The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  I imagine explaining all this to Isabel, grabbing her by the shoulders before she can grow into those images on the wall, those photos of her older self, and saying, Who cares? Go live your life! Go muck stalls, go farm potatoes, go smoke pot in the parking lot of a Stop & Shop . . .

  “Hello?” Isabel says, peering at me. “You look totally spaced out.”

  She’s right. I am spaced out, floating, realizing that I don’t know anything about her. I try to imagine if I were Isabel. If I actually were her.

  “Hello?” she says again. “Anybody home?”

  ERIC PUCHNER

  Last Day on Earth

  FROM Granta

  When I was young, seven or eight, one of my father’s German shorthaired pointers had puppies. These were marvelous things, trembly and small as guinea pigs and swimming all over each other so they were hard to count. Their eyes, still blind, were like little cuts. After a few days my father decided we needed to dock their tails. He shaved them with an electric razor, then sterilized some scissors and had me grip each puppy with two hands while he measured their tails and snipped them at the joint. It was horrible to watch. The puppies yelped once or twice and then went quiet in my arms, as still as death. I didn’t want my father to see what a wimp I was, so I forced myself to watch each time, trying not to look at the half tails lined up on the porch, red at one end so they looked like cigarettes.

  When it was time to dock the last puppy’s tail, my father handed me the scissors. It seemed important to him that I do it. Don’t think too much, he told me. When it came time to snip, though, I couldn’t stop thinking and did it too slowly and there was a sense of cutting through something strong, like rope, except it was tougher than rope and gave me a curled-up feeling in my stomach. The puppy began to yelp and thrash around and I made a mess of the thing, snipping several times without finding the joint so that my father had to cut the tail shorter than all the others. He was upset. These were expensive dogs, and you couldn’t sell one that wasn’t perfect. Still, my father loved me back then and didn’t make a big deal of it; he was planning on keeping two of the pups anyway, so he named her Shorty. He could do that in those days—turn his disappointments into a joke.

  During hunting season, my dad went shooting once or twice a month, squeezing Shorty and Ranger into the back seat of his Porsche and driving out to a game farm in Hampstead County. I used to get up at the crack of dawn to see him off. He must have known I liked helping him because he always asked me to carry something out to the car: his first aid kit or his decoys with their keels sticking down like ice skates or once even his Browning 12-gauge shotgun in its long-handled case. But it was his Stanley thermos that seemed magical to me because my father’s breath, after he took a sip from it, would plume like smoke. My mother hated coffee—“motor oil,” she called it—and so I connected it with being a man. Often my dad didn’t return until after dark, his trunk lined with pheasant, which he’d carry into the house by the feet. They looked long and priestly with their perfect white collars, red faces arrowed to the ground. It made me feel strange to look at them, and a little scared.

  After we moved out to California, my dad stopped hunting, which meant there was no reason to keep Shorty and Ranger in shape. There was an old horse corral on the property we’d rented, and my dad set up their pen inside it. Despite the creeping shade of an avocado tree, the dogs spent much of the day in the hot sun, snapping at flies, whimpering, and getting fat. The corral was a good ways from the house, and eventually I stopped really thinking about them. The whimpering made me sad for a while, and then it didn’t. I was fifteen by then. My dad kept saying he was going to find a home for them, but then he moved out himself and left my mom to take care of us—me and the dogs.

  “We’re going to the animal shelter,” my mom said one afternoon. She was sitting at the kitchen table, holding a glass of white wine. I’d never seen her have a glass of wine before six o’clock. I inspected the bottle on the counter—it was half-empty, sweating from being out of the fridge.

  “What?”

  “I told your father that if he didn’t come get the dogs this morning, I was taking them to the shelter. I’ve been asking him for six months. It’s past one and he isn’t here.” My mother took a sip from the glass in her hand.

  “They’ll put them to sleep,” I said.

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “No one’s going to adopt some old hunting dogs. How long do they try before giving up?”

