by Neil Plakcy
He looked down at Rochester. “What’s your name, handsome?”
“He’s Rochester,” I said. “I’m Steve. Levitan.”
“Mark Pappas.” He looked at me. “You grow up around here?”
“I did. In the Lakes. You?”
“I thought you looked familiar. I live on Lakefront Drive.”
Though he was a few years older than I was, the Lakes was a compact neighborhood centered around two lakes – Mirror Lake and Reading Lake – and most of the kids knew each other. I vaguely remembered Mark as a sickly kid who often missed school. It was a shame that he was still so sick as an adult.
As we moved around I learned that Mrs. Curry, a quadriplegic woman in her sixties, had been at the Manor for nearly twenty years, while Mr. Bodnar, who was about my age, had been there for fifteen. “Got hit by a car when I was walking down State Street in Trenton,” he said. “Cut my lumbar spine like that. If it wasn’t for these people here, I’d have been dead long ago.”
It was awfully sad. I was glad when we finally made our way back to Edith; at least she had a chance to go home soon. Not that the place was terrible; the certified nursing assistants who moved around the room seemed genuinely caring, and the patients were clean, their sheets and bandages white and fresh. Posters advertised bingo nights, card games and knitting circles, and relatively new movies were shown on Tuesday afternoons. Motivational posters of beautiful landscapes urged patients to soar, believe and achieve.
“Now, no more walking on ice,” Lili said to Edith as we prepared to leave. “If you ever need anything, you call us, all right? One of us can bring you groceries or clear your walk for you.”
Edith had no children of her own, though I knew that many of her former piano students considered her part of their families. “I hate to impose,” Edith said.
“It’s not an imposition. Do you have someone to take you care of you at home when you’re ready?”
Edith nodded. “I have a long-term care policy, so as soon as I’m ready I can go home and have an aide live with me for a few weeks until I can get around easily.”
We both kissed her goodbye and Rochester led the way back out to the front door. Allison was chatting with an older woman I thought might be a doctor. “That’s Rochester,” Allison said to the woman. “He’s a sweetheart.”
“I’m Marilyn Joiner,” the woman said, walking over to us. She wore a pink wool turtleneck under her lab coat, with an intricate gold chain around her neck. Her straight brown hair was flecked with gray. “I’m the administrator here. I happened to look into the lounge when you were visiting. Thank you so much for coming. I’m a big proponent of pet therapy, and so many of our patients respond very well to dogs and cats.”
“We’re happy to be of help,” I said.
“Do you think you might come back sometime? I know you came to visit Edith, but she’ll be going home soon. As you may have seen, we have a mix of long-term and short-term patients—it’s something that Manor Associates does with facilities in small towns, to keep people close to family and friends. But some of our long-term residents have no one to visit them, and I’m sure they’d appreciate seeing your handsome boy.”
“We’d be happy to,” Lili said. We waved goodbye to Allison as we walked outside. As soon as the door was closed, Rochester nearly pulled my arm off tugging me over to the base of a pine tree, where he lifted his leg.
“Good boy,” I said when he was finished. I reached down to scratch around the scruff of his neck. “You were very well-behaved in there. I’m proud of you.”
He nodded his head and woofed once.
“Sometimes I think that dog really understands you,” Lili said.
“I know he does.”
On the ride home, I wondered how my father had done at Crossing Manor. Because I was in prison at the time, I couldn’t fly back to visit him. Had anyone else? He could be a prickly guy, and I could remember many times when he’d yelled at me as a kid, usually because I mouthed off to him. But he also had a lot of friends from work and from our old neighborhood. I hoped he’d had good care and the love of those around him.
2 – Final Papers
On the way home, we stopped at the supermarket so Lili could run in and pick up a few things she needed for the dinner she was preparing that night for my friend Rick and Tamsen, the woman he was dating. Rick and I hadn’t seen each other for a while; I’d been nesting with Lili after she moved into the townhouse with me and Rochester, and he’d been spending time with Tamsen and her young son.
