by Ava Finch
“I totally jumped in without thinking, just like Mom says I always do. I was just so flattered to be asked to fill in, you know? But I was so . . . out of my depth. I sure won’t miss producers looking at me like a cut of meat that just needs a bit trimmed off.”
“Now you’re talking. Are you eating enough? You’re not buying those servings-for-one frozen things.”
“No, Gran, I’m cooking every meal from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”
“Don’t be smart, dear.”
“Besides, it’s not like I had much say in the show. How many times did Cassi and I discover the perfect guest, then get shot down in favor of some glamoramus or somebody selling some gimmick?”
“So everything’s fine.”
“Mostly.” After a silence RayAnne asks, “Gran, is Dad on a bender somewhere?”
Dot pauses. “Maybe he’s just holing up, like you’re doing.”
“I’m not holing up. You make me sound like some prairie dog.”
Dot sighs. “Speaking of, did you get that dog yet?”
“I’m working on it.”
Once over the bridge from Taylors Falls, she watches for the county road sign and follows a paved road until it turns to gravel. The hobby farm is easy enough to find with its yellow barn. She needn’t have worried about the early hour—the couple is outside bagging leaves and gathering sheets off the clothesline, as if they’ve been up for hours. The husband wipes his hand across the front of his jacket before shaking RayAnne’s.
“Call me Earl.”
A woman comes up from behind. “I’m Mary.” They have the obligatory weather chat while walking to the barn.
The yellow building has wide rolling doors on either end, both open. Inside, Rory is circling a small gathering in the middle of the cement floor, a number of plastic bags buoyed and shifting in a vortex of breeze. When one cartwheels out of the swirl the dog pounces, returning it to the fray and dropping it among its mates.
Earl shrugs. “Silly fella thinks they’re sheep.”
Mary smiles and, in a voice eerily like Dot’s, adds, “Neurotic little thing.”
Upon hearing his mistress, Rory reluctantly abandons his chore and scampers over. When he sees RayAnne, he detours to trot directly to her. He sits, meets her eye, and tilts his adorable head as if to ask, “Who have we here?” When she reaches to pet him, Rory presses his skull upward into the perfect-fitting cap of her hand, his silky fur tickling the spaces between her fingers. With a stupid grin, RayAnne drops to one knee to look Rory in his mismatched eyes.
“Well,” she says. “Hello there, dog.”
He assesses her, then nuzzles in to smell her neck. At first she thinks she’s imagining it, but then she feels it again—the ever-nagging band of tension between her neck and shoulders beginning to release. Rory rests his chin on her shoulder, sighing hugely, as if he’s just located some beloved old rag.
“Huh,” grunts Earl. “I guess that’s that.”
After coffee and Mary’s cake, the folding kennel and leash are stowed in the hatchback, and the plastic-bag sheep are rounded up. Earl hands over the bin of much-chewed Lincoln Logs Rory is particularly attached to. There is only a moment of hesitation when it comes time to leave. Rory leans hard against Mary’s leg and looks up at her with as near to a shrug as a dog might muster, as if to say that he, like RayAnne, really has no choice. He hops up into the passenger seat. Ready for what’s next.
Who knew so much time and space could be taken up by a forty-pound animal? RayAnne happily puts up with behavior she would never tolerate in a man. She’s learned to plow around the house rather than lift her feet to avoid being launched ceiling-ward by one of the Lincoln Logs scattered everywhere, including the stairs. She hadn’t intended to allow Rory upstairs, but already there’s a second dog bed in her room, along with more Lincoln Logs. If she’s not vigilant, a nighttime trip to the bathroom could easily turn into a skit.
The kitchen table has been shoved aside to make room for the folding kennel and bowl caddy. She’s offered Rory chew toys and a Kong stuffed with treats, but he doesn’t acknowledge these other than to drop them on the sheepskin he’s designated as his island of misfit toys.
The sheer volume of dog hair makes her wonder if the stuff could be spun into yarn and knitted into sweaters, and not three minutes into a Google search, she discovers the cult of dog-hair sweater knitters and weavers and an article on a designer who has woven a Samoyed cape for Kate Middleton. Another knits her golden retriever sweaters made from its own fur. In the living room, a stack of dog-training books spills from the coffee table. Having now reconsidered bookshelves, RayAnne has topped the pile with an Ikea catalog.