  “Seventy-two hours.” My mom looked at me, her eyes damp and swollen. “Your father won’t deal with them. What am I supposed to do?”

  My mother couldn’t even get rid of a spider without ferrying it outdoors on a piece of paper. Then again, the dogs were unhappy, perhaps sick, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one who got up at six in the morning to run them up and down the driveway. I had no interest in dogs or hunting. The only time I ever got up early in summer was to go surfing, and I groused so much that my friends usually regretted taking me.

  My mother poured herself another glass of wine, which spilled when she lifted it. She’d begun to wear contact lenses again, something she hadn’t done in a long time, and her eyes looked naked and adrift without her glasses. On the kitchen counter was a book called Unlocking the Soul’s Purpose. I wished my sister were here to see her—my mom, drunk and strange-eyed in the kitchen—but she lived in Africa, doing something for the Peace Corps I hadn’t bothered to understand. She was nine years older, too worried about puff adders hiding in her laundry to care much about our parents’ troubles.

  I handed my mom a dishtowel. “Dad’s going to go apeshit,” I said, hoping the swearing might upset her.

  “Ha. Believe me. That doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

  “Maybe he’s tied up at work,” I said.

  “Your father doesn’t have a job, remember?”

  “He’s starting his own business.”

  My mother laughed. “With his girlfriend?”

  “It’s a savings and loan,” I said, ignoring this.

  “Caleb,” my mother said. “He’s two million dollars in debt.”

  I smiled at her. “That’s money he’s invested,” I said patiently. “Venture capital.”

  My mother got up to put her glass in the sink. My dad had told me all this a couple weeks ago, the last time we talked on the phone, but it was just like my mother not to understand. “Your mother’s an idiot,” my father said when I told him she’d described him as “unemployed,” and what shocked me more than the word itself was how sincere he was—how calmly diagnostic, as if he were trying to make sense of his own hatred. As soon as he said it, I had a feeling like when you drink a Coke too fast and burp it into your head. There was something about her, something needy and timorous and duty-bound, and it had driven my dad away. And now he would be furious about Shorty and Ranger—furious at me, too, for failing to stop her.

  When they realized they were going in the car, Shorty and Ranger skittered around the driveway before hopping into the back seat. It made me both happy and sad to see they could still muster some excitement. My mother shut the door quickly, as if she couldn’t bear to look them in the eye, and I remembered that she was the one who’d always groomed and bathed them when my dad wasn’t running them up and down the yard, talking to them in a dopey, dog-brain voice that occasionally made me jealous. “Buster,” she called Ranger sometimes, which is what she also called me, at least when I was little.

  “We should do something for them,” I said, “before we take them to the shelter.” I needed time to think.

  “Good idea,” my mom said, looking relieved. “Where’s the happiest place for a dog?”

  “The beach?”

  She smiled. “Of course. The beach. My God, I don’t think they’ve ever been.”

  I climbed into the front seat while my mother shut up the pen. The dogs watched me eagerly from the back seat. Shorty’s muzzle, I noticed for the first time, had b
egun to go gray. “You’re not going to die,” I told them, though they didn’t seem worried. Already a plan had begun to hatch in my brain. My mother, trying to unhook the orange whistle from the door of the pen, dropped it in the dirt.

  “Do you need me to drive?” I asked her when she got in the car.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You haven’t even finished driver’s ed.”

  She managed to back the Mercedes successfully down the dirt road, even with the FOR SALE sign covering half of the rear window. My mother did not have a job—hadn’t, in fact, graduated from college because she’d become pregnant with my sister—and despite my efforts at denial the new reality of our lives was beginning to sink in. Selling the Mercedes was not going to be enough to support us. The house had a tennis court and a swimming pool overlooking the canyon, and though I didn’t know how much the rent was, I knew it was much more than we could afford. We’d given notice for the end of the month, but only now, watching my drunk mother back out into the street, did it occur to me she had no idea what we were going to do.

