden giving away of the knees because his doctor had died . . . I named all I could recall for Mr. Sturgis, who repeated them after me, making a clicking noise with his teeth as if counting.

“Good work,” he said when I finished. “Bayless's nurse, that woman who wasn't a nurse, you recall, she's gone, gone and got herself married.” He thanked me and then shouted before he hung up. “WHEN IN TARNATION ARE YOU COMING BACK DOWN HERE?”

I repeated that to Mom and Daddy, and she said, “Everybody misses you, hon, that's the truth. I hope you did the right thing running away till things cooled down. Even Millie Dawson, to get personal. I mean who else can she ask, when little Danny runs a fever?”

25

THE OUTSIDE AIR felt grand, windy and not too cold, and I'd helped bundle up Mom and Daddy against the elements. They'd talked my ear off, and my feelings had been hurt because my trusty companion had been ignored. But then what had I expected? Why did I think they would suddenly be different?

We headed toward town the back way, so Beulah could get busy before we started our walk. Mom suddenly peered at her, as if noticing Good-natured Dog for the first time, “How come you keep her locked up in that cage in there?”

“I put her in the crate when I went to get you. That's all. Most of the time she's out. But I thought, with new people—.”

“Does she bite?” Mom walked a step ahead of us, glancing back as if at probable trouble.

“Mom. She's being trained to work with
a blind person.
She's gentle.”

“If you say so.” She clutched the railing, unsteady on the steps. “Sending me her picture, Janey, like it's some kind of member of the family. You think I'm going to get out my billfold and show everybody on the street
my daughter's dog
?”

Actually, I did. Not, I guess, thinking it through that somebody who never wanted to have one wasn't going to suddenly develop friendly feelings toward an animal just because it
happened to live with her daughter. “I thought you'd like to see her playing in the leaves, the fall leaves.”

“What the—.” All at once Mom stopped dead. “God Bless America! Is this some kind of joke?”

It took me a second to believe my eyes. BOYS it said on a hand-lettered cardboard sign by the bare lilac bush, and GIRLS by Beulah's spot at the base of the bare-limbed locust tree. The upstairs guys—who earlier had been outside, puffing and shoveling the snow from our front walk to the driveway—had cleared a nice curving path in the backyard through the two-foot drift to Beulah's spot, and another, ha ha, to the lilac bush. They must have seen us come up the front steps, Larry and his hulking roommate, Roland, must've seen Janey with her parents and decided to have some fun.

“There's a male dog next door,” I explained coolly to Mom, inhaling a lungful of fresh air, “who sometimes comes over here and we discourage that, because each of the Companion Dogs has its own special place. Also Beulah is the age to worry about
accidental pregnancies,
and I don't want him to get her scent.” Going up the driveway behind Mom and Daddy, I stuck out my tongue and made horns at the upstairs windows, in case the jokers were watching.

A block before Church Street, we turned north in order to pass First United Methodist, a gray granite and red fieldstone building with suggestions of buttresses on the side—clearly recognizable as Methodist, though I couldn't exactly say why. Sure enough, the sermon title, “SIGN LANGUAGE,” listed below the pastor's name in a glass-fronted display case on the deep snow-covered churchyard, lived up to Mom's prediction, and even cited a passage from the Gospel of Luke. “Now isn't that smart?” Mom said, cheered. “I'll have to pass that on to Pastor Edmunds. Didn't I tell you they'd be talking about signs and portents this week? I did.” No mention, by Mom, that this preacher happened to be a woman, since Methodists had
had female pastors back to The Flood.

Turning at the next light, we got onto Church Street at a good location. Not too far from the classy gift shops—Symmetree, April Cornell, Frog Hollow—and not far from Apple Mountain, which sold arts and crafts by Vermont artists, and not far at all from Ben & Jerry's ice cream parlor, in which I devoutly hoped we would soon be enjoying a major dish of Cherry Garcia, in a warm, snuggy booth. “Where's your Barnes and Noble's?” Mom asked, getting out a lengthy list.

“That's way out, near a mall. There's a Border's and a local book shop here.” I thought maybe she wanted to get Christmas cards.

“Which is closer? My feet don't like doing all this walking. No wonder you're wearing those shoes that look like they belong in a gym class. How do you get used to these bricks? That's like trying to do your sightseeing on the cobblestones of Savannah, which I have been to on several occasions. Though as a city it does not surpass Charleston.” She leaned down, groaning, to loosen the Velcro straps on her plastic boots.

We went into the chain store, Beulah in her orange vest, and—I should have seen this coming but did not—Mom trucked right straight to the fiction shelves and pulled out every hardcover Bert Greenwood mystery, all with the title in the same rust-red lettering imposed on a snow-covered landscape with the red brick general store in the center. “Lookit here,” she said. “Not a one of them is signed. You'd think they'd have local authors sign their books, wouldn't you?” She held up
The Prisoner of Charlotte,
unsigned, to show me. “I'm going to take these with us over there tomorrow and get them signed in person, yes, I am.”