Rick and I were the same age, though he was graying faster than I was – probably all the stress of police work. He was a couple of inches shorter than I was, and more muscular, from running and regular gym workouts. We’d first met in high school chemistry class, becoming pals over fumbled experiments. When I returned to Stewart’s Crossing we’d met up again at the Chocolate Ear café, and bonded once more over bad divorces. He was a detective with the Stewart’s Crossing police department, and occasionally Rochester and I had been able to help him with investigations, often against his will.
As soon as Lili got out of the car at the grocery, Rochester tried to squirm his way between the seats to the front. At eighty-plus pounds, though, he was having trouble, and I pushed gently on his chest to reinforce that he belonged in the back. “You stay there, puppy.” I turned in my seat to face him. “Did you have a good time today? Did you like having all those people pay attention to you?”
I already knew the answer was yes. Rochester was true to his breed – a happy dog who loved attention, was gentle with kids and was always ready to play. I had worried a bit about how he’d react to having Lili move in, when he wouldn’t be the center of my life any more. But instead, he’d been delighted to have another human around for tummy rubs and treats. Lili and I often walked him together after dinner and talked about our days as he sniffed and peed. I called Rochester my Velcro dog, because he always wanted to be around me, curled around behind my office chair or lying on the floor beside my bed. It was nice to have another person in the house he could pay attention to sometimes.
As the time Lili was in the grocery stretched out, I took Rochester for a walk around the parking lot. It was cold and dry but he had his own fur coat, and he happily chased a squirrel up a tree, then sniffed the wheels of a couple of cars.
When Lili finally reappeared she was pushing a cart full of groceries. “All this for Rick and Tamsen?” I asked when I met her at the car.
“I figured as long as I was here I’d do a big shop.”
I started loading the bags into the Beemer’s trunk, where they’d be safe from Rochester’s inquisitive nose and tongue. Though it was chilly and gray, felt happy to have Lili and Rochester there in my world.
Once we got home and unloaded the groceries, Lili and I went into the kitchen and started to prepare dinner, and Rochester lay down flat on the kitchen tile, his front paws outstretched, his head resting between them. His eyebrows twitched as he watched me sprinkle the baking potatoes with kosher salt, then wrap them in aluminum foil.
I gave in to the pleading in his eyes and handed him a doggie treat. I’d had to stop buying the little ones in the shape of T-bone steaks, because they were made in China, and I had read a couple of horror stories online about dogs getting poisoned. The new treats weren’t as cute, but they were made in the US with all natural ingredients. Rochester didn’t mind; he gobbled them all.
“I have some final papers to grade,” Lili said, once the roast and potatoes were in the oven. “I’m going upstairs to try and knock them all out.”
“This is one of those times when I don’t miss teaching.” I had taught as an adjunct at Eastern for a couple of semesters, but since becoming the administrator of the college’s Friar Lake conference center, I’d stopped. “When are grades due?”
“Tuesday. So I have time. But I hate to let things slide until the last minute. And I’ll be busy policing the rest of the department.”
In ad
dition to teaching classes in photography, Lili was the chair of the fine arts department, which involved a great deal of administrative work. She went to the small bedroom we shared as an office, and I relaxed on the sofa downstairs, with Rochester sprawled on his side next to me.
Lili had given me an early Hanukkah present, an iPad, and I was still setting it up. I’d always considered myself a PC guy and resisted Apple products, but once I’d bought my first iPhone I had gotten hooked. I wasn’t going to give up my Windows-based laptops, though – partly because the tools I used for my occasional illicit forays online were there.
I had spent a year in a California prison for computer hacking, and only recently finished my two-year parole. Mine wasn’t a malicious crime; I had hacked into the databases of the three major credit bureaus and placed a red flag on my then-wife’s credit cards, so that she couldn’t drive us into bankruptcy in a flurry of retail therapy after suffering her second miscarriage.
Though the state of California had tried, I hadn’t been rehabilitated, and I had continued to use my hacking skills to help Rick, though he frequently told me not to. But that summer, after he and Lili had staged an intervention, I had acknowledged that my itchy fingers and my arrogance could get me into trouble again if I wasn’t careful.
