A Dog Called Jack

by Ivy Pembroke

  Bill had noticed that the Indian girl almost inevitably came home in a knot of friends, chattering away. Friends coming over to visit her house, or friends who lived a few streets away but close enough to walk together. It was a happy little bundle of children that Jack circled around, bouncing and barking.

  The American boy—Teddy—was almost always by himself, almost always looked tired and grumbly and out-of-sorts, and brightened only when Jack made his way over to him and licked his hand in greeting. Bill might have got used to having Jack around the house, but he understood why the American wanted Jack sometimes, too. It wasn’t that Jack was Bill’s dog to share, but, well, all the same, Bill would share him, to the extent that he could.

  Because Bill had to admit that he understood what it was like to be lonely.

  Teddy had slipped a thank-you note into the mail slot. In large, precise writing, it had thanked Bill for the wooden wizard and said that he would call the wizard Mike. Which didn’t seem likely as a wizard name as far as Bill was concerned, but who was he to argue? He did regret that he hadn’t given the boy a dragon to go with the wizard, since the boy had said dragons could be wizard pets. Another unlikely thing, but again, Bill wasn’t going to get into arguments about fictional fantasy people.

  Which was why, when he saw the boy’s father outside, frowning at a piece of furniture he was trying to get into his house, Bill decided to just take a little dragon over to him.

  The man looked up in surprise when Bill walked over to him, and Bill raked his head for the man’s name, came up empty, and decided that was fine. He didn’t need to know his name. He cut off the man’s greeting by thrusting out the figurine.

  “It’s a dragon,” he explained, because he didn’t know if the man would understand. “For your boy.”

  “Oh,” said the man, turning it over in his hand. “This is so very lovely. Thank you so much. You don’t need to be so nice—”

  “It’s nothing,” Bill said. “I already had it carved. Don’t make a big fuss.”

  The man said, sounding amused, “Yes, God forbid I call you ‘nice.’ I’ll be sure to give it to Teddy when he gets home.”

  And Bill didn’t actually care how the boy was doing in school, but, all the same, it stung that this young man was so sarcastic toward him, and so Bill said, “How’s the boy doing in school?”

  The man smiled in a way that was clearly a lie. “Well, you know,” he said, “it’s a process. I tell Teddy we just have to get through it.”

  Bill considered. “I suppose.” And he should just leave it at that, he knew, and yet... “On the other hand.”

  The man lifted his eyebrows.

  Bill shrugged. Because this wasn’t being nice, this was just being . . . old, and knowing things other people didn’t know. “If you spend too much time just getting through things, before you know it, you blink and you’re old and you realize you spent your life just trying to get through, and there’s nothing on the other side you’re trying to get through to.”

  Bill left the man with his furniture problem and went back to his own house.

  * * *

  Buying the bookcase had really seemed like a good idea. It was a gorgeous old piece of furniture, and it would look fantastic in Sam’s office, where he really needed a bookcase, but he couldn’t even figure out how to get it inside, never mind up the stairs.

  And meanwhile his crotchety old neighbor had decided to suddenly give him advice about the fact that he was wasting his life by just trying to get through it instead of living it, and now he was contemplating a larger life failure than buying a bookcase slightly too big for his house.

  “You look like you have a conundrum, mate,” remarked Max, standing at the end of the walk.

  Sam said, “I might have wasted the last few years of my life and also I’m encouraging my son to waste his life, too.”

  Max lifted an eyebrow.

  Sam said, “Oh, I see, you were talking about the bookcase.”

  “I cannot help you with the existential crisis you’re having there, but I can probably help you lift a piece of furniture,” offered Max.

  “You’re sure?” said Sam. “It’s a lot of trouble.”

  “This is a new, friendly street,” said Max. “And anyway, probably if I throw my back out, I can sue you. My husband’s an insurance agent; he’ll figure out a way to get your insurance company to pay.”

  “Oh, good,” said Sam, as Max said hello to Jack, who was watching all of the proceedings with interest, and set up on the other side of the bookcase. “A win-win for both of us.”

