by Melinda Metz
Did that Wonder Woman impersonator make a living at it? Was it her passion? Maybe. If you truly loved and respected Wonder Woman, it could be your passion to be her all day. It made people happy. Everyone taking pictures with her had been smiling. Jamie hadn’t taken a picture with her, but she’d taken pictures of people taking pictures with Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman had looked like she was enjoying every second of every encounter.
She’d taken more pictures in the last two days than she had in the last two years. She’d sort of fallen out of the habit, even though back in high school she’d actually taken pictures for the school paper, and she’d taken a couple photography classes in college, just for fun. Maybe she was getting back into it because there were so many new things catching her interest.
She added a few items to her list:
Taking pictures.
Seeing happy people.
Making people happy.
And . . . and nothing else was coming to her. She had to like more than—she did a quick count—fifteen things. But fifteen was a start. She read her list slowly, looking for similarities, connections, inspiration.
Apparently, she liked old stuff. Old movies. Old dolls. Old postcards. History. Garage sales. Even things made of other things, because lots of time the other things were old things. She’d known she absolutely had to live in Storybook Court the second she saw it, because it was straight out of another time. Even when the houses were first built, they wouldn’t have looked modern. They looked like they’d been created in a fairy tale and then transported, like Ruby’s little witch’s house. Al and Marie’s was like a miniature castle, complete with towers and turrets, and Helen’s place felt like part cozy animal den and part human house.
So her passion had led her to her new home, even though she hadn’t thought of it that way. Could it lead her to a new career?
Some people made good money selling old stuff on eBay, but that didn’t really appeal to her. She didn’t want to look at fabulous old finds and have to calculate how much they were worth.
She wished she could upcycle clothes and make something like her favorite shirt, but she wasn’t crafty. When she tried, the results were . . . not good. She’d actually superglued two of her fingers to her hair once. And not when she was in her single digits.
Jamie returned to sitting-and-staring mode. She was starting to feel like she had brain freeze again, even though she hadn’t taken another swallow of her drink. “Thinking hard,” she muttered, in her Frankenstein voice. Could you make a living in Hollywood with a somewhat-passable Frankenstein impression? Doubtful. She slapped her notebook closed and shoved it in her bag—another old thing she liked. She’d do more brainstorming when the inside of her head had thawed.
As she stepped back outside into the gorgeous day, she decided she really needed to get Mac a leash. He deserved to explore his new neighborhood, too, and not be stuck inside all the time, poor kitty.
* * *
Diogee greeted David at the door, leash in mouth, tail—make that his whole rear end—wagging. “Okay, Big D, okay.” He took the slobbered-on leash out of his dog’s mouth, and clipped it to his collar. As soon as he did, Diogee shoved his way past David and yanked him down the porch stairs.
David knew that he was supposed to be the alpha dog, not Diogee. And as the alpha dog, he was always supposed to go through the door first. But he’d decided that doing battle with a super-size dog multiple times a day went in the category of “life’s too short.”
First stop, the cedar tree that grew next to the house. Diogee gave it a good dousing of piss, but that didn’t mean he was done. D regarded his urine as a precious commodity, and he’d spend the rest of the walk squirting here, squirting there, announcing “this is mine,” “this is mine,” “and that over there, also mine.”
“Not on the fence,” David warned him as he opened the gate. He’d built the fence himself when he’d gotten the dog, using twisty tree branches that he thought worked with what he always thought of as his Hobbit-hole house. “Not on the fence,” he repeated. He pulled a piece of freeze-dried liver out of his pocket—yes, he bribed his dog routinely—and used it to get Diogee away from the fence before he could mark it.
Diogee galloped down to the wax leaf privet that grew at the side of his neighbor’s bungalow and got down to business. He had a technique where he leaned away from whatever he was aiming at, which allowed him to lift his leg farther up and so launch the spray as high as possible. The mutt was almost the size of a pony, but he seemed to want to leave a mark that said a Clydesdale-size beast had been there.
