A Dog Called Jack

by Ivy Pembroke

  “You don’t have any lights up,” Diya retorted.

  “I’m waiting until after Thanksgiving,” Sam replied. “Speaking of, did you get my invitation?”

  “Oh. Yes. I’m slightly concerned.”

  Diya looked earnest, and Sam was confused. “Concerned about Thanksgiving?”

  “Are you really going to make the ‘Thanksgiving feast’? You’re going to make a turkey? And everything else?”

  Diya looked supremely skeptical, and Sam frowned. “Yes. There’s really nothing to making a turkey. I’ve watched lots of them get made. You just stick it in the oven and then the little timer thing sticks up eventually and boom, it’s done.”

  Diya said, “I will make something for this feast, too,” clearly not convinced a turkey was easy enough for Sam to handle.

  And because Sam had come over to discuss other things, he decided not to debate the point any longer. He said politely, “Yes, thank you. That would be nice. I wanted to ask you if you could just keep an eye on Teddy for me on Friday night. He and Pari are usually hanging out together anyway.”

  “They have been spending rather a lot of time together,” remarked Diya.

  “They’re working on the class play,” Sam said. “The class play starring Jack.”

  “Starring Jack?” echoed Diya. “Jack the dog? Why would Jack be in the class play?”

  “Because our children are determined,” said Sam.

  “Hmm.” Diya frowned.

  “Anyway,” Sam said, feeling they were being sidetracked, “can you watch Teddy for me?”

  “I can,” said Diya. “Is this because you’re going on a date with Miss Quinn?”

  Sam opened and closed his mouth.

  Diya made an excited gesture with her hand that ended up having the effect of shoving Sam a little bit. She said, “You are! I didn’t expect that to be true, but you are! I am so proud of you! Where are you taking her?”

  Sam had barely thought far enough ahead to answer the question of when the date should happen, never mind where.

  “Oh,” he said vaguely. “I don’t know yet. Coffee somewhere, I guess?”

  Diya’s jaw dropped in abject horror, as if Sam had just said his idea of a date was making her wax his back hair or something. She said, “You cannot just take her for coffee. This is your first date. You want to make a good impression! You want to sweep her off her feet! Coffee never swept anyone off their feet!”

  “Maybe if it was really good coffee . . . ?” Sam offered hopefully.

  Diya gave him a withering look and said, “I will watch your child for you, but you must come up with a better date than ‘coffee.’ ”

  * * *

  In the end Sam, inspired by their first food-related meeting, ended up texting to Libby, How would you like to make a gingerbread house? Libby texted back, As long as it doesn’t have to be structurally sound. Sam replied with, Collapsed gingerbread pile also counts as a house. Libby’s response was, Brilliant! And then, after a pause, Wait, you’re not going to insist the gingerbread house has beetroot, are you?

  Sam fell a little bit more in love.

  On Friday, with an address tucked on the mobile in his pocket, Sam left Teddy with Darsh and Diya and Pari. Teddy, apparently unbothered by the entire affair, told him to have fun and then immediately ran off into the back garden with Pari in search of Jack.

  Diya looked Sam up and down and said, “You’ll do.”

  Darsh called from the kitchen, sounding amused, “Leave him alone!”

  Sam decided Darsh was his favorite.

  On the way to Libby’s, he stopped to buy her flowers, settling on bright daisies because they seemed happy.

  Libby’s flat was in a building that had reached an air of benign age, saggy in spots but charming nonetheless. She answered the door for him, already tucked into a bright blue coat with a matching beret perched on her head, and lifted her eyebrows at the daisies.

  “Look at you,” she said. “Angling for bonus points, are you?” She gave him such a delighted smile that he thought he’d already won the bonus points.

  “I’m hoping for an A-plus grade at the end of the evening,” said Sam.

  “Expecting me to hand you a report?” She was busying herself in the small kitchen, filling a vase with water, and Sam was striving to be polite and not spy openly at all of her decoration choices as if they might be keen insights into her psyche.