  Except that, no matter how they attempted to maneuver the bookcase, it seemed to be impossible to get it through the door.

  Even Jack had lost interest in their incompetence and was now scouring the street for his nemesis squirrels.

  Max and Sam finally stepped back to assess the situation.

  “Will it even fit?” Max asked, lifting up his hand to shade his gaze from the sun, which had broken through the clouds in order to ensure that it was the hottest September day of all time for them to be struggling with a piece of furniture. “I mean, did you even measure?”

  “No,” admitted Sam. “It just felt like it would fit. I mean, it’s just a bookcase. Who would make a bookcase too big to fit through a door?”

  “I have a measuring tape,” remarked Pen. “I could fetch it for you.”

  Sam hadn’t even noticed that Pen was there, but she had stopped on the pavement, clearly just having finished a run. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Long enough to know that neither of you has ‘furniture mover’ in your future career prospects,” she replied. “Let me fetch you the measuring tape.”

  Pen returned with the measuring tape and together they ascertained that yes, the bookcase should fit through the door.

  “It’s something with the angles,” mused Max.

  “Yes, and God knows I don’t know anything about angles,” said Sam. “I can barely do my son’s maths homework with him.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about angles,” said Max. “I’m an artist.”

  Max and Sam both looked at Pen.

  “Have you,” Max said, “by any chance, written an article about angles?”

  Pen rolled her eyes. “No, but I’m Googling it. You two are hopeless.”

  Although, even with Pen’s Googling and giving them impossible directions like “Make yourselves smaller” and “Put your hand on the other side of your body,” they could not get the bookcase in the house.

  “Shocking that we couldn’t accomplish it, even with maths and directions,” remarked Max.

  “You would have got it through the door if you’d been able to get your feet properly up on the wall,” Pen told him.

  “I do accept the full responsibility of this failure,” said Max.

  “I need a beer,” Sam decided. “Beers for everyone?”

  “Beers for everyone,” Max and Pen agreed.

  They settled on the front step, because, no longer struggling with a bookcase, the unexpected warmth of the day was no longer a trial to be endured but a pleasant bonus.

  “It is a gorgeous bookcase,” Max remarked.

  “Well, you can have it, I suppose,” said Sam. “Since I’m not going to have it.”

  “We have the same house,” said Max. “How would I get it inside my house if I couldn’t get it inside your house?”

  Sam shrugged. “Magic?”

  “Speaking of magic.” Max picked up the little dragon figure Sam had forgot he’d put down and held it up. “This is cute. Did it come with the bookcase?”

  “Oh, no,” said Sam. “Mr. Hammersley made it.”

  Max and Pen both looked surprised.

  “The old man?” Max clarified. “Who lives next door?”

  “Yes. That Mr. Hammersley. He’s an artist, too.”

  Max looked down at the little dragon figure reflectively.

  “Really?”

  “So
you talk to him,” Pen said. “Like, really talk to him.”

  “Not really. I don’t know. It’s weird. I think he’s taken an interest in Teddy, for some reason.”

  “It’s because they both love Jack,” said Pen. “Jack bringing people together. The love of a good dog.” She reached down and scratched behind Jack’s ears.

  “I suppose,” said Sam, as Jack suddenly sat straight up, tail wagging, looking toward the top of the street.

  “The children must be coming,” Max said, and indeed a group of loud children appeared at the top of the street, dispersing in various directions.

  Pari Basak and a group of chattering children walked past, followed by Diya Basak, who looked curiously at the trio of them ringed on the front step, and the bookcase. And then went out of her way to avoid Jack, who went running from Pari to Teddy in greeting. Teddy, bringing up the rear, feet dragging as they usually did.

  “Hello,” Sam said, as positively as he could, as Teddy came up to them. “Good day at school?”

  “It was fine,” Teddy said. “Here.” He handed Sam a piece of paper.