“Excellent work,” David told the dog as they continued down the cobblestone sidewalk.
“Diogee, hey!” Zachary Acosta called from across the street.
Diogee lurched toward the boy. David pulled back on the leash until he’d done a car check, then let the dog tow him over to Zachary. Diogee immediately put his paws on the kid’s shoulders, and Zachary thumped the dog’s sides, their version of a bro hug.
When Diogee finally dropped his paws back to the ground, David got a real look at Zachary’s face. There was an angry red circle about the size of a quarter between his eyebrows.
David didn’t ask, but he had to force his eyes away. It was so bright and so symmetrical. “What’s the up?” he asked. That’s the way the kid used to say it when he was little, and it had become part of the language of their friendship.
“School, whatever, nothing,” Zach answered.
Sometimes David could hardly believe Zachary was fourteen. How could it have been almost ten years since they started making their trips around the neighborhood? David and Clarissa had only moved in about a week before, and David had made sure to go running at least every few days to work off all the samples he ate when he was developing new recipes. He’d just started down the street when the Acostas’ front door had burst open and Zachary had come barreling out wearing an Oakland A’s T-shirt, track pants, and tiny Puma sneakers. He’d looked like David’s Mini-Me, right down to the color of the Pumas—red and white.
“Wait! Wait! I come!” he yelled.
His mom, Megan, caught up to Zachary before he reached the sidewalk and swooped him up. The boy immediately started trying to free himself. “Sorry, David. He saw you running the other day, and that’s all he’s been talking about. I thought the gear would be enough.”
“Hey, I can use a running buddy,” David told her.
“You sure?” Megan asked.
“Definitely. Let’s hit it, Zachary.” The kid insisted, then and now, on getting the full “Zachary” every time. No “Zach”s. Megan put him down and he hurtled toward David. From that day on, they’d been running together, or the last few years, walking Diogee, at least three or four times a week.
“School, stuff, whatever,” David repeated. “Care to elaborate?” Zachary had just started his first year of high school. David was sure there was more to say.
“Squirrel at four o’clock,” Zachary announced.
David wrapped the leash around his hand a couple times in preparation. A few seconds later, Diogee spotted the squirrel and gave what David thought of as the Shoulder Popper, a sudden jerk and yank. The squirrel scampered up the trellis of the closest cottage, and Diogee gave an explosion of barks, telling the squirrel exactly what he would have done if he’d been free.
When he finished, Zachary said, “I signed up for the track team. Cross-country. I wanted to do football, but my mom had a freak-out.”
Mom might have been right, David thought. Over the summer, Zachary had shot up in height, but he was still all legs and arms and feet. David remembered that stage. He’d hardly been able to walk across a room without banging into something. Not the best time to be on a football field. Not that he’d say that to Zachary. “You’ve been running since you were five. You’re a natural,” he said instead, forbidding himself to take another look at that red circle between the kid’s eyes. Had it really been a perfect circle? Could he have gotten
whammed by a golf ball?
David was pretty sure Zachary’s dad played golf, but it didn’t seem likely he’d take Zachary along. Zachary and his father had an every-other-weekend thing, which ended up being one night every other weekend way too much of the time. From what Zachary said, they usually went to some trendy restaurant his dad’s current girlfriend liked, where there wasn’t usually anything Zachary wanted to eat. To be fair, Zachary didn’t like a wide variety of food. He seemed to live off of peanut butter and Slim Jims and those red Swedish Fish candies.
They paused while Diogee stopped to sniff repeatedly at a ginkgo tree. “Checking his pee-mail,” Zachary called it. After he did his lean and squirt, leaving a message back, they continued on. When they reached the corner—or the closest thing to a corner Storybook Court had, since nothing in the place had a solid right angle—Diogee took a left. The alpha dog always decided which way to go.
