by Sara Levine
“I’m sure he’s here somewhere,” I said though at that point, I wasn’t. It didn’t seem likely that anyone would have abducted a poodle, but if the vandals had held the door open for him, he might have run off. He was Nancy’s favorite, but not as attached to her as she liked to think.
A whimpering noise came from the back room.
“Willie?” Nancy cried. “Where are you?”
“I know this sounds weird, but he might be tied up,” I said, but she had already broken past me before I could finish my sentence.
In fact, he had not been tied up. But neither had he been spared. Whoever had barged into the place had managed to find the electric clippers and shave fluffy white Willie clean as a lamb. It was fascinating to see him shivering there under the table, all white and pink, like a licked candy cane. About three feet away from him lay a soft, enormous, tufty pile of fur.
“William!” said Nancy, stricken.
I wish I could say that was the end of the trouble. In fact, because I had left the fish tank uncovered, the cats had helped themselves to a snack, which explained the water on the floor. It must have taken them quite a bit of work to catch those fish. You might almost say they deserved them—not that Nancy was open to entertaining that point of view.
“You leave fish tank uncovered,” she wailed. “Cats loose! Fish massacre!”
“I have a notion,” I began. “I feel that my talents are a bit under-used in my present position. I realize that right now you may not even be following every word that I’m saying, but I’ll go on. The Pet Library is ailing—admit it! Admit what you and every other person in this town know. This Pet Library is going down. Hard. I reckon we can’t compete with companies that sell long-term ownership of dogs and cats and hamsters, et cetera. But what if we offer something different, something less run-of-the-mill than cats and dogs?”
“We do that,” Nancy insisted. “We do rooster, we do llama.”
“I know. But do we do parrot?” and here I unveiled Richard who, despite his initial echo of Nancy’s death cry, had yet to be noticed by her. Then I gestured to the long front windows by which I wanted to build a sandy bank. “I’m thinking seashells, I’m thinking palm trees. Parrots, geckos, maybe a different kind of fish tank—one with a wave machine? Nancy Wang, I’m talking about branding the place. Not just any old animal rental, but—are you listening?—Pets Treasure Island!”
“Where you get money for parrot?” she asked.
“Well, it’s our money. Your money, of course. I took it from the petty cash.”
“What petty cash? No petty cash here!”
As I said, I’m no economist, but from what Nancy said next, I gather that the money I’d used had not been ear-marked for the business. Apparently she had been stashing it away for her mother’s hip replacement. But she kept it in The Pet Library, so how was I to know? Quite suddenly, Nancy sat—or rather collapsed—on the floor, hugging Willie and crying, her hair sticking in wet wisps to her face. Willie licked her tears.
“I work hard to build Pet Library. People in community say thank you, Nancy. Thank you for bringing animal joy to my life. When I hire you, you say you like animals.”
“I told you I was tired of working the gift wrap department at Flounkers. It’s not my fault if your English isn’t good. Maybe I said I like to eat animals.”
“You have problem in your head!” she shouted. “Give back money now or I call lawyer! Flighty! You are flighty person!”
“It’s all very well to call me names, but I don’t have your money. I have this parrot. —Oh wait.” I fumbled in my pocket and produced two soiled fives and some change. She ungraciously left my hand to dangle in the air. “Nancy,” I said, in my kindest voice, hoping to restore the crisis to its proper proportions. “I think you and I have had a misunderstanding about my job description.”
She stood up and began to scream in Chinese, causing Willie to pee all over the floor. I shook my head, but before I could explain that it was not my job to get a rag, the rooster began to choke on a dog food nugget the size of his trachea. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a rooster choke, but it’s a terrible sight. Even more frightening was the prospect of having to pick up his herky-jerky body and perform the Heimlich maneuver. “Help me, help me!” Nancy ran insensibly through Willie’s urine and made her way to the rooster, but I had already grabbed Richard’s cage and was hotfooting it out the door.
CHAPTER 5
Back in my studio apartment, I reached for the phone. Could anyone be more lost than I?