I had joined an online support group for ex-hackers and promised that I would talk to either Lili or Rick before I tried anything stupid again. I’d only screwed up once so far, but I knew how slippery that slope was. I was sure that part of Lili’s incentive to buy me the iPad was to remove some of the temptation, because the hacking tools I had required a PC’s operating system to work.
I played around at the Apple store for a while, looking for interesting apps I could download, and eventually the smell of the rib roast in the oven brought Lili back downstairs. I set the table with my mother’s Lenox china and the Baccarat crystal tumblers Lili had collected on duty-free shopping sprees, and by the time the food was ready, the house was glowing with candles and filled with delicious scents.
Rochester heard Rick’s truck pull up in the driveway, and answered the joyful barks of Rick’s bristly-haired black, white and brown Australian shepherd, Rascal, with a few of his own. It was a canine cacophony that didn’t stop until both dogs were in the house, chasing each other up and down the stairs.
Tamsen was a beautiful blonde who had also grown up in Stewart’s Crossing, but she was a few years younger than Rick and I were. She had a natural grace that made me think she might have been a fashion model at some point. She certainly had the figure for it, with a shapely bust and long legs. There was also a gravity to her, perhaps the result of losing her husband when she was young and having to raise her son Justin on her own.
After all the kisses and handshakes, Tamsen said, “Something smells yummy.”
“Standing rib roast with baked potatoes,” Lili said.
“That was Kyle’s favorite,” Tamsen said. “I haven’t had it in years.” Kyle Morgan, Tamsen’s first husband, had been an Army lieutenant and had been killed in Iraq a few years before. “I’m sure it’s going to be delicious. My mouth is watering already.”
Lili took her arm and the two of them walked into the kitchen. Rick and I went into the living room. “How’s it going?” I asked.
“In general, or with Tamsen?”
“Whichever.”
“Tamsen is great. We really connect. A couple of weeks ago, before it got cold, Justin went to her sister’s for the weekend, and we went up to a country inn in the Poconos with Rascal. We hiked during the day and played pool in the evening and had a great time.”
“And the whole Kyle thing?” I knew Rick had been reluctant to date Tamsen because he’d be competing with a dead war hero.
“He’s a part of her life, the way Tiffany will always be a part of mine.” Tiffany was Rick’s ex, who had left him shortly before I returned to Stewart’s Crossing. “He sounds like he was a great guy, but Tamsen has made it clear he wasn’t a saint. And Justin was still so little when Kyle left for Iraq that he doesn’t remember his dad much.”
“Okay, boys, dinner is served,” Tamsen called from the dining room, and Rick and I joined her and Lili there. The dogs were right on our heels, and settled beside us on the floor, waiting for tidbits.
“How’s the crime beat in Stewart’s Crossing?” Lili asked Rick over salad. “Nothing new for the Hardy Boys?”
When Rochester and I first began helping Rick, he’d referred to me as either Nancy Drew or Miss Marple, but eventually I’d graduated in his eyes to Joe Hardy, the younger of the two investigative brothers.
“Only ordinary drama,” Rick said. “A couple of break-ins out at Crossing Estates, though we pulled in a guy for that, an ex-con with a long record for burglary. A shoplifter at the hardware store and a couple of domestic disturbances. And it looks like we’ve got a growing homelessness problem.”
I remembered the man we’d seen outside the nursing home and realized I’d seen a few other homeless people around town.
“The economy is taking its toll,” Rick said. “Lots of people are upside down on their mortgages, and those layoffs in New York and Philly are reverberating here. I know a guy who used to be a greenhouse assistant at Teacups and Tulips until they had to cut back because the rich folks weren’t buying fresh flowers. Now he sleeps in the woods behind their parking lot.”
“Hannah says that the Friends are getting involved,” Tamsen said. Hannah was her older sister, the Clerk of the Meeting in Stewart’s Crossing. “We’re going to serve dinner to the poor and the homeless on Christmas day.”
