by Dixie Cash
“Oh, thank you, sweetie,” she said to the stray. “But you shouldn’t be eating garbage. It isn’t good for you.”
Bending over, she scratched behind the dog’s ears and she would swear to anyone who asked that he smiled at her. Her heart swelled. She continued to scratch his ears and stroke his face. “What I make for doggies like you isn’t just pretty,” she told him tenderly. “It has lots of good nutrients for doggies baked inside. Yes, it does. Yes, sweetheart, it does.”
His big brown eyes focused on her face as if he understood her every word.
She couldn’t just walk away and leave him. The city’s dogcatcher prowled the alleys and would surely pick him up. And he would be euthanized like so many other unfortunate animals left to stray. But she couldn’t take him into her shop either. He was filthy and she had no way of knowing how he would behave indoors. He had to be fed and cleaned up.
“You stay right here,” she said and started across the alley to her back door. He followed. She stepped into her shop and picked a leash off a hook where she kept several. They came in handy in her animal-friendly enterprise. She clipped the leash to his collar without a problem and led him to her SUV that she always parked in the alley. When she opened the back gate, he jumped in without coaxing.
She walked back inside her shop, locked the front door and hung up the CLOSED sign. She hated locking the store during business hours, but with no one to watch it, she had to. One of her two employees, Betty Ann, had already been in early to help make Atomic Energizer, the homemade raw dog food LaBarkery sold in bulk, but Betty Ann was long-gone by mid-morning.
Like Sandi, Betty Ann loved animals. And like Sandi, she had gotten sucked in by Juanita Harper at We Love Animals, the no-kill animal shelter. Betty Ann now foster-cared for her own small menagerie.
Back in the alley, Sandi scooted behind the steering wheel. “We’re going for a short ride.” As she eased along the alleyway, her passenger sat calmly, so he was used to riding in an automobile.
A dog-grooming parlor, the Pampered Pooch, was located at the end of the strip mall. Sandi had become friends with the owner, Prissy Porter, and they referred customers back and forth. The new dog continued to behave well as Sandi drove toward the grooming parlor. She rounded the end of the strip and parked in front of Pampered Pooch, opened the SUV’s back gate and reached for his leash. “Come on, boy. Let’s go get a bath. Then you can have a nice lunch.”
The dog hopped to the ground, his long tail swishing a steady beat.
As Sandi walked him into the grooming parlor, Prissy came from the back room. “Hey, Sandi. Whatcha got there?”
“This is my new best friend.”
Prissy’s brow tented. “Oh, no. Look how pitiful he is. Oh, bless his heart. I can’t stand to see any animal like this. Where’d you get him?”
“In the alley, when I was taking out the trash. Isn’t he sad? The way he acts, he must’ve belonged to someone and just gotten lost. He’s very friendly and he seems to be trained. He jumped right into the back of my SUV and rode down here with no hassle.”
Prissy squatted in front of the dog and began an inspection. “Oh, he’s no stray. But he’s been homeless a while.”
“I’m going to try to find his owner, but first I need you to feed him and clean him up. Clip, shave, whatever you have to do. Just put it all on my bill.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. We keep plenty to eat around here for our boarders.” Prissy took the leash from Sandi’s hand. “We’ll be okay. You go on and do what you need to. This baby and I will be just fine.”
The dog smiled up at her.
“Look at that,” Sandi said. “I swear he smiles.”
“Lord, he is full of personality, isn’t he?”
“Any idea what breed he is?”
“He’s kind of long-haired, so Collie and something maybe.”
“I sure hope I can find his owner.”
“I hope you can, too, because if this one stays around long, it’ll be easy to fall in love with him.”
Prissy led the dog to her back room and Sandi went outside to her SUV. Taking one last look at the grooming shop, she drove away feeling happy about the good deed she had done, but a little sad at recognizing herself in a lost dog. Alone and out of options weren’t new emotions to her. A few years ago, she had been as lost as that dog and in some ways, she still was.
Well, fate had given her a break. What else could she do but pay it forward? She would see that the lost dog got a break, too.