“Oh, to be a dog,” she muses to Gran on the phone.
Gran sighs on the other end. “I imagine you’re regretting all those times you were mean to Trinket now.”
“Um, no.”
She tells Dot about their lessons at Citizen Dog. Tuesday and Thursday evenings, she and Rory attend Obedience One with twelve other dogs in varying degrees of good dog, trainable dog, and bad dog.
“Dagmar says there’s only two kinds of dog owners, dumb and dumber.”
“Oh, that’s a good name for a trainer. Sounds no-nonsense.”
“She looks exactly like her mastiff, Gran. Five times a session she yells, ‘Obedience is work!’ We actually get stars next to our names for good work.”
One of the dumber owners and a complete newbie, RayAnne is willing to admit her ignorance in full—knowing nothing, she follows every instruction, figuring she and Rory are both in training. And since her social life is nil, there’s all the time in the world to master sit, heel, stay, and down.
“I think I can do this, Gran.”
“Of course you can, dear; did you think you couldn’t?”
“Well . . . I didn’t know dogs had so much personality. When others come around he pulls me away before I can pet them, like a jealous boyfriend. And he hates Danny Boy. When he’s out of his cage and on my shoulder, Rory just faces the wall and sulks.”
“What goes around comes around.” Dot’s laughter sounds a little thin. “You used to mope just like that.”
Rory’s eyes flash with happiness at monosyllabic offerings of “walk?” or “car?” or “treat?” When she lifts his leash from the hook he beelines to her left knee and sits at the ready. I’ll go anywhere! Do anything! No questions asked! No need to explain your motivations to me! The fawning drivel she leaks back at him would make anyone gag: “Who’s a handsome devil? Who is the handsomest devil-dog in the world? Who has the softest, softest fur? Fur like butter. Yup, you lick that thing. Lovelovelovelovelove you!”
In the backyard, his urinal of choice is a horseradish plant she’s been unable to kill no matter how deeply she hacks at its roots. Now, as Team Radish, its death is their mutual goal. Each time Rory lifts his leg at it she sings in her best Elmer Fudd, “We’re hunting horse-waadish, we’re hunting horse-waaadish.”
His herding instinct seems reserved for inanimate objects. His primary task is keeping a bead on RayAnne, constantly updating her precise coordinates. If she’s in the bathroom, he’s on the other side of the door, nosing the crack as if sniffing out her every move. When she sits, his paws are placed one inch from each of her feet, adjusting and shifting as she does. If she’s at her desk, he’s under it. Of course this is what they meant by “Velcro dog.” When she’s out of his line of sight, she can sense his unease, his need for her to be back in it. She wonders if this is what having a stalker is like.
He is not the watchdog Dot would’ve hoped for. When the doorbell rings he gives a girly whimper and hightails it for the space between RayAnne’s calves. If there is no space, he carves one with his damp snout. Teresa was right; most noises are a challenge, anything loud or abrupt: the garbage truck, the mail slot. One ding of the microwave and he is sitting o
n RayAnne’s toes so she might protect him from whatever is coming to kill and eat them both. She is supposed to ignore this behavior, but it’s hard not to laugh. Rory loves peanut butter and makes snarling faces when trying to lick it off the roof of his mouth. She takes a picture of him in the act of baring his teeth and sends it to Dot, texting, Nobody’s gonna mess with this bad boy!
Somewhere along the line, Rory’s confidence was damaged. RayAnne doesn’t know his history and prefers not to think of what cruelty or neglect he might have endured before the nice hobby farmers fostered him. He hates being leashed to a railing or post, even for the minute it takes to pop into the library to toss books down the return chute, or to duck into Walgreens for shampoo or the coffee shop for a dark roast to go. Whenever she pauses near a doorway or shop window, he acts like he will be left to starve on the pavement. Dagmar reckons some previous owner tied or chained him, probably for a good portion of the day.