  But I wasn’t too worried. Not because I had any sentimental illusions about my parents getting back together. They hated each other, that was clear, and I was happy that no more dinners were going to be ruined because of it, my mother locking herself in her room to cry. But my father wasn’t going to leave me high and dry. He’d told me as much after the separation. He’d take me in, if I wanted, just as soon as he found a bigger place. He was looking in Corona del Mar, trying to find a house on the beach. I could surf every morning if I wanted to. The name itself—Corona del Mar—sounded like a foreign country to me, a place you sailed to in a dream. Very soon he’d zoom up our driveway in his Porsche, bearing pictures of our new house, grinning in the way he used to when the trunk was full of birds.

  At Grunion Beach my mother opened the glove box and fished out her old sunglasses. They were white and mirrored and hopelessly out of style, the kind you saw on the ski slopes with little leather side shields on them.

  “How do I look?” she asked me.

  Poor, I wanted to say. I pretended to drink the coffee I’d made her buy me at 7-Eleven. It tasted terrible, but I didn’t care. I liked the warmth of it in my hand. We let the dogs out of the car, and they ran down the dusty trail before splashing into the water and then galumphing back out when a wave caught them. This was not the beach where I surfed. Homeless people came here, and spear fishermen in scuba gear, and strange, well-dressed men with briefcases who looked like they’d walked through a mirror in London or Hong Kong and ended up at the beach by mistake.

  It had taken some sly work to steer my mother here, and now I told her I had to use the bathroom. Instead I headed for the pay phone and called my father, my heart stamping in my chest. I’d never been there, to my dad’s apartment, but I knew the address from all the letters my mom had to forward—Now I’m his collection agent too—and I pictured the phone ringing just a mile or so up the street, wondering if his girlfriend would answer. I’d tried sometimes to imagine what she looked like: tall-booted and glamorous and at home in the front seat of a Porsche, the opposite of my mother in every way.

  When the machine came on and my father’s voice asked me to leave a message, I was almost relieved. I explained what was going on, that he needed to come find us as soon as he could.

  “Mom wants to murder Shorty and Ranger,” I told his answering machine.

  Down on the beach, my mother was absorbed in her Slurpee, sucking on the straw with her eyes closed. I’d been astonished to see her buy anything for herself at 7-Eleven, let alone a Slurpee, which she used to say would “rot my liver.” Shorty and Ranger sniffed around for dead things, looking happier than I’d seen them in a long time. It was a beautiful afternoon—sunny and cool, with a breeze like a can of perfect ocean smell—and it was hard to imagine anything being killed.

  “I haven’t been to the beach in years,” my mom said. She slipped off her sandals and dug her feet into the sand, and you could see the warmth of it spread across her face. Her sunglasses, when she tipped her head back, looked like a piece of the sky. “Believe it or not, we used to have a great time together. You and me. Ocean City, remember? We used to bury each other in the sand, like mummies. Your sister too. Even your father got a kick out of it.” She shook her head, as if the fact that we didn’t go to the beach together anymore was my fault. “I should have come down here more often.”

  “You still can,” I said. “You can come here whenever you want.”

  She looked at me. “Do you really believe that?”

  “Why not?”

  “That I can skip down to the beach whenever I want, just for the hell of it?” She seemed angry, though it was hard to take her seriously with the Slurpee in her hand. “Nice try, but I’m going to have to get a job.”

  I smiled. “Like what?”

  My mother lifted her ridiculous sunglasses. “You don’t think I have any skills or talents?”

  I shrugged. No, I didn’t really think she did. She had an okay singing voice, nothing to write home about, and sometimes she could solve math problems without a calculator—but I couldn’t really think of anything else, anything special about her.

  “I see,” she said, slipping her sunglasses back on. Her lips, damp from the Slurpee, looked thin. She gazed down the beach, where Shorty and Ranger were sniffing at a giant bullwhip of kelp. “Remember when your father made you dock Shorty’s tail?”

  “Not really,” I lied.