***
Back at her own shop, a regular customer waited at her front door. She turned over the CLOSED sign, then unlocked and opened the door. “Hi, Mrs. Arnold. Hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Oh, I just got here, honey.” The customer stepped through the doorway. “I’m so glad you aren’t really closed. I was scared for a minute. Where’s your helper today?”
“She came in at five to help me make LaBarkery’s Atomic Engergizer. We usually finish up by eleven and she goes home.”
“Oh, that’s your raw superfood, isn’t it? Well, I’m just glad you’re here. My darlings would be so upset if I didn’t have a fresh LaBarkery treat for them every day.”
Mrs. Arnold was married to a prominent personal injury attorney who made more money than both he and Mrs. Arnold could count, add up or spend on diamond rings. They lived large and Mrs. Arnold spared no expense in pampering their dogs and cats.
“I had to lock up for a minute,” Sandi told her. “I found a stray dog in the alley. I took him down to the grooming parlor to be cleaned up.”
Mrs. Arnold’s brow tented. “Awww. I can’t bear the thought of little homeless dogs.”
“I don’t think he’s homeless, but I do think he’s lost. He isn’t exactly little, either.”
“Awww. Well, you were sweet to help him.”
“I’m going to try to find his owner. But if I don’t, would you like to have him? He seems to be a really nice animal.”
Mrs. Arnold pressed her palms against her cheeks, the multiple diamond rings on her fingers glittering under the fluorescent lighting. “Oh, my Lord, honey, I couldn’t. My husband thinks four dogs and twenty cats are enough. Three of our doggies are Labs, you know. We’ve given one whole bedroom to them.”
She leaned closer to Sandi and spoke in a whisper. “I don’t tell just anyone, but the kitties have taken over the pool house, which upset my husband terribly. When he tells people he spends his weekends herding cats, they think he’s crazy.”
Instantly, Sandi thought of Jake, her African Grey parrot. She’d had to give him his own bedroom. Well, actually, Jake’s room was the spare bedroom she had used for her office. So now, she conducted LaBarkery’s clerical chores at her kitchen table and kept her files in the dining room. Beyond taking over her house, the bird had taken over her life and she sometimes found herself having conversations with him and following his advice.
He had been added to her little throng a few months back. As a registered foster parent at We Love Animals, she often got a call when they had a hard-to-place resident. Having spent some time—maybe his whole life—in a biker sports bar, he had come to her with a colorful vocabulary. He was so smart that after living with him for a few weeks, Sandi wondered if he had cognitive abilities. And after doing some research on African Greys, she was convinced he did.
“I know what you mean,” Sandi said. “Mention him to your friends if you don’t mind. Maybe someone might need a dog that’s already trained.”
“I certainly will,” Mrs. Arnold said, “and I’ll put a note on the bulletin board at church.”
Sandi stepped behind the counter, quickly washed her hands and turned back to her customer. “Well, what can I get for your babies today? I’ve got lots of Energizer, made fresh this morning.”
“Hmm. I still have plenty. I’ll save that for later. I haven’t treated everyone to Bare Paws in a couple of months. Let me have a dozen of those and a dozen of those cute little mice
for the kitties.”
Sandi reached inside her display case, removed a dozen Bare Paws from their paper containers. “Did you say a dozen of the Mousekins also?”
“I’ll tell you what. Make that two dozen. The kitties come and go, but I want to be sure I have enough for everyone to have one.”
Sandy counted out twenty-four little oval salmon cakes she decorated to look like pink mice with big white-and-black eyes and black noses. She carefully placed all of the treats in two bakery boxes that bore a LaBarkery logo.
“Oh, and let me have one of your birthday cakes. Mikey, my youngest is turning two. We’re having a little party with six of his friends.”
Sandy gave Mrs. Arnold a wide smile. “Oh, how cool.”
She sidled along the long display case and lifted out one of her two-layer cakes filled with beef, chicken and vegetables and frosted with nutritious frosting that looked like chocolate. “Would you like the candles? They’re really beef sticks, you know.”