“That’s a lovely gesture,” Lili said. “There’s a problem in Leighville, too. People gravitate there because students can be so wasteful, so the dumpsters are full.”
“You haven’t been dumpster-diving, have you?” Rick asked.
She shook her head. “But I’m putting together lesson plans for the course I’m teaching this winter on photojournalism, and I’m including a unit on homelessness.”
“What does that involve?” Tamsen asked. “When I think of photojournalism I think of those pictures in the newspaper of wars and natural disasters.”
“That’s the way things used to be,” Lili said. “But with the budget cuts in print media, that career is going the way of buggy-whip makers. Today’s photojournalists are more likely to focus on issues and use their pictures as a way of pushing social change.”
Lili and Tamsen took away the salad plates and brought out the rib roast and potatoes. We talked more about photojournalism and life in Stewart’s Crossing as we ate, and the dogs nosed us for handouts. By the time we had demolished slices of the awesome carrot cake that Tamsen had baked, the dogs had slumped into post-beef comas and the humans were lounging in back in their chairs.
After Rick, Rascal and Tamsen left, Lili and I took Rochester for a quick late-night walk. “Do you ever stop to think how fortunate we are?” Lili asked. “We both have our health, we have jobs, and we have a roof over our heads. So many people aren’t as lucky.” She turned her head and pretended to spit three times. “Keyn ahora.”
I remembered my father using that same expression after mentioning anything good in our lives, an imprecation against the evil eye. “We’ve both been hit with life events,” I said. “But we’ve been resilient.”
Lili had bounced back after two divorces and an abortion, and though I knew she still suffered from some of the things she had seen as a photojournalist, she was at heart an optimistic person. I had suffered the loss of two unborn children, the destruction of my marriage and my career in IT, as well as my year’s incarceration.
“It’s not just the ability to be resilient,” Lili said. “Some people don’t have the emotional and financial resources we do. I read somewhere that a huge percentage of people on the streets have psychological problems.”
“I consider myself very fortunate,” I said, taking Lili’s hand. “I had a home to come back to and a dog to teach me how to love again
. And then I met you, which was the luckiest thing yet.”
I hoped that my luck would hold, and that I wouldn’t do something to screw up my relationship with Lili. Even after less than a year together, my heart told me that what Lili and I had was so much stronger than what I’d had with Mary. Sure, Lili and I had small problems, but at heart I knew we were well-suited to each other, and she seemed to agree.
* * *
Sunday morning Rochester didn’t want to walk very far, which was unusual for my happy-go-lucky dog, and he seemed to be favoring his back right leg. I was attuned to his moods and I’d learned that he could be very skilled at hiding pain. When we got home, I sat down on the tile floor and pulled him over to me. “Let’s see what you’ve got going on, puppy,” I said.
He squirmed and wiggled but I immobilized him and shifted so I could see check each of his paws. He had torn a toenail on one of his back paws, and the nail bed was red and swollen. “What did you do? I trimmed your toenails last week.”
He looked up at me with a woeful face. We had a regular grooming routine. I cleaned his teeth every couple of days with turkey-flavored toothpaste; I groomed him with a special brush that pulled dead fur from his undercoat; I swabbed his ears with medicated pads and whenever his toenails got too long I trimmed them with an electric gadget.
“What’s up?” Lili asked as she walked downstairs.
“We’re going to have to go see Dr. Horz first thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “Rochester has an infected toenail.” I cleaned the wound and squeezed some antibiotic ointment onto it, and then sat on the floor scratching Rochester’s belly.
Edith called later that day to thank us for our visit. “It was so wonderful to see you,” she said. “I admit, I get a little depressed here. Sometimes it feels like God’s waiting room, that people come here to die. My roommate, that poor Mrs. Tuttle? She passed away right after you came to see us.”
“I’m sorry, Edith,” I said.
“I’m sure it was her time, dear,” Edith said. “It was very sweet that she reached out to Rochester just before she died. He might have been the last being who touched her.”
