by Ivy Pembroke
“Dad won’t want a dog, either, you know,” Sai said. “He always blames it on Mum but he doesn’t like dogs, either.”
“We can hide the dog from Dad, if we have Mum’s help,” said Pari, and then tugged open the back door.
Mum looked up from her baskets. “Oh, good, just in time! Tell Dad I’ve left dinner; you just have to heat it up. And I must run to Ananya’s and drop off these baskets and then I’ll be back. How are you both? Did you have a good day? Was the library good?”
“Mum, I want to talk to you,” said Pari, trying to get her rushing mother to stay still for a second.
“When I get back, okay?” Mum put a kiss on the top of Pari’s head. “When I get back, we will do all of the talking.”
“Sai wants to be a vet,” Pari blurted desperately.
Mum looked at Sai, that soft smiling look. Pari knew what came next.
“You’re so handsome,” she said to Sai fondly. “You would make a wonderful veterinarian.”
“Right,” Pari agreed. “So don’t you think that—”
“Bye!” called Mum, already out the door.
Pari sighed.
“Better luck next time,” said Sai.
“We might just have to hide Jack in here ourselves.”
“How are we going to hide Jack ourselves?”
“The same way we hide that you’re dating Emilia.”
“That’s different. Emilia doesn’t live in our house.”
“Well. I’m going to figure something out.” Pari went in search of biscuits to serve as brain food.
* * *
“She really is stealing the dog,” Teddy reported at dinner that night. This was his adventure of the day.
Sam suppressed his sigh. He didn’t understand how he’d ended up on a street with so much dog drama. In his head, Teddy was supposed to have already made friends with other children and be running around playing complicated games of tag. Sam was mostly unpacked by now, the house was mostly in order, and he was supposed to start his job next week. He had hoped Teddy would be more settled by this time. Granted, he was happy Teddy was apparently so engaged in the life of the street, but he wished it had been a less combative relationship.
Teddy continued stuffing pasta into his mouth. At least there was nothing wrong with his appetite. “I heard them plotting about it. The girl is going to take the dog and hide him in her house.”
“Hide him?”
“Her mum and dad won’t let her have a dog.”
“Then I don’t think the girl is going to be successful in stealing the dog,” said Sam.
Teddy looked as if he couldn’t believe how stupid Sam was to not realize how much children could hide from parents. A look Sam would have preferred not to be subjected to until at least Teddy’s teen years.
Teddy said, “It isn’t fair. The dog belongs to all of us.”
“The dog belongs to the old man next door. The dog definitely does not belong to us,” said Sam.
“Great. He probably senses that you don’t want him and he’ll start coming around less.”
“He just spent all day in the back garden with you,” Sam pointed out.
“Right. Listening to the people next door plot about kidnapping him. Dognapping him. Whatever.”
“Your mother and I let you watch 101 Dalmatians too much when you were younger,” said Sam.
* * *
Teddy had been considering the situation from all angles. While Dad was locked up in his office working, Teddy had plenty of time to consider the best course of action. If he wanted to keep the girl from stealing the dog from him, he had to let the old man know what they were planning. After all, it was the old man’s dog.
So Teddy knocked on Dad’s office door.
“Come in,” Dad called. He was sitting at his desk, which was fully unpacked and thus a total mess. Dad always made a mess when he worked.
“I am going to go see the neighbor,” Teddy announced, deciding it was best not to say anything more than that.
Dad, who had been frowning at his computer, looked up and smiled widely. “Really? That is excellent, Teddy. I’m so glad. Just be home for dinner, yeah?”
“Yes,” Teddy agreed.
Then he walked outside and next door to the old man’s house and rang the doorbell.
* * *
Bill was whittling. In his younger days, he used to whittle almost constantly. He had wooed his Agatha with gorgeous, intricate figurines of ancient queens, of elegant birds, of impossibly delicate trees. He still whittled when he could, but his hands gave him trouble these days and he couldn’t seem to do anymore the things he had done without thinking so many years ago.