I started to call my mother—a reflex reaction when I smell trouble—but before I completed dialing, I realized I had no desire to hear her point of view and saved myself by hanging up. Then I called Lars, who was at work and couldn’t take my call, and Rena, who was not, and immediately came over to feed and water Richard. This was fortunate, since I was in no condition to nurture a bird. She insisted she didn’t mind.
“You haven’t called me in a long time,” she said. “So you’re still deep into this Treasure Island thing, huh?”
“Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears, a fork’d one! Thanks for asking. Lately my sister’s the only one who asks, but she asks because it’s her library copy. She’s pissed about the overdue notices.”
“Of course. They’ll revoke her borrowing privileges!”
“You’re as bad as her. They won’t. They’ll just decide the book is lost. Adrianna wants me to get my own copy, but that’s crazy—like telling a superstitious person to buy a new rabbit’s foot.” I nuzzled the book against my cheek.
“Did you used to have a rabbit’s foot when you were a kid?” Rena said, shuddering. “Mine was dyed blue and on a little metal chain. My uncle gave it to me. Whose idea of luck was that? Certainly not the rabbit’s.”
Rena cut up some banana and gave Richard a water dish, occasionally throwing him flirty little glances.
“I’ve pet-sat for a Zebra Finch and some lorikeets,” she said. “But never a large exotic. He sure seems like a character.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I said.
“Nothing. I just mean he has a lot of personality.”
At that Richard screamed, loosening the fillings in my molars.
“Maybe turn off the maritime music,” Rena suggested.
Reluctantly I did, but Richard didn’t calm. He screamed and screamed until Lars pressed the buzzer to be let into my apartment. “Wonder why that shut him up?” I said as I pressed the intercom. Rena left as Lars entered. In passing they exchanged mildly distressed greetings, Rena clobbering his hip with her enormous Turkish Kilim hand-woven expandable purse.
“I’m not taking sides,” Lars said after he had heard, two or three times, my story.
I cuddled up to him on the bed, about three feet from the bird whose cage sat unhygienically on my table.
“Do,” I urged. “Do take sides. Otherwise where is the fun?”
“Well, okay, I’m thinking maybe you were out of line a little.”
“Oh come on! Nancy thinking I stole her money, that’s out of line.”
“You did take it—”
“But it was petty cash. And I’m her employee. She’s putting the worst possible spin on it. She goes about as if she’s St. Francis of Assisi! I’m supposed to bring extraordinary diligence to her scrappy endeavor? I said I’d work there, not that I would live for the animals. ‘Oh, time to feed hamsters!’” I added. “‘Oh, time to brush cats!’”
“Please don’t do her accent,” Lars said, his mouth askew.
“But you know the apple barrel scene, right? Jim Hawkins overhearing Long John Silver plotting a mutiny? After Jim falls asleep in the apple barrel? That’s how he discovers half the crew are pirates.”
“So?” Lars said, failing to grasp the magnitude.
“So then Jim rushes back to the Captain, Dr. Livesey, and Squire Trelawney and tells them everything he’s just heard. And they’re all like, Wow, Jim, with this information you have basic
ally saved our asses, only they put it better. They’re complimenting him and the doctor says, ‘Jim is a noticing lad.’”
Lars looked at me blankly.
“A noticing lad, a noticing lad,” I said, smacking his thigh. “I’m a noticing lad, and that’s why I do Nancy’s voice. I’ve noticed that Nancy talks without any articles.”
Lars has a bit of fight in him, so long as the topic isn’t too personal. “You told me Nancy’s lived in the States twelve years. She owns her own business. She’s probably more integrated in the community than we are. No way she sounds like a Chinese stereotype.”
“But you haven’t met Nancy,” I grumbled. “She really does talk like that. One day I’ll go to China and the native speakers can quote my egregious errors as much as they want—then you’ll see.”
“Since when are you going to China?” Lars said with a touch of sulkiness. That’s when it hit me: Lars wasn’t politically sensitive, not by a long sea mile. He was afraid I’d leave him.