“Oh, by all means. Nothing’s too good for Mikey. But two won’t be enough. You’d better give me seven candles so everyone can have one.”
“Coming right up.” The corners of Sandi’s mouth tipping up with another huge smile, she plucked seven doggie treats she had molded to look like birthday candles out of her display case and bagged them.
She packaged the cake in a fancy cardboard box worthy of a human gourmet bakery, handed it and the boxes of goodies across the counter to Mrs. Arnold and collected $158.76.
“Thank you, dear,” the woman said. “I’ll see you next week.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Arnold and don’t forget to spread the word about the dog I found.”
Another happy customer strolled out the door, leaving Sandi humming. Yes, indeedy. 48-million Americans might be on food stamps, California might be out of water, Colorado might be going up in wacky-backy smoke, but tonight, in Midland, Texas, a pooch named Mikey was having a birthday party with six canine friends all chomping happily on birthday cake and candles made of healthy homemade dog food.
And for that, Sandi was ecstatic.
As she wiped the front of her display case, her mind spun backward to the beginning of LaBarkery and its exclusive pet treats that looked like fine gourmet bakery wares. Just four years ago, she had held a good job in a Midland bank where she had gone to work right out of college. On a fast track, she had moved up to a low-level vice-president and loan officer and was in line for another promotion when a mega-bank bought her employer and laid off more than half the staff, including her.
Sandi hadn’t loved that job, but she had been good at it. Interacting with people—the bank’s customers—seemed to be what she was meant to do, not to mention the bank paid her well and offered great benefits.
Though disappointed by being laid off, she took it in her stride because she was one of the lucky ones. At home she had a loving man who had a good job with an oil company and who supported her in all things. She would simply stay at home, tie on her apron, clean her house to spotless perfection and have elegant meals waiting for him when he came home in the evening. After feasting on her mouthwatering cuisine and washing it down with fine wine, she would slip into her sexy black nightie and allow the rest of the evening to take its course.
She hadn’t even finished her unemployment application before Ken Coffman declared that their marriage no longer worked for him and moved out of the house, leaving Sandi reeling.
In a matter of two weeks, she learned the number one contributing factor to the “unworkable” part of her marriage to Ken was a pierced and tattooed nineteen-year-old who had flunked out of college in Lubbock and moved home to live with her parents, who happened to be neighbors. That information squelched any notion Sandi might have had that she and Ken could put things back together. It hadn’t done much for her relationship with her neighbors, either.
She had known every nook and cranny of the bank that had employed her, but she’d had no clue what had been going on under her own roof.
Two weeks after that revelation, she found herself not only unemployed, but headed for divorce court for the second time.
She had filed for divorce, instructed her lawyer to clean Kenneth Coffman’s clock and at the same time, petitioned to have her name changed back to her maiden name. She had never liked that stupid name, Coffman.
She was through with men. Period. Exclamation point.
After all of that, all she’d had to do was swallow her pride, get back on her feet, find a job and a new place to live. Meanwhile, for a social life, she had joined Book Wranglers, a local reading club whose members had taken on the lofty goal of reading all one hundred of the books everyone should read in his lifetime. She was now sandwiching War and Peace, Fifty Shades of Grey and the Crossfire Series, which made War and Peace infinitely more entertaining.
She had arranged to meet with the elderly ladies at the Glen Cove Retirement Home for crocheting lessons one night a week and had produced half a dozen intricate tablecloths and an untold number of afghans that nested in a neat stack in a corner of her bedroom. When she needed a gift for someone, she simply plucked something from her stack.
She had bought a gym membership and worked out, took Yoga classes and forced herself to think positive. She was honed into the best physical shape of her entire life. She might be thirty-two, but she had the body of a twenty-year-old.
But the most productive thing she had done back in the dark aftermath of her divorce was enroll in a Wilton course in cake decorating. With her mother working in the Walmart bakery in Big Spring, she had learned a little about cake decorating through osmosis, so she had a penchant for it. Now, daily in LaBarkery, she used what she had learned about cake decorating from Wilton and from her mother.