  “I’ve never taken a teacher on a date before. I assume you must grade all social occasions.”

  “So I should expect best behavior, then?” asked Libby, daisies in a vase and keys in her hand, as she stepped back through the door.

  “Mmm,” said Sam, following her, watching her lock the door with those hands that seemed to so frequently become the object of his fascination. “Or my worst behavior, I suppose. It depends on which sort of date you want.”

  Libby looked at him for a moment, and then grinned and leaned forward and brushed her finger ever-so-lightly down his nose. “These freckles,” she murmured. “They rather kill me.” Sam had never had anyone say that about his freckles before. He said breathlessly, “Oh,” and wondered if it was too early in the evening to kiss her, since she was standing close enough now that he could sink happily into her eyes.

  She closed the distance, leaned up to press her lips gently against his, a sweet and brief kiss that felt exactly like the best sort of hello, a warm welcome that made you forget how many of the people in the world were strangers because the people you knew were just lovely.

  Then she leaned back and said, “Shall we make ourselves a gingerbread house?”

  * * *

  Sam had chosen the class somewhat at random, because making a gingerbread house sounded like it would afford more opportunity for talking than cooking classes that involved the making of a whole feast. How difficult could a gingerbread house be?

  It turned out to be incredibly difficult. If their roof wasn’t caving in, then their walls were tipping over. Their windows were dangerously crooked, their door was far too small in proportion to the rest of the house, and their gingerbread began cracking, letting in what Libby said would be a fierce chill for the poor gingerbread inhabitants.

  And Sam couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed quite so much. Libby was raw, pure joy, blithe about their errors, steadfastly optimistic about their futures as gingerbread architects, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. She gamely piped tiles onto their roof while it lay in pieces on the parchment paper. The instructor at the front of the room was explaining to the more competent participants in the class how to pipe garlands around the eaves, to serve as a Christmas decoration.

  Sam remarked softly to Libby, “This assumes the gingerbread house has eaves.”

  “We have eaves,” Libby replied, laughter in her voice. “They are horizontal eaves.”

  And Sam couldn’t help but say, “You are so delightful.”

  Libby glanced up from her piping, a charming blush spreading across her cheeks, and then leaned back over their destroyed gingerbread pile.

  * * *

  In the end, they were allowed to collect their gingerbread pieces into a bag and they walked along the pavement, munching on destroyed gingerbread with random icing accents.

  Libby said, “I thought you’d be better at gingerbread house construction. Surely you’d built some with Teddy before?”

  “I’ve definitely bought some, premade, at a store,” Sam responded.

  Libby laughed, head thrown back a little. It was a crisp, cool night, but the gingerbread house class had been warm, so Libby’s coat wasn’t fastened, and the star pendant around her neck glinted in the city lights all around them.

  Sam said, “Your necklace is beautiful,” because it was, although maybe what he meant was It suits you, because that was perhaps truer.

  She reached up to rest her fingers on the pendant and said, “Thank you. It was a gift. From my father. When I was younger, I was going to be an astronaut.�
�� Libby smiled as she said it, playfully, as if sharing a secret. “I was going to go up into space and see the stars from right next to them.”

  “That sounds lovely,” said Sam. “All I wanted to be was a rock star, for no poetic reasons at all.”

  Libby laughed. “Do you play any instruments?”

  “No,” confessed Sam. “I can’t even sing. I have no idea what I thought I was on about.”

  Libby laughed again. “And I get carsick, which pretty much put an end to any fantasy about orbiting the Earth. I’d never be able to handle G3 when I couldn’t even handle the M4.”

  Sam chuckled.

  “But I became a teacher instead, and, without being too terribly embarrassing about it, I still get to see stars up close. Just a different sort of star. Oh, God, that sounds horrible, doesn’t it?”

  “It sounds sweet,” said Sam. “My job is just something I do that makes me money. But I think you love your job.”

  “I do,” agreed Libby. “And also, it allows me to meet all sorts of interesting men.” She flashed a coy smile at him, dimples just visible.