They’d only gone a few steps when they heard Addison Brewer yelling. Like Zachary, she hated nicknames. It was the full “Addison” or she’d pretend she didn’t hear you. Her voice got louder as they walked. “You said you were going to come over. And you’re not in the kitchen eating directly out of the fridge. And you haven’t declared yourself King of the Remote. So you’re not here. Oh, wait. You could be stinking up the bathroom. No, not there. So, you’re not here when you said you’d be. Again. And you didn’t look sick in gym. I could see you from Algebra. So, don’t even try that.”
“The girl is a shrew,” Zachary muttered, twisting his head around so only the back of his head would be visible from Addison’s house.
“Do you have any classes with her this year?” David asked.
“English.” Zachary managed to pack the word with disgust.
“Impressive lungs. She didn’t have to take one breath during all that,” David said. Zachary didn’t comment, just kept walking with his head turned toward the street.
There was a brief pause in the girl’s rant. “How much traffic can there be? I’m home, and I take the bus. You said you only had to go home for one minute. Which means you should have been here twenty minutes ago. We’re over. We’re seriously over. Seriously. Do not ever come over here again. I don’t care how close you are. Turn around.”
One of the windows of what everyone called the Rose Bungalow—because of the yellow roses painted on the shutters—opened. A second later a purple cell phone with a rhinestone skull on the case came flying out.
Zachary glanced over, then turned his head away again. “Shrew.”
“Remember when you gave her flowers for her birthday?” David asked. Zachary glowered at him. Sometimes David forgot how sensitive teenage boys could be. Sometimes he remembered, but he still couldn’t resist teasing the kid.
“I was in kindergarten and my mom got to take home flowers from work, because they changed them every couple days.”
“Oh, right,” David said, deciding to give Zachary a break.
They passed the house with the drawbridge and moat filled with sparking aqua water. Sometimes David felt like he was living inside a miniature golf course. Clarissa’s grandmother had given them her place as a wedding present. She’d decided to move to a luxury assisted-living place in Westwood. Storybook Court had felt too cutesy to David at first, but it wasn’t like they could afford to turn down a free house when they were barely in their twenties. And it grew on him. Now it was so tied up with memories of Clarissa that he couldn’t imagine living anyplace else.
Thinking of miniature golf made him think of that circle on Zachary’s face, and this time David shot it a glance before he could stop himself.
Zachary caught him. “I kind of messed up my face.”
“What? I didn’t—” David stopped. There was no point in bullshitting the kid. “What the hell did you do?”
“You know those things you use to wash your face, with the spin-y brush on the end?”
David nodded.
“My mom has one. When I got home from school, I decided I was going to get rid of these zits. If you use it too long in one place—you get this.” Zachary jabbed the bull’s-eye between his eyebrows with one finger.
The was the last explanation David had expected to hear. Personal hygiene wasn’t a big priority for the kid. Megan had asked David to tell him “real men wear deodorant” a couple years ago when Zachary started getting that ripe sock smell, and David would have thought that was about where his grooming stopped. Gotta be a girl in the picture, he thought, but he kept his mouth shut. He’d let Zachary bring that up if and when he wanted to.
“It just happened?” David asked.
“Couple of hours ago,” Zachary answered. “I’m not showing up at school like this. The zits were bad enough.” He poked the red circle again.
“First, keep your fingers off it,” David told him, and Zachary jammed his hands in his pockets. “Maybe try some ice? That might help,” he suggested as they continued walking, sometimes half-jogging, following Diogee.
“Did it. It’s hopeless,” Zachary answered, rubbing the circle.
“No!” David burst out.
“Sorry,” Zachary said, jerking his hand away.
“Not you. Diogee. Diogee, no!” Diogee had started turning in those tight little circles that always preceded him taking a dump. And he was on the Defranciscos’ lawn. “Marie will have my head. Make that my balls.” He started trying to yank Diogee off the grass. Diogee dug in. He’d found the spot he wanted. He started to squat.
