Talk to the Paw

by Melinda Metz

  The moon was bright, so Mac kept to the shadows, the soft pads of his feet and his quick reflexes making his movements all but silent. Not that he had to be so careful. The bonehead was a mouth-breather. He probably couldn’t hear anything over those slobbery pants.

  When Mac reached the fence around the bonehead’s yard, he deliberately stepped on a twig to get the dog’s attention. Didn’t work. The dog had decided to start licking himself. Mac understood. Even he got distracted when he did that.

  He jumped up onto the top of the fence and let out a long, low yowl. The bonehead heard that! He lurched to his feet. And Mac was off. He leapt onto the ground and streaked across the yard. The bonehead galumphed after him. Mac led him around the lawn once, twice, slowing his pace a little to be sure the dog thought he had a chance. On the third loop, Mac ran straight for the big tree he used to get up to the second-floor window.

  He launched himself at the lowest branch at the last possible moment. The dog couldn’t stop fast enough. He rammed into the tree with his big bone head. Score!

  That would have to be enough entertainment for now. He had to get to work. He opened his mouth, tasting the air, searching for a scent that matched the loneliness in Jamie’s.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jamie opened her front door and immediately looked down. A pair of boxers with penguins on them, a pair of gray boxer briefs, and a pair of tighty-whities lay on the doormat. She slammed the door shut again and leaned against it. “What is going on?” she cried to Mac. “Who is doing this to me?”

  The cat gave the short mew Jamie always interpreted as “uh-huh.” Like he wasn’t really paying attention, but was acknowledging that she’d said something.

  “Not helpful, MacGyver.” She could accept that the hand towel had been dropped by the previous tenant. The socks—well, she had no real theory, but socks were always turning up in strange places. Maybe her doormat was a hosiery portal, and socks that went missing from local dryers landed there. But three pairs of men’s underwear—

  Tentatively she opened the door, took a quick peek, then shut it again. Three pairs of different sizes and styles, all showing up on the same morning. “It’s freaky. It’s freaky and wrong. It’s freaky and wrong and unnatural and bizarre and weird.” Mac gave the “uh-huh” mew again.

  “Thanks for nothing,” she muttered. She marched herself to the broom closet and got the box with the hand towel and socks, then she grabbed a pair of tongs and returned to the door. She couldn’t just leave three pairs of men’s underwear lying out on the porch for anybody to see. She’d be the talk of Storybook Court—and not in a good way. She opened the door again, and used the tongs to pick up the boxers, briefs, and tighties and place them in the box. She thought about taping the box closed before she put it back in the closet, but she had no reason to think there wouldn’t be something else to put in it the next day.

  It wasn’t just freaky, wrong, unnatural, bizarre, and weird. It was also a little scary. She felt like she’d been targeted, but she didn’t know for what. Maybe it wasn’t even about her. Maybe it was about whoever had lived here before. Maybe they’d pissed off someone and whoever it was had decided to . . . leave them small, somewhat random items in retaliation.

  Or! This made more sense! Maybe they were things the guy who’d lived here before—if it was a guy—had left at his girlfriend’s house. Maybe they’d broken up and she was returning things she’d found in his place. Maybe that was even why he’d moved! Maybe she was some kind of psycho stalker chick and he wanted to get away from her!

  There were two people who would know the details about the previous tenant. Marie and Helen. They’d known tons of stuff about her before she’d even introduced herself. Jamie would go talk to them. She hated to go over to Marie’s empty-handed. But she didn’t have much in the house. She’d lived here more than a week, but she hadn’t really settled in.

  She checked the kitchen. Several flavors of cat food, of course. Coffee, but Marie made much better coffee than she did. Assorted snack foods. She couldn’t show up with a bowl full of Goldfish crackers, but maybe a mix. Hurriedly, she mixed the Goldfish with a few handfuls of pretzels and some popcorn, then threw in some Goobers and Raisinettes. It was kind of like trail mix.... She really needed to start eating like a regular person. Sometimes it felt like there was no point in cooking, though, if she was the only one who was going to eat. But that was wrong. Her lifestyle shouldn’t be determined by whether or not she was in a relationship. Not in The Year of Me!