  “I bet you heartlessly collect us, don’t you?” rejoined Sam. “Slay us all with that smile and the way you laugh and then move off to the next crop.”

  “Normally, yes,” replied Libby, still smiling. “But none of them ever demolished a gingerbread house with me. I might keep you around a bit longer, see how badly you can destroy chocolates for Valentine’s Day.”

  Sam laughed.

  * * *

  At the time, it had made perfect sense to put Max’s number down as the main contact for the adoption agency. Max didn’t have an office job. Max was reliably with his mobile. Max didn’t silence it for random middle-of-the-day meetings. Naturally the adoption agency should contact Max first.

  Except that what this meant was that it was Max who received the call about being chosen for another baby.

  What this meant was that Max sat in his studio, drinking in the middle of the day, debating whether or not to tell Arthur, debating whether or not to ring back and turn down the baby, debating whether or not he was the world’s worst husband for even thinking about this, debating whether or not he could go through losing another child at the eleventh hour.

  Which was when his doorbell rang.

  Max swore and pressed his glass to his forehead and debated now whether or not to answer the door, and then decided that maybe it was a good idea to break himself out of this. Of course he had to tell Arthur about the baby. Of course he did.

  Max opened the door on Sam, who looked slightly frazzled.

  He said immediately, “Have you ever made pastry before?”

  “You’re making pastry?” said Max.

  “Yes. For a pumpkin pie. For the Thanksgiving feast. I accidentally invited Libby to the Thanksgiving feast. So now I need to look as if I can cook. I really can’t cook. As you may have already noticed.”

  Max looked at Sam, obviously in the middle of some kind of minor crisis, and thought how he couldn’t handle someone else’s minor crisis, because he was in the middle of his own rather major crisis at the moment, so he blurted out, “Arthur and I have been matched with a baby to adopt.”

  Sam blinked, and then grinned widely. “Have you? That’s wonderful—”

  “It isn’t wonderful.” Max shook his head.

  “Don’t you want a baby?” Sam asked hesitantly.

  “I want a baby, yes. Arthur wants a baby, yes. Arthur would be so amazing with a child. Arthur would raise this incredibly serious little insurance agent of a child. We’d be good at it. I think we’d be really good at it. Don’t you think we’d be good at it?”

  “Yes,” Sam said. “I do. Because you want to be, and that’s important. Because you’d try really hard. Because you’d love. Why don’t you sit down? You look as if you—”

  “But we get matched with children and they take them from us. The first time it was before the baby had been given to us, so it was all in the abstract, and it was hard but we dealt with it. The second time, Arthur had held her, and his face was—and her face was—and then we couldn’t have her anymore because—and I don’t know if I can do that again. I don’t know if I can.”

  “Take a breath,” Sam said, stepping through the door and closing it behind him. “Have you talked to Arthur about this?”

  “Yes,” said Max. “No. I don’t know. I think I’ve tried? But when the possibility of another baby was still in the abstract, I didn’t realize the extent to which I was going to panic. Now they’ve rung me about a baby and I’ve plummeted directly off a cliff like a lunatic.”

  “Stop it. You are not a lunatic,” said Sam. “Trust me. You’re just under a lot of stress at the moment.”

  “Right. And if I can’t handle this amount of stress, how can I handle a child?”

  “Nobody thinks they can handle a child, once the reality of it really hits. You’ll be fine. You really will be. But I do think you need to talk to Arthur about how you’re feeling about the possibility of losing another child.”

  Max did not want to do that at all. Max did not want to bring up how concrete a new baby had become. Max did not want Arthur’s rising hopes, Arthur’s careful preparations, Arthur’s measured excitement, because Max did not want the flip side of all of these things. Half of Max wished they’d got the first or second baby, and the other half of Max wished they’d never brought any of this up at all.

  There was a knock on the back door, and Max said, “Oh, Christ, everyone on the street is coming to visit today.”

  It turned out to be Bill, who said, “Weren’t we supposed to work today? Your shed is locked. What’s the matter with you? You look like hell.”