RayAnne needs something to go right, and training Rory might be one thing she can do properly. If she does everything Dagmar says, they’ll test into level-two Obedience, and she will have accomplished that. They will have. Reading the dog books, she learns many things. He raises his eyebrows when she excitedly informs him of such tidbits as “Did you know dogs have no sense of their own size?” This explains his trying to burrow into an empty flowerpot when the aluminum stepladder crashed to the patio.
Perusing a chapter on canine eyesight, she puts down the book and looks deeply into Rory’s eyes, saying, “Get this. Dogs’ eyes have different cones than human eyes.” His butterscotch eye winks, she swears. “You see about as well as a color-blind man.” She makes a mental note to buy a blue leash. Dogs, apparently, can see blue.
Outings with Rory are measured in the miles racked up on her Stepz app. They walk both sides of the Mississippi, investigating neighborhoods in the Warehouse District, Saint Anthony Main, lower Northeast, Boom Island. Dagmar suggested taking him north to the metal scrapyards on the river or the rail yards where there is constant clanging and crashing. He needs to get used to noise.
Such places have always intrigued RayAnne from a distance, but having a dog in need of tough love now makes them a destination. Her pockets are smelly with high-value treats—pork jerky and little plastic bags of steamed chicken bits. RayAnne leads him toward the environs of rust and crashing chaos, the loading and unloading of barges, the ca-thunk of trains switching tracks. They find a patch of grass near the cranes that hoist and bash shipping containers into stacks, and she lets Rory overtake her lap, feeding him chicken bits each time he stops trembling or whining.
Autumn has peaked. It’s her favorite season, though entirely too short. Each day grows a degree or so cooler, the sky a shade bluer on clear days, a shade grayer on cloudy ones. Evenings shorten by a minute or three each night, but weirdly, RayAnne finds herself staying up later—eating dinner after ten and seldom climbing the stairs before two a.m. She once read that a healthy body, if left to its own devices, will sleep just the right amount, during the hours that best suit it. The right amount for her is apparently ten or eleven hours. The darkness suits her waking hours, and her new routine is a complete reversal of summer on Location—no more dragging herself out each dawn to catch the first fish.
When not walking Rory, many of her hours are spent reading. On crisp afternoons she’s sunk low in a chair on the coffee-shop patio, bundled in sweaters and the gloves she’s cut the fingertips from, Rory wedged under the wrought iron on sun-warmed patio stones. There are books on the front seat of her car in case they get caught waiting somewhere. Her sling bag is abandoned for a backpack that will accommodate hardcovers and Rory’s accessories. Throwing caution to the wind, she’s begun buying books. Her growing library is a variety of the sort found at rummage sales: The Island of the Colorblind, Travels with Charley, My Life in France, The Thin Man, Valley of the Dolls, The Shack. For five dollars at a thrift store, she’d scored a shopping bag of 1950s detective and romance novels. Not a discriminating reader, she picks up whatever’s next on the pile, and if it doesn’t grab her in the first pages, it is abandoned. A story should engage with twists or interesting characters, occupy her mind’s lanes of thoughts to keep them clear of her own. She’s discovered a recent crime series by a Scottish writer and downloaded the audio versions to her iPhone so she can listen while jogging with Rory. There’s not much she won’t read, save books with covers that feature partial women—female limbs, a torso, bodiless hands holding some thing or each other, legs from the knees down or a face from the nose up, women from behind gazing into the distance. Why always from behind? She wonders writers don’t revolt when publishers can’t endow their characters with more than a jawline or a suggestive shoulder.
There’s been a message from Hal. “It occurs to me you don’t have my number, so here it is. Things to talk about, right? So, whenever . . . wait, scratch that, not whenever. Call soon. Please.”
She stares at the phone, unable to imagine what “things” might be.