  Jamie picked up the bowl. “I’ll be back,” she told Mac, doing her not-really-passable Schwarzenegger. She found Al filling a tiny crack in one of the pavers that led from the sidewalk to his house. Had he been there when she’d used the tongs to collect the underwear? Too late to worry about it now, she told herself.

  “Marie around?” she called.

  “Inside with Helen,” he answered without looking up from his work.

  “Great. I want to talk to them both.” She walked up to the front door, taking a moment to admire the flag flying from the turret of their little castle house, wondering if it was the Defrancisco family crest.

  She raised her hand to knock, but the door opened before her knuckles could touch it. Marie really did know everything that was going on. Jamie handed her the bowl of snack mix. “For you. To thank you for all the coffee. Also, I wanted to ask you something. You and Helen. Al said she was here.”

  “Come on in.” Marie stepped back.

  “Oooh. I love your fireplace,” Jamie said. It was huge—at least compared to the size of the living room, commanding most of one wall and reaching almost to the ceiling. It was easy to picture a bunch of knights gathered around it. Or Al and Marie watching TV on the comfy, overstuffed sofa.

  “We’re in the kitchen.” Marie led the way and gestured to a chair at the wooden table. “Jamie has something to ask us,” she told Helen.

  “I knew you’d change your mind!” Helen exclaimed. “I already told my godson all about you. He wants to meet you. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll set it all up. I know the perfect place for you to go.”

  “I told you, he’s too young for her. And he’s allergic to cats. That’s what they call a deal breaker. Am I right?” Marie asked Jamie.

  “Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Big deal breaker. Absolutely.” She wasn’t going to turn down a ready-made excuse to get out of a fixup with Helen’s godson.

  Marie gave a satisfied smile as she put the snack mix on the table. Helen stretched her hand toward it, but Marie moved it out of reach. “You don’t need that. I’ll get you an apple if you’re hungry. Nessie still wears a size—”

  “I told you not to talk to me about that person. That person can go suck an egg. You, too, Marie.” Helen leaned forward and took a handful of the mix. “He can take Benadryl for the allergies,” she continued before Jamie could ask who Nessie was. “And women live longer, so it’s good that he’s younger. Also, he’s a teacher, so they have that in—”

  “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” Jamie interrupted. “I wanted to see what you could tell me about whoever lived in my place before me.”

  “Desmond,” Marie said. “He was wonderful. He always separated his recycling.”

  Did Marie do some kind of trash can inspection? Jamie wondered. “What else?” she asked. “Did he have a girlfriend? Why did he move?”

  Neither of the women seemed to find her questions strange, probably because they liked to ferret out everything about their neighbors, too. “He had to relocate. He works for that fancy Harvest grocery store. Almost five dollars for four stalks of asparagus in a jar of water.”

  “And kale guacamole. Guacamole means avocados,” Helen jumped in. “I don’t know how the place stays open. But Dezzy moved to help open up a new store in Austin.”

  “Well, good for him,” Jamie said. “Do you know if he was seeing anyone? Did he maybe have a bad breakup before he left?”

  “His boyfriend up and
decided to move with him,” Helen answered. “Kyle was trying to get into screenwriting. But you know how that is. He managed to line up a job working for some film festival there.”

  “Did Desmond and Kyle throw a lot of parties?” She didn’t know why she’d asked. No matter how wild the parties, people wouldn’t still be leaving underwear by the door.

  “They had that one party where everyone wanted Al and me to show them how to swing-dance out in the courtyard,” Marie said.

  “And Dezzy made bananas Foster in his front yard,” Helen added.

  “It sounds lovely.” It did. She wished she could have been there to see Al and Marie do their thing. But nothing she’d heard gave her any explanation for the freaky, wrong, bizarre, strange, and scary happenings at her place. Jamie stood up. “I should get back. I was just curious about who was in the place before me, and I knew you’d know. Thanks!”

  “I’ll be in touch about my godson,” Helen told her.

  “He’s too young. I still want you to meet my great-nephew,” Marie said. “And I know lots of suitable young men, not just him.”

