The Goodbye Summer

by Patricia Gaffney

  “It’s not a real nursing home, and it’s very small, only about a dozen people live there. I was hoping they would like Finney and he could become their sort of, you know, therapy dog.”

  When Christopher Fox smiled, a small crease deepened at the left side of his mouth. He had greenish eyes behind rimless glasses, and they twinkled, as if she’d said something funny. “Jack Russells are great little dogs, but most don’t have the temperament to be companion or therapy animals. Too much energy. And they’re a little on the stubborn side. Unless you find a way to make it worth their while, they’ll always do what they want to do.”

  “Oh, gosh, that’s true.” It felt natural to kneel down across from him on the other side of Finney. “That’s exactly what he’s like. He loves to sit in my lap when I’m reading or something, but if I call him to come sit in my lap, he just looks at me.”

  “That’s a J.R.”

  “And if I’m playing the piano and I don’t want him to sit in my lap, that’s the only place he wants to be.”

  “You play the piano?”

  “I’m a teacher. Piano and violin.”

  “Really.” He sat down, folding his long legs and resting his hands on his knees. “I can play ‘Für Elise’ and ‘Chopsticks.’ ”

  She laughed. “How long did you study?”

  “Four years, and I hated every second.”

  “Your parents made you,” she guessed.

  “No, my sisters played, so I wanted to, too, not taking into account that they had talent. My folks were saints to put up with it for so long. Money down the drain.”

  “At least you wanted to. I have students who’d rather peel their skin off than take music lessons.”

  “That must be a drag.”

  “It’s when I really hate my job.”

  “When do you love it?”

  “Oh, when they master something and go on to the next level, a new book or a new piece. When they’re excited and proud of themselves.”

  “What do you do when you get a kid who’s completely hopeless, no aptitude for music whatsoever?”

  “I’ve never had one. Well, a couple of times I’ve had kids with learning disabilities.”

  “Do you tell them to find another outlet for their creativity?”

  “No, I wouldn’t, that would be—I’d never discourage anyone who really loves music.”

  “You must be a good teacher.”

  “I’m…yes, I think I am.”

  He combed his hair back with his fingers and smiled at her, as if he agreed. He had the kind of good looks you didn’t notice so much at first, but gradually his perfectly shaped nose came into focus, and the way his eyebrows tapered together in the middle in a neat line of golden-brown hairs. He wore a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show the long stretch of muscles and tendons in his forearms and the gracefulness of his wrists. His long, strong hands.

  She was going to think about him after today, Caddie realized. When they said goodbye and she went on her way—assuming he couldn’t help her turn Finney into a therapy dog, a hope she was coming more and more to see as deluded—Christopher Fox would stay in her mind for a while, maybe a long while, as an example of the kind of man she was never going to have. She didn’t resent it—she certainly didn’t resent him. People fell into classes, and you were allowed to pick who you wanted to be with from certain categories but not from others. Men like Christopher Fox were not in Caddie’s selection range.

  “Has Finnegan ever had any obedience training?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  Christopher’s face changed when he turned his attention to Finney, went from friendly and open to serious and searching; his professional face, Caddie assumed. He held the dog’s chin in his hand and looked into his huge, almond-shaped brown eyes, and she wondered what he could see, how deeply he could go. All she ever saw there was the most deceptive innocence.

  “Is there any hope?” she asked humorously.

  “Always.” He gave Finney a pat on the neck and stood up. How graceful he was. Caddie scrambled to her feet, feeling silly for the second or two she was on the floor without him. He was taller than she was; in fact, standing up, her eyes were on a level with his mouth. “Would you be interested,” he asked, “in taking the training to become one of our volunteers?”

  “Oh! Really? With Finney?”

  “Probably not with Finney. For him I’d recommend some enlightened obedience training, but to be certified as a therapy or visitation animal he’d need much more than that. Even if he had the temperament for it, and I’m afraid he doesn’t, you’d be looking at at least six months of training with one of our teams.”