  Turtledove Chronicle! it exclaimed at the top. There was a drawing of a swooping turtledove, with Coo coo! coming out of its beak.

  “Thank you. You ought to walk around with Jack and see if there’s anything for you to clean up,” Sam suggested. It was part of his ongoing lessons about the responsibility of part-time custody of a dog.

  Teddy thought everything to do with Jack was magnificently exciting, so he headed out to clean the streets, Jack trotting happily next to him, bouncing a little bit with excitement and keeping an eye out for squirrels.

  “Having a street dog is much nicer now that he comes with cleanup duty,” remarked Max.

  Pen started to talk about an article she’d researched about the problem of horse manure in cities at the turn of the last century, and Sam perused the Turtledove Chronicle. There were several articles about what the class had been doing. They were using what they’d learned about angles to construct a city out of nothing but pasta (nothing about aiding in getting a bookcase into a house, however). They were writing a play for them to perform for Christmas entitled Miracle Snow at the Baby’s Birth in the Desert. The article below proclaimed it to be a stirring epic with a message about peace on Earth and climate change. They were experimenting with different sounds in science; the school had concluded that the loudest sounds were henceforth prohibited.

  And, at the bottom, was Miss Quinn’s weekly column, From the Teacher’s Desk:

  Next month we will be taking the children on a field trip to the Natural History Museum. We are seeking volunteers to assist with chaperoning the children. Please send a note to school with your child if you are willing to chaperone! —Miss Quinn.

  Sam reflected upon the field trip request. He had done nothing with regard to Miss Quinn since school had started. Maybe he ought to chaperone the field trip. And use it to flirt with his son’s teacher. That . . . might be untoward of him. And maybe a little creepy. He’d met her twice, and barely exchanged words with her, certainly nothing meaningful. But he found himself watching out of the corner of his eye for a glimpse of dark red hair, wherever he was. Sometimes he even leaned out of the window of his office, as if she might wander down the street when she was in actuality busy teaching his child. He suddenly, abruptly, for the first time in years, wanted to go on a date, but only with Miss Quinn. No one else appealed. He’d even poked around online just to make sure, although he would never admit that to Ellen.

  Sam asked abruptly, “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

  Whatever Max and Pen had been discussing, it hadn’t been that. They both looked at him and said, “What?”

  “I know,” Sam said. “That’s an out-of-nowhere question.”

  “Are you doing some sort of survey?” asked Pen, as if that would have been a normal thing to do.

  Max just said evenly, “Yes. I believe in love at first sight. Arthur doesn’t, though.”

  Sam looked at him. “So how did that work? You loved him at first sight, he took some convincing?”

  “No. It’s different definitions of ‘love.’ I asked him about it once, because I was a little offended. I wanted him, of course, to say he took one look at me and knew no one else would ever do. How devastatingly romantic, right? I told everyone that was how I felt about Arthur. I thought it made for a wonderful story. And I thought it was true. I still think it’s true. But Arthur has a point, and his point is that I looked at him and I just immediately wanted to know more about him. And after I knew more about him, after I knew he was it, I went back and interpreted that first spark as ‘love.’ He looked at me, and he wanted to know more about me, but what Arthur would tell you—what he’s told me—is he didn’t fall in love with the sight of me, he fell in love with the me of me, later, and the initial look was what made him look again, and it was the second look that made him fall in love. That’s Arthur’s version of romance: eminently practical, and utterly disarming in that practicality. To me, anyway.”

  Sam considered. “I might be on Arthur’s side,” he said. “Let’s say I met someone. At, say, the fruit and veg section of the supermarket.”

  “A very sexually charged place to meet someone,” said Max. “Virtually everything is phallic in the produce section.”

  “We met over carrots.”

  “Phallic.”

  “And beetroot.”

  “Could be a sex toy,” suggested Max.

  “This conversation is gross,” Pen said.

  “Agreed,” said Sam. “I’m just saying: I met her, and as soon as I met her, I thought, ‘I want to know more about her.’ And I’ve been sitting here, for a while now, thinking how ridiculous that is of me. How can I know I want to know more about her? I don’t know her.”