  “I’m good. I want some time on my own right now. Thanks again.”

  As Jamie left the kitchen, she heard Helen say, “If you think your great-nephew is a better match, you’re wrong. He doesn’t—”

  “Really. No setups. I’m serious,” Jamie called back to them.

  “I said my great-nephew is only one possibility,” Jamie heard Marie say before she escaped out the front door. She hurried away from the house.

  “Neither of them listens to me,” she blurted out as she passed Al. He grunted an I-hear-you grunt.

  Al, the Grunter, wasn’t going to talk her problems over with her. And it was three hours earlier back home. Her friends would be getting ready for work or getting their kids ready for school or both. She took a right at the corner, and saw Ruby’s Christmas-ified house. They’d only had that one conversation, but it was a good one.

  She walked straight up to the door and knocked. A grin broke across Ruby’s face when she answered, and Jamie smiled back. “I would have called first, but I didn’t know your number.”

  “No worries. Come on in. I have sprinkle cookies that a professional baker pronounced ‘edible perfection’.” Ruby gestured for Jamie to come inside and brought her back to the kitchen.

  “What’s all this?” The table was covered with fabric, sequins, beads, buttons, lace, and ribbon, mostly in shades of pink and purple. “Oh my gosh. Is that a BeDazzler?” Jamie added, spotting the oversized stapler-looking thing.

  “As seen on TV,” Ruby answered. “And did you actually say ‘oh my gosh’?”

  “I did, and I stand by it,” Jamie said.

  “A woman with convictions. I like it.” Ruby unearthed a cardboard box partially covered with fuchsia corduroy. “What I’m making is a barn for a very special pony. She recently had a traumatic experience.” She moved a roll of lavender netting so Jamie could sit down.

  “The pony’s name wouldn’t happen to be Paula, would it?” Jamie asked.

  “That’s the one. Somehow she ended up on my doorstep yesterday,” Ruby answered as she cleared some table space for a platter of cookies.

  “On your doorstep?” Jamie repeated. “I’ve been finding stuff on my doormat, too. Today it was three pairs of men’s underwear. It’s starting to give me the creeps.”

  “Today? How many other times?” Ruby turned the box-barn to one of its bare sides and began measuring out a piece of corduroy to cover it.

  “This is the fourth. First there was a hand towel, then a sasquatch sock, then a tube sock, and now the underwear,” Jamie explained. “I thought maybe they were left for the last person who lived there—not that that makes much sense, either.”

  “It’s hard to think of anything that does make sense.... It doesn’t sound malicious, exactly. Maybe it’s a stupid prank. We have a few teenagers in the complex.” Ruby shook her head. “I sound like I’m a hundred years old. ‘It must have been those pesky kids.’”

  “Do you think they left you the pony, too?” Jamie asked.

  “Possible.” Ruby cut out a square of the fabric. “I can’t think of a reason the little girl would have been at my door. Unless she wanted a closer look at the Christmas decorations and left the pony behind. She’s too young to be out by herself, though.”

  “Okay, for now I’m going to go with the pesky kid theory. Can we move on to my second problem?”

  “For sure.” Ruby handed her the scissors and corduroy fabric. “Cut me out another piece like this.” She handed Jamie the square she’d made.

  “Okay, but be warned, you’ve reached the limit of my craftiness,” Jamie told her. “So, my other problem is Marie and Helen. They both want to fix me up with someone, and they’ve gotten all competitive about it. Even though I’ve told them, repeatedly, that I’m not interested.”

  “Marie and Helen. Formidable team. But they can’t actually force you to go out with anyone.” Ruby began fashioning a flower out of a scrap of pale pink tulle. “I’m going to put flowers along the side of the barn, like they’re growing there,” she explained, then switched back to Jamie’s problem. “Just because they’re old ladies, that doesn’t mean you have to be nice and do what they say.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just that Marie keeps making me coffee.” Jamie finished cutting out the square and compared it to the one Ruby had given her. It was smaller, and now that she looked at it carefully, not exactly square. She groaned, holding it up.

  “I’ll cut it down for one of the barn doors,” Ruby said. “Have a cookie. Cookies always help.”