“Don’t worry, I’m not planning any trips. Unless someone does all the arrangements for me, flight and hotel and all that, I don’t even like to travel.”
“Scrraww!” Richard said. Wings flat, head tucked, he appeared to be molesting his feathers.
“You know what Nancy’s really upset about? Willie. But it wasn’t me who shaved him. Who do you think did pick up those clippers?”
“I have no idea. Maybe some kids wandered in and then did it for a prank—”
“Teenagers!” I remembered the boys speeding past me in the mud-splashed car. I had waved to them. Willie’s tormentors.
“Do you have another job in mind?” Lars asked.
“What?” I said, caught unawares.
“That’s why I’m thinking you should talk to Nancy. Face to face. BOLDNESS. KINDNESS. FORGIVENESS—”
“Lars, you don’t even relish the adventure, do you? You’re like Tom Redruth, the gamekeeper who gets dragged along, and grumbles the whole time.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Heart of gold; not a lot of drive; eats a bullet in Chapter Twenty-Five: The Attack. Besides, there’s nothing about forgiveness in the Core Values! Jesus. Read the book!”
But the longer we sat on my bed, in my lovely studio apartment, with its cheerful, flimsy sub-Urban Outfitters furnishings, the more I realized I had no savings and would rather slit my wrists than go back to the gift wrap department at Flounkers. At least at The Pet Library I could read. And maybe Nancy could take the parrot back.
“Lars, hand me my stationery box.”
At first, I chose a lovely medium-weight note-card with a letter-pressed border of red peonies, a piece of stationery that came from a superb out-of-town paper boutique. Just imagining Nancy’s hands (never manicured) unwrapping it on the counter (invariably soiled) prompted me to save the card for a better occasion. Here was a dull card with fern fronds, leftover from a box set. I drew a thick decorative swirl over the “Thank You” and it was perfect.
Dear Nancy, I wrote. Immediately an image sprung up of her sifting through the mail in the back room, the airbrushed centerfold of cats warping off the wall behind her. Since you’ve misconstrued my actions, I’m bound by my honor to explain them. Many, many times I looked at The Pet Library’s petty cash and thought of how I could use the money for my personal uses, for instance to buy a cashmere sweater—which I’m fairly sure I’m never going to be able to buy—and yet I didn’t. I hope I’m right when I say that this kind of restraint counts for something. I took the money to buy a parrot for The Pet Library. Which wasn’t right, my boyfriend tells me now, but wasn’t the most wrong thing in the world either, as it was an act on behalf of the business and not a misappropriation of funds for a personal sweater. I had no idea the money didn’t belong to The Pet Library. As for the fish, I wish I hadn’t left the tank uncovered but you can hardly blame the cats for taking a crack at them. When Jim Hawkins counts up the dead after the first skirmish, the crew has been reduced from nineteen to fifteen. And two more wounded, lying about, I think. But he soldiers on. As for Willie his coat was his best feature but, on the bright side, it will grow back, and now it will be easier to really go after his eczema. I hope you accept this apology and let me know at your earliest convenience about my hours for the coming week. I could work this Saturday, but not Sunday because Lars and I have plans and I was going to ask you, before you fired me, if I could have Wednesday off. Any of the other usual hours would be good.
Your Faithful Hand
CHAPTER 6
Sometimes when a person does something wrong, she finds it easier to continue in a wrong way; for if having done a wrong thing, she proceeds to do a right thing, the wrong thing may appear to others all the more plain. I offer this sententiousness as an attempt to understand Nancy, whose actions the most compassionate person would find difficult to explain. Not only did she fire her best and only part-time employee, she refused to accept Richard for her collection. This woman who for years had given homes to lizards that people had dumped anonymously into the drop-box after maiming them, refused, as a matter of principle, to accept my bird. All she wanted was her money back.
I was at my parents’ house, explaining some of the indignities to my sister Adrianna, who for financial reasons, had recently moved back home. Adrianna loaded pita chips with hummus and ate them very slowly, leaning one elbow on the speckled Corian breakfast bar.