  “So why don’t you get to know her and find out?” asked Max. “The worst that happens is she’s not for you. The worst that happens if you don’t take the risk and get to know her is that she was for you and you’ll never know it. That, to me, was always the bigger tragedy.”

  “I think,” said Pen, “that meeting people that you want to know more about is . . . rare, frankly. In any sense. We all of us just exist in our own little bubbles, and don’t venture outside them. Look at how long we all lived on the same street and barely spoke to each other. The things that happen on this street—the things we know about each other—and we don’t ever say anything to each other, about anything. We don’t get to know each other. We don’t stop and help each other with furniture and end up talking about the nature of love. But look, when we do, how much nicer it is. I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight. I think what I do believe is that every once in a while we, as humans, just want to reach out and get to know another human and not feel alone on the planet anymore. Romantic or otherwise. And I think that’s important. Every relationship you make is important.” Teddy was coming back up the street, racing Jack, who was moving so quickly and so enthusiastically, with his little half-bounces, that he was practically tripping himself. “Even relationships with dogs,” she finished, smiling.

  Jack went rushing past the front garden, stumbling to slow to meet Arthur, walking down the street, who greeted him with a pat on his head and then stopped in front of the house and said, “Hello.”

  “Darling,” said Max. “Would you like a bookcase that wouldn’t fit in our house?”

  “Not especially,” said Arthur. “Hello, Teddy. How’s school?”

  “Very long,” Teddy said. “And we have to learn a lot.”

  “I see,” said Arthur.

  Max smiled and stood up. “Sorry about the bookcase,” he said to Sam.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. “I’ll find another bookcase somewhere.”

  “You can’t get that in the house?” Arthur said. “I feel like it’s just a matter of angles, no?”

  “Human limbs are in the wrong place to accomplish it,” Max said, as he walked over to meet Arth
ur. At Arthur’s look, he added, “Don’t ask. Good night!” He waved back to Sam and Teddy and Pen.

  “Good night,” they called back, and then Pen stood.

  “Actually, I should be going, too. I was supposed to be writing today. Thank you for providing me with today’s version of procrastination.”

  “Anytime,” agreed Sam pleasantly. “Thanks for your help.” Then he turned to Teddy, handing him the little dragon figure. “Look what Mr. Hammersley made for you.”

  Teddy smiled at it, turning it over in his hands. “A dragon to be a pet for Mike!”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hang on,” said Max, and Sam looked up, surprised to see Max had turned back and was now standing regarding the bookcase. “I do want the bookcase,” he said slowly. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Sam. “I can’t do anything with it.”

  “What will you use it for?” asked Pen. “We can’t get it in the house.”

  “I think I’ll be able to get it in the shed in the back garden,” said Max. “And I’m going to use it for art, of course.”

  * * *

  Sam, after the bookcase had been carted to Max and Arthur’s shed, after he and Teddy had shared adventures over dinner (Sam’s: buying an unexpected art bookcase; Teddy’s: Miss Quinn taught them how to build the best paper airplanes), after he had helped Teddy with homework (massive amounts of which Sam himself did not understand although he tried not to admit that), after he had put Teddy to bed to the sounds of Emilia practicing on her drums (which he was sure meant that Teddy did not actually go to bed until Emilia finished but Sam didn’t want to bother the Pachutas over it when Emilia always finished fairly quickly)—after all of this, Sam sat in his office ostensibly doing a bit of work and really considering the Turtledove Chronicle.

  The thought of the fact that he didn’t want to bother the Pachutas over Emilia’s drumming made him think of Ellen saying he wanted everyone to like him, and Sam thought of how this tendency to want people to like him had somehow crystallized into wanting one person to like him: Teddy’s teacher. In fact, he would prefer it if Teddy’s teacher thought he was dazzling and fantastic. And he’d been worrying that this was irrational, but maybe Max and Pen were right: maybe this was a good thing.