“Things just keep going away and not coming back,” Bill remarked ruefully, stretching his cramped hand, and then realized Jack wasn’t there to hear the comment. Wandering the street, was Jack. Keeping an eye on the neighbors.
Then the doorbell rang.
For a moment Bill was startled. And then he crystallized into grim determination. A visitor. Surely someone selling something or asking for money in some other way. This visitor must be fought off. Otherwise, Bill thought, an entire legion of people would start pointlessly descending on his doorstep.
Bill made his way over to the door and peered through the glass at a young boy. Even worse, they were now sending children in to do their dirty work.
Bill opened the door and said shortly, “Well?” as an opening salvo.
The boy, after a moment, squared his shoulders and tipped his chin up, and Bill respected that. He was, Bill had to admit, an intelligent-looking kid, with bright blue-green eyes and a head of wavy sand-colored hair. He needed a haircut, but who didn’t these days?
“I’m Teddy,” said the boy.
And then said nothing else.
“And?” barked out Bill.
“I live next door,” said Teddy the boy. “I play with your dog.”
“My dog?” said Bill. “You mean Jack? He’s not mine. He belongs to the street.”
The boy looked confused. “To the street?”
What was difficult to understand about this? “Yeah,” affirmed Bill brusquely, because apparently this kid was the sort that needed to be told everything twice.
“You mean he belongs to everyone?”
“He just roams around the street,” said Bill.
The boy chewed on his bottom lip, which was a terrible habit he really ought to break. Then he said, “That little girl is planning to steal him from everyone else.”
“Steal who?”
“Jack. And I don’t want anyone to steal him. I want him to keep belonging to the street. I want him to keep belonging to everyone. Don’t you?” The kid seemed very determined now, his stubborn posture back. And then his eyes sharpened on the little figure Bill realized he was still holding in his hand. “Is that supposed to be Jack?” he asked, peering at it.
Bill didn’t answer. His instinct was to close the door immediately and end this conversation.
The kid said, “That’s cool! Do you make other things?”
Bill wanted to say that he didn’t. Bill wanted to say whatever would make this kid turn around and never come back. But he thought of all the wooden figures arranged through his house, all of which no one but he had seen in so many years. He thought of the one of Jack he was clutching in his hand. Of Jack himself, who stopped by every night.
And he noticed one of the gay neighbors, in his front garden, spying on the entire conversation.
Bill frowned and said gruffly to the kid, “Get inside.” Nobody minded their own business these days.
* * *
Sam made scrambled eggs for dinner.
Well. It was supposed to be an omelette, but that had been too ambitious a plan. So it was scrambled eggs on toast with some cheese scattered on top.
Not that Teddy seemed to mind. He came inside and dropped down at the table and immediately began eating.
Sam said drily, “Well, hello to you, too. Did you have fun playing wi
th the girl?”
“What girl?” asked Teddy around a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
Sam winced and said, “Let’s remember table manners, please. Haven’t you been off playing with the neighbor girl? You said you were going to meet the neighbor.”
“Oh,” said Teddy, thankfully swallowing his mouthful. “I meant the old man. His name is Mr. Hammersley and he used to make things out of wood. He has this whole shelf full of wooden dragons. It’s pretty cool.”
Sam, surprised, blinked at his son. “You’ve been with the old man all this time?”
Teddy nodded and took a large gulp of his milk.
Sam said, “The old man was the neighbor you intended to go and meet?”
“I wanted to talk to him about how the girl is trying to steal the dog. Whose name is Jack, by the way. Mr. Hammersley has lots of figures of him, too. Not as many as the dragon, though.”
“Okay,” Sam said slowly, still processing all of this. Although, now that Teddy was explaining it, it seemed like he should have realized immediately this was what Teddy meant when he’d said he was going to meet the neighbor. “So you told him that you think the girl is trying to steal the dog?”