  “Oh. Well, then, I guess that’s that.”

  “Not necessarily. CAT always has more animals than volunteers. If you’re interested, you could enroll in a training program and borrow one of our dogs. Or cats, or guinea pigs. Cockatoos. We even have a chicken.”

  “A chicken.” Her mind raced while Christopher told her about the chicken, Estelle, how gentle she was, what wonderful companions chickens could make. Did she want to do this? Did she have time? She tried to imagine herself in a cancer ward or a rehab center, a hospice, ministering to the ill or the dying with a borrowed golden retriever. Was she the sort of person who could do that? What if she wasn’t and she had to pretend she was?

  “It’s a big decision,” Christopher said, nodding his big, handsome head with understanding, and she liked him better than ever—if she wanted to say no, he had already forgiven her. “Shall we talk about it some more? Do you want to find out what’s involved?”

  “I’d like to do that, yes. Definitely.”

  “Good. Would you be free for dinner?”

  “Dinner?” She was only partly successful in keeping her voice within a low, unamazed range. “Tonight, you mean?”

  “If you’re free.” He took off his glasses, an intimate gesture in the small room, or so it seemed to her. “I’ll tell you about the work we do, and you can decide if it might interest you.”

  “I’d like—yes, I’m free. I think, I’m almost positive. No—I forgot, I’ve got a lesson at seven. Oh, I’m sorry.” Too good to be true. She’d known it all along.

  “How long does it last?”

  “An hour.”

  “Eight o’clock, then. Or would that be too late for you?”

  Was this a date? He had such an open, interested face, and he’d been nice to her since she’d walked in the door. He wasn’t being any nicer now, and his warm, handsome smile didn’t look any more interested. Maybe it wasn’t a date.

  “Eight’s perfect.” She said it brightly and casually, as if being invited to dinner by gorgeous men on short acquaintance happened to her every day. “Where shall we meet?”

  Christopher snapped his fingers, and Finney, who’d been exploring along the baseboard behind his desk, came trotting over, bright-eyed and attentive, ears cocked. Christopher bent down to retrieve his leash and pressed it into Caddie’s hand. “Anywhere you like. Or I’ll pick you up—would that be all right?”

  She was cautious about men, as a rule. But she only gave Christopher Fox’s question a second’s consideration. “I’ll write down my address for you.”

  He took her to a German restaurant in the east end, the only end of Michaelstown that could remotely be called trendy. He must have called ahead; the hostess seated them at one of the window tables, screened from the view of sidewalk pedestrians by red-and-white-checked café curtains. They both ordered beer instead of wine, Caddie because she liked beer, and also because she thought it made her seem more like a fun person, somebody who was easy to please. She’d spent much too much time deciding what to wear—a white T-shirt under her long khaki jumper—and she’d felt a little disappointed, actually a little silly, when Christopher had picked her up wearing the same clothes he’d had on this afternoon.

  “I come here fairly often,” he told her. “It’s pretty good, and it’s only a co
uple of blocks from my apartment.” He lived on the first floor of a three-story converted town house, and it was a good deal because he had the whole fenced-in backyard to himself. He and his staff used it to train the dogs and volunteers for the visitation teams.

  “How many people are on the staff?”

  He smiled down at the beer stein he was rotating in circles on the tablecloth. “Staff might be a slight exaggeration. I don’t even have an assistant. What I have is team leaders, and the number fluctuates as people come and go. The organization’s very spread out, and of course the real work goes on out in the field. I could probably operate from a laptop in my living room, but don’t tell headquarters that.”

  “Where’s headquarters?”

  “Ohio.”