  “Especially when you eat them before lunch,” Jamie agreed, taking one from the plate. “It feels subversive and decadent.”

  Ruby laughed. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to meet one of the guys. You just moved here. It would give you a chance to—”

  “Not you, too!” Jamie cried. “Remember how I told you it’s The Year of Me?” Ruby nodded. “Well, if I’m really going to focus on figuring out what I want, I can’t have a guy around. Guys, they derail me. I start spending all this time obsessing about whether or not they like me, even before I know if I even like them myself. I get all worried about what they want, and I don’t even stop to think about if I want something. Now I want to figure out what I want. Just me. I don’t want to think about anybody else.”

  “Got it.” Ruby started fashioning a new flower out of shiny silver ribbon. “How’d your brainstorming session go the other day?”

  Jamie groaned. “I wrote down all the stuff I like, but I didn’t have an Oprah aha moment.” She shook her head. “Like sitting in a coffee shop for an hour should have given me an epiphany.”

  “You can’t have written down all the stuff you like. There have to be a bazillion things you haven’t tried, so you don’t know whether you like them or not. Like surfing! Have you ever gone surfing?”

  “You think I can make a living surfing?”

  “That’s not the point. The point is finding out whether you like surfing or not.” Ruby finished off her flower. She’d created an exquisite little rosebud. “So, have you ever tried it?”

  “Nope,” Jamie said.

  Ruby sprang up from her chair and hurried over to her fridge. It was covered with hundreds of magnets, pictures, drawings, postcards, and business cards. “Where is it? Where is it?” she murmured. “There!” She snatched a card and brought it to Jamie. “You need to have a least one lesson with the Surfer Chick. I won some lessons once in a raffle. It was awesome.”

  Jamie studied the card. Maybe Ruby was right. Maybe she was limiting herself by only thinking about things she already knew she liked. Maybe there was something out there she’d love, love, love, but had never even thought about trying.

  She suspected that surfing wasn’t it. But what the heck? The Year of Me was about self-discovery. She slid Surfer Chick’s card into her pocket.

  * * *

  “Dude, you better n
ot have eaten my briefs,” David told Diogee. Diogee wagged his tail. Never failed. Use any form of the verb “eat” and the tail started up. He did a patrol through the house, Diogee following. He didn’t see any scraps of gray cloth. If the beast had eaten his briefs, he would have had to have ripped them up first. Wouldn’t he?

  David reached under the dog and began palpating his stomach. When Becky, the vet tech, had called to check on Diogee after the possible sock-eating incident, she’d asked if palpating him seemed to cause pain. It hadn’t that time. Or now. Diogee had fallen to the ground and rolled onto his back to give David better access. Seemed like it just felt like tummy scratching to him.

  Diogee had been drinking water, eating, pooping, and clearly wasn’t experiencing stomach tenderness. But if the dog hadn’t swallowed the briefs, where were they? David was sure he’d left them on the bathroom floor after he’d taken a shower the night before. His jeans and T-shirt had still been there this morning, but not the briefs.

  He couldn’t think of any explanation except Diogee grabbing them, even though he’d been almost positive he’d shut the bathroom door. He’d been extra-careful about it since the socks had gone missing. And Diogee wasn’t acting like he’d eaten anything other than his usual food, treats, and rawhide chews.

  It’s not like it’s time to open an X-File, he told himself. The briefs had probably just gotten caught in the leg of the pants or something. And the socks—stuck to a shirt with static cling. He’d find everything eventually. Or not. As long as none of them had made it into Diogee’s gut, and it looked like none had, what did it matter?

  David wandered back into the living room and flopped down on the couch. Clicked on the flat screen. Judge Judy was scolding someone for something. He clicked it off. Afternoon TV sucked. Baker’s hours sucked. He had a ton of stuff DVR-ED, plus Netflix and Hulu, but he didn’t feel like searching through them. He picked Infinite Jest up off the coffee table. He’d been reading it for about a year and a half. He put it back down. All those footnotes—he couldn’t deal with them right now. Maybe some music. But the stereo remote was out of reach.