“Jack. And I don’t think it. She definitely is.”
“Right,” Sam agreed, because that wasn’t a point worth fighting about at the moment. “What did Mr. Hammersley say when you explained the dognapping plot?”
Teddy, beaming with triumph, announced, “He said that Jack belongs to everyone!”
“What does that mean?” asked Sam. “Jack is, what, like air and the sun?”
“Mr. Hammersley’s not Jack’s owner. Jack just roams the street.”
“So Jack is just a stray dog?”
“That sounds mean,” Teddy frowned.
“Sorry,” said Sam drily. “He’s just a carefree wanderer, I suppose. Doesn’t want to be pinned down.”
Teddy scooped up another mouthful of scrambled egg and said, “Because he belongs to everyone, that means that the other kids won’t be able to steal him. The whole street will turn out to prevent it.”
The whole street? thought Sam. Now Teddy had managed to convert the stray dog situation into a glorious cause. Sam shook his head a little and said, “I suppose this whole thing is your adventure for the day.”
“Of course,” said Teddy, chewing on his toast enthusiastically. “What was your adventure?”
“I got the remote access software to work properly on the computer,” said Sam.
“You don’t have very good adventures, Dad,” said Teddy, sounding sorry for him.
Sam chuckled. “I know.”
* * *
“It’s been utter madness,” Ellen said when Sam called her that night, after Teddy had gone to bed. “I do not advise having teenage children, Sam. Keep them tiny and wee like Teddy.”
“Is Teddy still wee?” asked Sam. “He seems impossibly old to me.”
“I remember when I used to think that, too. Then they get even older.”
“Do they get wiser, too? Teddy already thinks he is much wiser than me and laments my pathetic stupidity.”
“Ah, but he has you for a dad, so he’s not wrong about that,” said Ellen.
“Aren’t big sisters supposed to be supportive?”
“I must have skipped that day at Big Sister School,” said Ellen. “Now. What can I do for you? You sound tired.”
Sam was tired. He was exhausted. It was partly because he was trying to transition into a job working remotely with largely American clients, and the time difference was brutal. And it was partly nothing to do with that at all. “Just some long days. Unpacking is . . .” Sam decided there was no need to choose an adjective to finish that sentence. No adjective was suitable to describe unpacking.
“Sophie and Evie and I are coming by to help you this weekend and I will not hear you argue otherwise. It’s not being a failure to enlist our help for this project.”
Sam didn’t want to bother Ellen too much, and at the same time he thought the help sounded good. And said that. “Good. Because I need to get the house set up so I can have a party.”
“A party!” exclaimed Ellen gleefully. “I knew you would want to throw wild parties fairly quickly.”
“Not a wild party,” Sam said. “A very boring, staid, basically middle-aged party.”
“Sam, haven’t you heard? ‘Middle-aged’ is the new early twenties.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“So tell me who’s on the guest list for your party. You need at least a couple of D-list celebs; they perk everything up.”
“Just the street,” Sam said.
“The street?” echoed Ellen. “As in your neighbors?”
“Exactly.”
“The old man next door? You’re going to throw a wild party and invite the old man next door?”
“No, I’m just going to throw a normal party and invite the old man next door. And all the other people next door. There are a couple of families and I’d like Teddy to meet the girl near his age and apparently the only way to make that happen is to literally sit her down right in front of Teddy. And even then I’m not entirely sure. They might just stare at each other dumbly.”
“Making friends is hard,” said Ellen.
“I know. But that’s why I’m going to show him how it’s done.”
“At your wild party.”
“Not a wild party,” Sam corrected again.
“I hate to break it to you, Sam, but if it’s not a wild party, then I’m not sure you’re going to make many friends at it.”