  The waitress came. Caddie ordered Wiener schnitzel. Christopher took his time deciding, asking the server how the broccoli was prepared tonight, if the sausage was homemade. He ended up ordering four appetizers, all with specific instructions for their preparation, including how much tarragon he wanted on his new potatoes. She would’ve worried that he was too finicky, that he was going to be a prissy, difficult man, except for the way he jollied the waitress into enjoying herself while he made his selections, charming her into a real investment in how much he was going to like his dinner.

  She still didn’t know if this was a date, and it made her nervous. Except for music, every subject she knew anything about sounded silly or boring when she framed an introductory sentence in her head. She hadn’t been on a real date in so long, she’d forgotten how to talk, that was the problem. She’d gotten used to thinking of her life as flat and straight, not metaphorical; everything just was what it was, nothing stood for anything else. While Christopher talked, she tried to think of her life as a series of stories, looking for one that might make an interesting topic of conversation. She had a new student, a middle-aged widower who wanted to learn show tunes on the piano because he thought that would make him more popular in the singles club he’d just joined. Was that a good story? Or was it just gossip, trivial people-news that wouldn’t interest Christopher because his conversation was on a higher plane?

  “Most people know on some instinctive level that animals are good for our health, but it’s only in the last twenty-five years or so that we’ve been studying it, proving the phenomenon scientifically. We know that loneliness is at the root of a lot of illnesses, and we know that people over sixty-five who have pets go to the doctor a lot less often than people without pets.”

  Caddie nodded, although she hadn’t known that.

  “It’s good to be able to back up what we do with data, but once you’ve observed a well-run pet visit at a hospital or a nursing home or a psych unit, you don’t need any more proof. It’s right there in front of your eyes.” He leaned forward on his elbows, ignoring his dinner. Candlelight sparkled on his glasses and made his eyes dance. “I’ve seen folks come back almost from the dead because a dog put his head in their lap. Disoriented people, people sick with pain or hopelessness, crazy people, violent, disconnected—you can see their eyes clear. An animal is such a pure thing, Caddie, it’s got no motivation except to be with these people, and they know it. It breaks through. Touch. That’s all they want. Bring a dog into a roomful of old folks, everybody’s in their own little world, it’s fifteen or twenty separate brains on autopilot. Bring that dog in—something happens. People start talking, first to the animal, then to each other. They even sing to it. The dog or the cat, whatever it is, unlocks memories, associations. Everybody has a story—all of a sudden there’s community.”

  “It’s wonderful.”

  “Trust. The animal has no agenda, it just wants to lick your face, hear your voice. Barriers these people have erected against the outside world come crashing down without a fight, and it’s just warmth and two-way gentleness. The innocent animal-human bond. It’s powerful, it’s beyond words. Deeper than words.”

  “Wow,” Caddie breathed. “What wonderful work. You must find it so satisfying.”

  “There are frustrations, too, of course. Nothing happens as fast as you’d like it to. People resist out of ignorance, so you have to start from page one all the time, educating and reeducating—it’s frustrating.”

  “I can imagine.”

  He sat back suddenly and took off his eyeglasses. “Is this boring?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, I get on a roll and forget this isn’t the most important thing in everyone else’s life, too.”

  “It’s not boring at all! You’re so lucky to have work that means the world to you. How did you get into it? How did you start out?”

  He’d grown up in Iowa on a farm, so there had always been lots of animals around the house, cats and dogs, birds, guinea pigs, rabbits, a duck, and, once, a llama. But especially dogs—dogs were his passion. He was the baby, with three older sisters who spoiled him. One was a lawyer now, but the other two were veterinarians, and that’s what he’d wanted to be, too. In college he did a little too much partying, though, and when it was time to go to grad school in vet med, his grades weren’t good enough.

  “I ended up with a degree in business I didn’t know what to do with. I backpacked in Europe for a year, came home, worked a couple of dead-end jobs. I started going out with a woman whose brother trained dogs to be companion animals for handicapped people, and he took me on as an assistant.”

  That ended when the relationship with the sister ended, but by then he’d acquired one-year-old King, who’d flunked out of the brother’s assistance dog school for being too “scattered.”