TWELVE
The weekend blows in with an early northeaster, hurling leaves across the window planters to plaster themselves on the screens of the porch where RayAnne sits reading, wearing something that is neither a sleeping bag nor a onesie, as the Koucharoo infomercial insists, but both! It has a hood, and when laid flat it looks like a sleeping bag for a human-sized starfish. It has pouches designed to hold chip bags and television remotes. Ky must have trolled late-night cable to come up with this hit on his parade of most hideous Christmas gifts—a contest he’s won every year since childhood by virtue of being its sole competitor. Perhaps if he knew RayAnne actually wears her Koucharoo, it might put a stop to the beer-can hats, antigravity shoes, the rubber Big Mouth Billy Bass on a plaque singing “Take Me to the River,” and the cape embroidered with scenes from “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with blinking LED lights—the sort of crap that clutters a closet until pitched into the Goodwill box.
After hearing the mail slot clang, RayAnne puffles down the hall to find a few pieces of mail for Big Rick on the tile amid the junk mail. The envelopes are forwarded from Arizona by Number Six. RayAnne wedges them behind the lamp on the hall table. If he does show up, she’ll shove it back through the slot, unable to imagine opening the door to her father anytime soon—especially since hearing via Ky, who’d heard from Gran, to whom Bernadette had confided that when she and her mavens were leaving Location, Big Rick stood in front of the van, blocking the road, and mooned them all. This was witnessed by half the crew, a number of sponsors, and Hal.
She hasn’t erased Hal’s messages but will. That morning he had left another: “It’s me. Again. I’m, ah, just wondering if you’re still—what does your e-mail responder say? Gone fishin’? But season’s over, so . . .”
Replaying it, she stands outside watching Rory rove his small domain, peeing along its perimeters. Finished with that, he herds oak leaves swirling on the patio, pawing at those falling in midair. Should she call Hal back or not? She lets Rory decide, holding out the phone for him to sniff. When he only drops to the flagstones and covers his snout with both paws, she retreats to the porch to resume thumbing her paperback. Maybe later, after their walk, she and Rory will drive down to the storage facility at the marina where Penelope is parked, just to check on her.
After three pages, the book she’s trying to read falls limply to her lap.
Such are the days, she thinks.
Shadowed by shame for her laziness, Sunday morning RayAnne vows to do something constructive. After traipsing around IKEA for two hours, she has not only justified her meatball lunch, but now has a project.
A burly, helpful IKEA guy had loaded the cartons into her hatchback. Once home and eager to get started, she realizes there is no burly, helpful guy on this end, where the boxes are too heavy to wrangle from the car herself. No small problem. She momentarily considers calling Ky then decides against it, knowing Ingrid’s weekend hours
at home will be dwindling. She tries lifting again, then wonders about Rani and Patak, the Pakistani brothers next door. But having shied away from all her neighbors this long, it would seem entirely too rude to ask for help now. She stands looking dumbly down the street, deserted in the middle of the afternoon—people are out doing Sunday things, off to museums, to the mall, dinner at the in-laws’, choosing paint at Home Depot, at home watching a Vikings game, whatever.
The unmovable boxes pose a pickle, but not huge—one Gran would call a gherkin.
After poking around the garage, RayAnne returns to the car with a utility knife, climbs in to straddle the console, and slices open the short ends of the boxes. She repeats the attack from the hatchback end and wrangles individual shelves out a few at a time, cursing like a longshoreman. The more manageable loads are then dragged inside. An hour later, the curb looks like a cardboard truck has tipped over. Fighting the wind, she retrieves the pieces along with the dozen flying instruction sheets with the mute little show-don’t-tell IKEA man. Once all is in the living room and brown paper is peeled from the shelves, she hears Gran’s ringtone and scrabbles around to find the phone.
“Hey, Gran. Guess what I’m doing?”
“Knitting?”
“Building bookcases! Well, not building, but IKEA, so, same-same. What are you up to?”
“No good, as usual. Say, I’m looking at my calendar and wondering about that road trip; did you settle on a date?”
“I’ll get to your place the day before Thanksgiving. And stay for three weeks?”
“You think that’s a good idea so late in the season? You don’t want to be driving through snow. You could come earlier.”
RayAnne laughs, “I can drive through snow, Gran. Why, you eloping with Mr. D or something?”
“Ha. No reason.” Dot chuckles. “Just . . . the driving. You know me, worrywart. Get your brother to help you with those shelves.”