* * *
The weather had broken into a brief burst of bright sunlight, and this was Max’s favorite type of evening—warm, endless twilight where the back garden seemed to hoard the daylight and glow back at him—and Max wanted to try to capture the scent of the air in the particular shade of violet he was using on his canvas. He procured a curry for dinner from their favorite takeaway and opened a bottle of wine and went out into the front garden to trim some roses to put in a vase.
Which was when he was treated to the entertaining sight of the new little boy who had just moved in marching determinedly over to the old man’s house and ringing his doorbell. Max wasn’t sure anyone had rung that doorbell in twenty years. The old man opened it, frowned at the little boy, and then, after a brief conversation, inexplicably invited him in. Max shook his head. “Will wonders never cease,” he told the nearest rose, as he snipped it.
The woman from the other end of the street went jogging past, clutching her customary green protein shake, her black curls springing in their ponytail in time to her pace. She lifted up a hand in greeting, and Max returned it briefly, and then Jack came dashing out of the Basaks’ house to joyfully follow her down the street.
The little Basak girl came running out of the house after him, shouting, “Jack! Come back!” And then stamped her little foot in a gesture of supreme annoyance.
Her brother, appearing in the front doorway, said, “See, Pari, I told you, Jack doesn’t want to live here.”
Max clipped another rose and thought that the street was an interesting place when you stopped to really pay attention.
Arthur arrived home to the scent of his favorite curry intermingled with the fragrance of the overflowing vase of roses and immediately said suspiciously, “What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion,” Max said. “I am alarmed. Can’t I do something sweet and romantic for my husband without it being an occasion?”
Arthur regarded him warily. “Have you spilled paint all over one of my suits again?”
“No,” Max said fervently. “I swear, I did that once and you’ve never let me forget it.”
Arthur smiled, which made Max smile in return. “It was the early days,” Arthur said. “It made a big impression on me. Life with an artist.”
“It was a simple mistake,” Max said. “I wasn’t used to living with someone else.”
“I know,” said Arthur, still s
miling, and sat at the table and pulled his curry over to him. “Thank you for my curry. You had a good day, I take it?”
“Lovely weather, lovely painting, lovely husband.”
“You’re effusive tonight,” remarked Arthur.
“I meant me,” said Max. “I’m a lovely husband.”
“Wanker,” said Arthur.
“Exactly,” said Max.
“Where did you get the roses?” asked Arthur.
“Our garden. Put them to use. And so much happened whilst I was snipping them.”
“Like what?”
“There is a plot to dognap Jack.”
“Dognap Jack?” echoed Arthur, sipping his wine.
“Pari wishes to adopt him. Jack appears to be resistant.”
“Well,” noted Arthur, with his mouth in that tight, bitter line that Max hated, “adoption, as we all know, is a tricky thing to accomplish. Not as easy as all that.”
There was a long moment of silence.
Arthur took a bite of his curry and said, “Sorry.”
“No,” Max said, because he’d allowed Arthur to avoid discussion of this topic for a fair while now, and he was calling a halt to it, suddenly, abruptly, now, on this beautiful summer evening when he had gone outside to extravagantly cut his husband roses. “See, you say things like that and it makes me think that we should give this whole thing up.”
“We’re not giving up,” said Arthur.
“I used to be excited about it,” Max said, ignoring him. “I used to hope every day that the phone would ring and they’d tell us we’d been chosen and there was a baby for us. And now I dread that because I just worry they’ll take the baby away from us again and you’ll get even unhappier—”
“I’m not unhappy—”
“—and I don’t want that. I wanted to have a child with you. I didn’t want to lose you.”
“Stop it,” Arthur said, sounding weary. “You’re not going to lose me. No one’s losing anybody. Unless you count us losing babies.”
“I don’t mean that you would leave me,” Max said. “I mean that I miss you. And before all this happened, I literally never saw that horrible expression on your face, the one you get every so often, and I could happily have gone my entire life never seeing it, and I don’t want to make it show up more often, darling. I want it to go away forever.”