  “By then I’d heard about CAT, which had a chapter in Columbus, where I happened to be living. I signed up to be a volunteer, took the training with King, and became a visitation team leader. For no pay—I paid the rent by working in the accounting office of a big insurance firm, which I hated. I was praying for the day I could quit. Which I did when CAT hired me to be chapter coordinator for the eastern region—thirteen states and the District of Columbia. So that’s my life story.”

  “But what do you do?”

  “I open chapters, get them up and running and independent enough so they can be administered from headquarters instead of on-site. Then move on to the next place.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “How long does it usually take to get a chapter going?”

  “Depends. I’ve done it in a month, I’ve done it in six months. Lot of variables.”

  “Michaelstown is so small,” Caddie noted, dispirited.

  “But there’s a lot of opportunity here. It’s small, but it’s in the center of a bigger region we haven’t organized yet. We’re hoping to use Michaelstown as a base for establishing a number of satellite chapters.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. Christopher smiled knowingly. She blushed. They finished drinking their coffees in a pleasurably self-conscious silence.

  They were the last to leave the restaurant. “Too bad it’s too late to take a walk,” Christopher said, opening his car door for her. “I could use one—I ate too much.” He patted his hard, flat stomach. “Show-off,” Caddie said, and he threw back his head and laughed. She blushed again, this time with delight.

  They drove through the all-but-deserted streets with the radio on low to a classical music station he’d preprogrammed into his selections. A good sign, she thought. Another good sign. On the west side of town, the pretty shops and renovated town houses gave way within a block or two to less attractive buildings and more haphazard zoning. More bars. The commercial section of her neighborhood was a single intersection of one- and two-story convenience marts, a couple of taverns, a store for uniforms and trophies, a Chinese takeout. It wasn’t very dangerous, but every year it got a little seedier. She saw it through Christopher’s eyes, how low and gritty and squat everything looked. At least her street still had plenty of trees on both sides, big green maples in their full spring glory. There was nothing like leav
es to hide a neighborhood’s imperfections, especially at night.

  Christopher coasted the car to a stop in front of her house and turned off the engine. He angled his body toward her, throwing one arm across the steering wheel, one over the back of the seat. She turned to him, happy to block his view of Nana’s shadowy, lumpen lawn sculptures with her head and upper torso. If he’d noticed them earlier when he’d picked her up, he hadn’t said, but in the dark he might’ve mistaken them for shrubbery. It didn’t really matter, but she wasn’t up to explaining Birth Canal to him on their first date.

  If this was a date.

  “Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Becoming a volunteer.”

  “Um, well, I think it sounds…”

  “Scary.”

  “Yes. Because…”

  “You’re not sure you’d be good at it.”

  “Yes.” It was good to have her reservations articulated for her.

  “Here’s something I tell all the volunteers, Caddie. It’s not about you. As soon as that sinks in, the pressure’s off. There’s a lot to being a good visitor, I won’t minimize it, but at the same time, most of it boils down to common sense. But where the real action is—you’re not there. It’s between the animal and the client. The dog and the little old lady, the cat and the bald kid with cancer. You’re just the person on the other end of the leash.”

  “I see. Yes, that’s helpful, but the thing is…”

  “Time.”

  She laughed. “You have to quit reading my mind!”

  “You’re not sure you can fit in a new responsibility.”

  “Yes, time is definitely—I’m thinking of taking a part-time job at Winslow’s this summer, because I’ll probably be losing some of my students for the holiday—music teaching is a seasonal business, believe it or not.”

  “What’s Winslow’s?”

  “The music store downtown. I worked there last summer, and I’m almost sure I can this summer if I want to.”

  “Okay.” He was smiling, not at all disapproving. She couldn’t have stood it if he’d tried to make her feel guilty about this. If he’d pressed her at all, she’d have agreed to anything, the way she did with charity solicitors on the telephone.