***
Just then, the front door chimed again and Sandi turned around to see her mother pushing the heavy plate-glass front door open with her butt, struggling with her purse and balancing two Starbucks cups. Sandi strode forward and lifted the two cups from her hands. “Hey, Mom. I wasn’t expecting you.”
Her mother heaved a great breath and waved her hand in front of her face. “Whew. That was a handful.”
Sandi studied the cold cup. Not being a regular consumer of Starbucks drinks, she couldn’t identify its contents. “Whatcha got here?”
“Caramel Frappachino.”
“Yum. Let’s go into the back room.” Sandi led the way back to her tiny kitchen where she concocted and baked the goodies she sold in her shop. Here, she kept a small table and two chairs. “What are you doing in Midland?”
“My hours got cut. I ended up with the day off, so I decided to drive over to see you. I thought you might like a pick-me-upper. Lord, I can’t believe what I had to pay for these two drinks.”
Sandi and her Mom sat down together. “Your shop looks so pretty,” her mother said. “And you’re so busy. I can’t get over how this business has turned into such a success. You’ve been really lucky.”
“I know, right?”
“But luck runs out, you know.”
Sandi did a mental eyeroll. Her mother had barely said hello and she was already criticizing. She always counterbalanced a positive with a negative, thus Sandi herself had grown up with a foot firmly planted in each camp.
LaBarkery was successful. More so than Sandi could have imagined in her wildest dreams, but it wasn’t just a matter of dumb luck. “Mom, I wish you’d stop saying that. I’ve got a college degree in business and marketing, for crying out loud. I worked my ass off to get it.”
Her memory zoomed back to her student days when she had worked at an array of bad minimum-wage jobs. Not intending to let herself get sidetracked, she continued, “I’ve researched. I’ve studied trends. Do you know what I read just this week?”
Her mom’s wide-eyed look came across the rim of her plastic cup. Her head shook.
“This year, the citizens of this country will spend forty billion dollars on their pets. Forty billion. And a piece of that
fruit is there for my little business to pluck.”
Her mother set her cup on the table, still shaking her head. “You can’t believe stuff like that, Sandi. People make it up. Forty billion? Why, I don’t even know how to write a number like that.”
Mom had no concept of a billion dollars, Sandi knew. How could she? She hadn’t finished high school, had worked for low wages her entire life, still worked for low wages though she had been employed by Walmart for almost twenty years.
“When you graduated from college, I was so proud of you,” her mother said. “I hoped you’d get a good job and earn a good wage with a big company that would give you benefits. Like I’ve got.”
Sandi stared at her a few beats, considering again the different wavelengths on which she and her mother functioned. Owning her own business would never occur to the woman sitting across the table.
“Benefits.” Sandi said acidly and gave a huff. She had a hard time glossing over the bitterness she felt over her former bank employment and layoff. “Mom, read my lips. I had a good job with a big bank. I was there more than five years. And look what happened to me.”
Her mother sighed.
Sandi sighed, too. “We’ve had this conversation more times than I can count. I always wanted to own my own business. You know that.”
“But it’s such a risk. If you weren’t so tied down by all of this”—she gestured around the room with her hand—“you could still be out looking for another job with a big company. Look at me. I’m coming up on twenty years. I’ve got health insurance. A 401(k). Stock, too.” Her mother leaned forward. “And when I do retire, because I’ve been there so long and been a loyal employee, I’ll have a lifetime discount.”
“That’s what you’ve worked twenty years for?”
Her mother’s mouth pursed. “Don’t be so smart-alecky, miss know-it-all. You’re a single woman now and you’re over thirty years old. You need to be thinking about things like that.”
Sandi had only one of those benefits her mother had just ticked off—a health insurance policy for which she paid a fortune. Even with its coverage, a serious illness or accident could destroy her. And retirement? She had cashed in her 401(k) and used the money to start LaBarkery. Was her mother right? Should she be out pounding the pavement looking for a “big company” job?