At the counter, getting out a wad of what she called her “green presidents” and counting the right number, she told the clerk (a kid wearing two earrings and a lip stud) that this
wellknown writer here in her hands was practically family. That her own aunt happened to be his
very close friend.

“Anything else for you?” the boy asked, slipping the books into a plastic sack.

“Rude up here, aren't they?” Mom remarked on the sidewalk, where Daddy waited for us. He looked totally out of place and clearly agitated, wearing his Tyrolean hat square on his head. And although I was glad he'd missed the lip stud, and that the lip stud had missed him, as I couldn't imagine them making allowances for one another for one second, still, I was ashamed of being ashamed of the way he looked.

Mom got most of the Christmas presents on her list at Apple Mountain. Handing me her teddy-bear fake fur coat to hold, which I let Beulah sniff lest she think I had a lapdog in my arms, Mom bought Woody Jackson cows, Warren Kimble pigs, Stephen Huneck dogs, Sabra Field mountains—on coasters, potholders, notecards, coffee mugs. Plus she got herself a pair of black-and-white cow-print socks.

The clerk, most likely a student, admired Mom's 2 GOOD, 2 BE, 4 GOTTEN t-shirt, taking it maybe for instant messaging, and offered her a selection of cow t-shirts. But Mom decided they looked touristy. “My daughter
lives
here,” she explained. “I have family here.”

“Anything else for you today?” the girl asked.

Out on the sidewalk, bundled up again, Mom said, “Janey, you should have brought your Bark Vader hand towels to show her. She could use something with a little humor to it.”

While she and Daddy stood in front of Ben & Jerry's, debating if it was worth standing in the line which reached out the door to find out if the ice cream really was better than Mayfield's back home, I took Beulah for a brisk walk, knowing we both needed a little exercise and a big breathing spell. “Are you all right?” I asked her. “Are they like scary people to you? Or just the people that you pass on the street that you
have to keep your person from bumping into?” I gave her head a pat and longed to bury my face in her neck, but restrained myself. How was it possible to feel closer to a dog than to my own kin?

When we got back, Mom, having decided we definitely should stop for a sweet treat, started shoving her way toward the door of Ben & Jerry's, to elbow on in and snag a booth, her mind on getting out of her boots. “How do you walk on these bricks?” she moaned, two large sacks in each hand.

Suddenly Daddy, who had been warily gazing around at the Christmas crowd, came to a halt. He rasped, “Ida Jean, do you see what I see?”

“What, Talbot, what? Do not make a scene on this nice street, blocked off for pedestrians such as ourselves whose feet happen to be killing them.”

“You see those two fellows down there, putting a little boy in that cart?
Two men?

I located the males in question, youngish, in parkas and sunglasses, no hats, helping a child into a cart pulled by a miniature horse wearing red-felt reindeer horns. “Oh, Daddy,” I said, “they're the boy's uncles.”

And why not? Vermont had a treasure trove of uncles and aunts.

26

“PRIVATELY, BETWEEN US,” Mom said, when I came to pick them up at PACIFIC VIEW for Aunt May's party, “you don't need to worry about that old gossip. Everybody asked me have you seen the baby, but tongues aren't wagging about Curtis running off the way he did anymore.” Mom reached up to pat my cheek, as if giving me comforting news.

“What do you mean, have
I
seen the baby?” They were driving me bananas with these tossed-in blindsiding jabs. “They know I'm up here. Mr. Sturgis tells everybody, he said so, he tells everybody. ‘Our pharmacist Janey is taking a sabbatical.'
”

“It's a figure of speech, hon. They want to know there's no hard feelings, that you're interested in little Danny.”

I sat on the tightly-made motel bed, looking out at the gas station. My daddy had been in the bathroom since I came. “Exactly
who
makes them think I might be interested? Maybe the same person who had to send me the birth announcement?”

“That happened to be the natural thing to do.” Mom sounded defensive, like I ought to understand. “People might consider you're kin, in a way.”

“No, Mom,” I said, trying not to yell at her. “I am not
kin
to some infant that my one-time husband and his former
cheerleader made.” I wanted to curl up with Beulah on the floor and pull her blanket over my head until they were safely back in Carolina.

“Huhhh,” she said, wriggling her pantyhose up her match-stick thin legs, checking the backs to see if they looked right. “I'm just saying some people might see it that way, you having been a Prentice, too, well, I know you didn't change your name, but I'm just saying, to all extents.”

I tugged at my hair as if to pull it out, fresh-washed and previously looking fine. I ground my teeth. This was too much; we were heading over to Aunt May's and my mind was on how they were going to deal with the arrangement over there, plus how they'd take to James, and how he'd manage to talk to them.

Daddy at that moment came out of the motel bathroom, all dressed for the social event, and I felt actually glad to see him. He had on his white shirt and a new red silk tie with a green fir-tree motif, red suspenders, and his fall-and-winter dark suit. “How'm I looking?” he asked, his face shiny with aftershave.

“Great,” I said.