“Well, he’s yours now,” she said. “Tell me where you see potential snags.”
I counted them off on my fingers.
“The dirty cage. The smell of feather dust. The cost of feed. The cost of shots. Holding the bird for shots. The bird angry with me after shots. Daily upkeep. Daily training. Daily contact.” I paused and stared at my pinky. “There’s also the question of how I could own a bird and ever go away on the weekends.”
“You never go away on the weekends. You come over to Mom and Dad’s.”
“Well, maybe I’ve been planning to go away on weekends.”
“Maybe it would be good for you to have a pet,” Adrianna said. “The responsibility, I mean. Besides, if you needed to get away, doesn’t your friend Rena do pet-sitting?”
I passed myself the tub of hummus she’d been hoarding.
“Rena gets on my nerves.”
Adrianna looked quizzical.
“Very unambitious personally, and very doom-and-gloom about the environment. Mm thinking of cutting her loose,” I said with a full mouth.
“She still worried about her nitrogen footprint?”
“Negative energy,” I summarized. A huge glob of hummus dropped onto my mother’s vinyl coupon organizer, which was lying on the counter. “Let’s finish talking about Nancy. Do you understand what I’ve sacrificed for her, how much study of Treasure Island I’ve missed while I sat and signed out her goldfish? I was trying to help her. Now I wonder where I’d be if I’d applied my ingenuity to myself instead of to her Library.”
“There’s an idea.”
“The real reason Nancy hates the parrot is because she doesn’t have the guts to go and get anything for the Library.”
“But it’s the money issue too, right? She’d been saving up for her mother’s hip replacement.”
In the pantry, packed with chickpeas, Cheez-its, and peanut butter pretzels for my parents’ next two hundred guests (they never entertained), I found and broke open a second bag of chips.
“If I have to, I’ll keep Richard even if it ruins me, even if I have no money to go to the movies or buy clothes or ever go anywhere on the weekend ever. But I’ll tell you what I told Nancy’s voicemail last night: only if she takes the parrot will I let bygones be bygones.”
“Who’s talking about bygones?” my mother said, coming into the kitchen with a basket of laundry.
“Who’s picking up fag-ends of conversations?” I said.
She set her basket down on the kitchen table and, as if I had said nothing at all, began to fold my father’s boxers.
“I mean, who’s pulling on the line? Dipping without a chip? Fishing without the bait? Cruising without a motor?”
“Really, sweetie, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Because I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Adrianna.”
“Oh,” my mother said, with the pleasure of having successfully translated a scrap of a foreign language, “have I interrupted?”
“Well, yes. It was kind of a confidential matter.”
“Okey dokey.” She took her laundry down the hallway and disappeared into her bedroom.
“What was all that about?” Adrianna said. “You pissed at Mom?”
“I’m not pissed. I just don’t need her knowing my business. Listen,” I said, when I was sure we were in no danger of being overheard. “You don’t happen to have a thousand dollars lying around, do you? That I could borrow?”
With a scornful glance, Adrianna plunged a shard of pita into the hummus.
CHAPTER 7
I’ve decided to live with Lars,” I told Rena on the telephone.
“Really? I thought you were . . . feeling alienated and . . . thinking of breaking up with him. How did this happen?”
“What do you mean, happen? We’ve been together for five months. Actually, nine, if you count that impromptu sleepover.”
“Yes, but . . . Well, how does he feel about it?”
“He’s thrilled. He’s more domestic than I am. This is what he’s always wanted. Also, I can’t pay the rent on my studio.”
In an intimate booth at Diamond Dave’s Taco Co., Lars had looked at me over the rim of his large-bowled margarita. “You mean you want us to get a place together?”
“Do you mind me asking?”
“Frankly, it’s a relief to not be the one doing all the emotional work,” he said. “I didn’t see it coming though. You’ve been kind of bitchy lately.”
“Preoccupied,” I amended. “Mea culpa.”