  Which meant Arthur would definitely know something was up with him. Max said, “No working today. Only drinking today.”

  “And making pastry,” said Sam.

  “Making pastry?” echoed Bill, sounding extremely disapproving of this.

  “Sam’s going to make the pastry,” said Max. “We’re going to mock him whilst we drink.”

  * * *

  Pari came home from school in a good mood. The class play was just going to be amazing. Miss Quinn had let them start running through lines, and Pari got to deliver dramatic pronouncements about insurance and climate change, and she even got to rest her hand against her forehead at one point in an almost-faint.

  She told Mum, “Our class play is the best.”

  “Oh,” Mum said, and pointed a wooden spoon at her, where she was stirring something in one of her gigantic pots. “I heard about your class play.”

  “Did you?” asked Pari happily. “Who told you? Did Miss Quinn say how fantastic it’s going to be?”

  “No, Sam Bishop told me that you expect that street dog to star in it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Pari. “Isn’t that a great idea? We’re working on it. I feel like we can get Miss Quinn to agree.”

  “She shouldn’t agree,” Mum said. “She should definitely not agree. In fact, I am going to ring her and tell her that I think having the dog involved in the play is a terrible idea.”

  Pari . . . stared. Pari felt she could do nothing but . . . stare. Because . . . Because she’d had a good day, such a good day, and she loved her play, and getting Jack in the play would be the best thing, and . . . and . . .

  Mum was stirring the contents of her pot and saying, “I have to go over to Anika’s because her niece’s friend’s mum just found out she’s having another baby and I said that I’d bring some rogan josh over for the celebration.”

  And she didn’t even notice, thought Pari. She didn’t even notice how she was saying something so horrible.

  Pari said hotly, “Jack would be the best. The whole thing would be the best. You don’t even know. Because you never pay attention.” And then she stormed out of the house.

  Tears were hot in her eyes as she stood in the back garden, blinking furiously. It was cold outside, and she’d forgotten to put her coat on, and ther
e was no way she was going back inside now to fetch it. She could have gone over to Teddy’s house, but she didn’t want to be there, blinking back tears, explaining how her mum was going to ruin everything. Because her mum just didn’t care. Her mum cared more about Anika’s niece’s whatever, whom she didn’t even know.

  Pari ducked out of her back garden into the garden next door, and from there into the street.

  Jack came to greet her, looking as happy to see her as he always did.

  “Go away,” Pari said angrily as she marched up the street.

  “Just go away, Jack. Everything is a mess and I don’t need you jumping around me like it’s all brilliant. Mum’s only ever home when she wants to do something to ruin my life, and it’s horrible. She doesn’t even look at me. She doesn’t even see the things I like. She doesn’t care what I like. And everything is just the worst and go away.” Pari shouted this finally, and Jack halted. His tail wasn’t wagging, and Pari had never seen him without his tail wagging. He stood in the middle of the pavement and whined at her a little, and she said firmly, “Stay,” and then whirled on her heel and marched down the street.

  It would probably be hours before anyone noticed, she thought. She’d probably be able to walk halfway to the Tower of London by then. She might as well.

  * * *

  Max, luckily, seemed unable to resist the adventure of making a pie from scratch. Before Sam knew it, he had basically taken over the entire project, and Sam’s kitchen was full of flour and butter that was refusing to combine but that Max was trying to smash into submission. Considering that Max had looked on the verge of a full-fledged nervous breakdown when he had opened the door for Sam, Sam was relieved that he’d bounced back. He was fairly sure that, given a moment’s reflection, Max would see that he should talk to Arthur about all of this.

  So Sam sat with Bill, who looked dubious about the pie escapade and indeed, Sam suspected, would really have preferred to flee.

  Sam said, “Are you coming for Thanksgiving tomorrow?”

  “I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving,” Bill answered gruffly.

  “None of us do,” contributed Max cheerfully. “Doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy Sam’s attempts at cooking.”