David leaned down, wrapped one arm around his dog’s middle, and half-dragged him down to the next house. He didn’t know who’d moved in there, but they’d have to be more tolerant of dog poop than Marie. It wasn’t like he wasn’t planning to clean up. Diogee let out a howl that probably reminded the whole neighborhood that he had a good amount of hound dog somewhere in the mix.
“Oh, come on,” David said. “As if it matters that much which patch of grass you use.” Diogee bayed again, and this time there was an answer, a high, long yowl from a large tan-and-brown-striped cat sitting in the house’s screened-in porch. Its golden eyes were locked on Diogee, sending out lasers of hatred. Diogee snapped his jaws in response.
“That’s enough, tough guy.” David pulled out a liver treat. Diogee’s attention immediately snapped over to him. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten to use one when Diogee had been about to bring down the wrath of Marie. He hurled the treat as far as he could, and Diogee ran for it, David and Zachary on his tail.
Diogee snarfed up the treat. He was an addict, and David was his supplier. That meant that, even though Diogee went out the door first, even though he chose which direction they walked, David would always be the alpha dog. Unless Diogee figured out how to obtain cash and get himself to Pet World.
“So, what do you think? Two days?” Zachary asked. He pointed to the red circle, but didn’t touch it. “I don’t want to miss too much practice. The track coach seemed pretty strict.”
David could help with most of the problems that came up for a fourteen-year-old boy. He’d been one himself. But the skin-care malfunction was out of his league. “What I think is that we need an expert.” He took out another liver treat. “Turn it around, Big D.”
“Where are we going?” Zachary asked as they changed directions.
“Ruby’s. She used to do makeup before she became a set dresser. She’ll fix you up,” David answered.
Zachary stopped dead. He looked as unwilling to move as Diogee had back on the Defranciscos’ lawn. “I’m not wearing makeup to school. And anyway, I don’t even really know her.”
“Think of it as a special effect. And you know her well enough. Besides, I’m friends with her,” David told him. Zachary didn’t move. “Just let her try. If you don’t like it, I’ll teach you the best way to fake the flu. All you need is a can of extra-chunky soup.”
Zachary didn’t say yes, but he started walking toward Ruby’s. “Chunky soup doesn’t really look like puke.”
“It
sounds like it, though. You make sure your mom is close enough to the bathroom to hear, then start pouring it in the toilet,” David explained.
Zachary snickered. “Sweet.”
They followed the curve in the sidewalk, and Ruby’s house came into sight. David felt like he’d been gut-punched. How’d he forgotten it was September fifteenth? It was one of Clarissa’s favorite days, had been one of her favorite days. She’d never missed helping Ruby decorate the witch’s cottage for Christmas.
Seeing something that made her so happy should have been a good thing. But it made him feel like a hole was opening right beneath his rib cage. For the second time in a week, he’d been surprised by how sharp his grief could still feel.
“You okay?” Zachary asked.
“Yeah,” David told him. “Yeah,” he said again, so he’d believe it himself.
He was okay. But he’d been right the other night with Adam. He wasn’t ready to get something started with another woman. No matter what his friend thought, it was still too soon.
* * *
MacGyver left Jamie sleeping and made his way to the kitchen. He pawed open the cabinet under the sink and gave a short growl of annoyance. He reminded himself he had to be patient with his person. She was a human, and that meant that her nose was pretty much just a useless blob on her face. He hadn’t been expecting this, though. She’d ignored his gift for almost two days. Then, finally, she’d picked up the hand towel. Yeah, she’d picked it up—then sprayed it with something that blocked out almost all the lonely smell he’d been trying to get her to notice, and rubbed it all over the table. He couldn’t stop himself from letting out another little growl as he flicked the cabinet door shut.
Patience, he told himself again. He couldn’t expect Jamie to understand with only one try. It had taken her a few times to find his favorite spot to be scratched. Right behind the whiskers. Pure bliss. It had also taken her a few times to realize she should never give his belly more than three rubs at a time. He’d had to give her a light bite to get that through her head. He hadn’t liked to do it, but she’d had to be trained.