  “I was glad you couldn’t do it,” she said, ignoring me. “It gave me hope for you.”

  I took another sip of coffee. The taste almost made me gag, but I decided right then to force myself to like it. Shorty and Ranger looked up from the kelp they were sniffing, distracted by a guy scanning the beach with a metal detector. He was wearing those stupid headphones that beachcombers wear, moving his machine back and forth like a blind person’s cane, so tan it was hard to make out his face. He waved at us, smiling, and my mom tugged the hem of her dress over her knees. I had never talked to a beachcomber before and lumped them in the same category as men who collected lost balls from the gully near the golf course, folks my dad called “bottom feeders.” I hoped Shorty and Ranger might scare him off, but the man walked up to them boldly and let them sniff his hand.

  “Fine dogs,” he said to me, taking off his headphones.

  He was wearing a madras shirt unbuttoned at the chest, exposing a tussock of gray hairs. I’d heard the term salt-and-pepper mustache before, but this was the first time I’d seen one in real life. In another context—if he had been holding a tennis racket, say, instead of a machine for grubbing up lost change—you might even have called him handsome.

  “German shorthairs?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you raise them yourself?”

  “They’re my father’s,” I said.

  “Used to have a GSP myself. Frisky, her name was. She had hip dysplasia, so the name was perhaps ill-chosen.” The man glanced at my mother, and I had the feeling that he was speaking to her somehow and not me, the way you might try to speak to a ventriloquist by talking to his dummy. He looked down the beach. “Where’s your paterfamilias, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “My what?”

  “Your father.”

  I glanced up at the parking lot. “I don’t know.”

  The man nodded, as if turning this over in his mind. He waved the detector in our direction, and it beeped so loudly that Ranger barked. “Sorry,” he said, frowning. “Are you wearing a ring?”

  My mother shook her head.

  “It’s attracted to you nonetheless.”

  She blushed. The man asked if we had a spot of water on us—“feeling a bit sponged out here today”—and astonishingly my mom lifted her Slurpee and offered him a drink. The man’s mustache, when he handed the cup back to her, was red.

  My mom laughed. She lifted her sunglasses again and perched them on her forehead. How different she looked without
them: tired and sun-stamped, the corners of her eyes mapped with little lines. She was forty-five years old. Something in the man’s face seemed to relax.

  “We don’t want to interrupt your beach hunting,” I said.

  “Not at all. I was just going to take a little breather.” My mom sucked noisily at her straw, and the fact that she wasn’t completely herself—that she was a bit drunk—seemed to dawn on him for the first time. “It’s me, possibly, who’s interrupting something?”

  “Caleb and I were just discussing my talents,” my mother said, narrowing her eyes. “Namely, how I don’t have any.”

  The man regarded me gravely. The idea of her talentlessness seemed to offend his cosmic sense of justice. “Nonsense. Everyone has a God-given talent.”

  “Well, He skipped me. Didn’t He, Caleb? I’m pretty much useless.” My mom smiled at me, but there was a hardness to her eyes that I’d only ever seen directed at my father.

  “I don’t believe you,” the man said. “Not for one second.” He looked at me, then back at my mother, as if trying to figure out what he’d walked into. “You mean to tell me there’s nothing you’ve ever done that made people go: ‘Hello, look at her, I’m impressed’?”

  My mother cocked her head. “In college, I could walk on my hands,” she said finally. “At parties they’d chant JP, JP—that was my nickname—and I’d walk around like that. Once I even walked to class that way, just for kicks.”

  “There you go,” the man said, vindicated.

  I looked at my mother. I knew for a fact that she couldn’t walk on her hands. She couldn’t even keep up with her exercise video, Aerobics for Beginners. I had never heard her lie before, about anything, and it gave me an ugly feeling.

  My mother glanced at the sieve hanging from the man’s belt. “And your talent, I gather, is finding hidden treasure?”

  “I have a certain knack,” the man said, and winked at her in a way I didn’t like.