by Phoebe Fox
“What’s wrong?” I asked before he’d even made it over my doorjamb.
Ben shook his head, but his reply was waylaid by a joyful Jake greeting his father as if he were the second coming of Christ.
Ben knelt down to pet the dog. “Hey, Jakie. Hey, buddy. How’s my boy?”
Jake was quite well, he let his father know with a toothy doggy grin, some really intensive sniffing of Ben’s entire person, and a tail that wagged so hard his whole butt swayed back and forth. His antics at least brought a small smile to Ben’s weary face.
“Thanks for looking after him,” he said, glancing up at me. “I know it’s not easy.”
“It’s my pleasure. How’s your mom?”
He stood and I led us into the living room. “She’s okay, the doctors said, as far as her head—no concussion,” he said as we sat side by side on the sofa. “But the problem was her knee, apparently. I didn’t know how bad it was; she’s got pretty much no cartilage left in there, and she’s been in constant pain.”
“That’s why she fell?”
“She says it just went out on her. Turns out she needs a replacement.”
“That’s good, right? They can fix the problem.”
“Yeah. We scheduled it for end of August, as soon as I finish the build in Cedar Key, so I can help take care of her.”
I frowned. “Will she be okay till then?”
The tight expression returned to his face. “The doctor has her on a pain management regimen for now. Not much else we can do at the moment.” He reached over to rub the top of Jake’s nose, which was resting on his thigh. “Meanwhile she can’t keep Jake with a bum knee—he’s way too intense for that.”
We both looked down at the dog as he stood gazing adoringly at Ben, head still pressed to his lap. “Well, why don’t I just keep Jake till you get back?” I said.
I was as startled to hear the words coming out of my mouth as Ben looked at hearing them. Jake, apparently, did not find this offer to be a surprise at all. At the sound of his name he bulled his way past Ben’s legs and shoved his nose under my arm. I scratched his ears, and his eyes narrowed into slits as he started a contented panting. “There you go. See? He approves.”
“That’s incredibly nice of you, Brook, but I can’t ask you to do that. Jake’s probably functionally insane.”
He was a handful; that was true. And I certainly was no expert on taking care of a dog—or any living thing, actually. The dead aloe vera on the sill behind Ben’s head testified to that. Seriously, it takes work to kill an aloe vera. In Florida.
But I wanted to do it, I realized. Not too long ago I was actually reluctant to even meet Jake, afraid the dog would get attached to me and make things with Ben and me feel way too serious. But I was kind of falling in love with him already.
The dog, that is.
“Let me do this,” I said. “It’s just for a little while. And I like him. He likes me.” Jake surged forward and buried his head between my legs. “Maybe a little too much,” I joked as I pushed the dog away.
I could tell Ben was considering it. Taking Jake to his residence hotel and leaving the poor guy alone all day couldn’t be what he wanted.
I gave the boulder one last shove over the edge: “Seriously, it’s no big deal. I have a fenced yard, and I work at home. It’ll be like doggy summer camp.”
I knew the moment a smile crept over Ben’s face that the battle was won. “If you’re sure...that would be awesome. Thanks, Brook—really.”
Jake scooted closer, sitting at my feet and looking up adoringly at me. Already he was calming down. I petted the dog’s smooth head and returned his smile. “It won’t be any trouble at all.”
* * *
We went to get Jake’s doggy gear and took another big leap forward in our relationship: I met Ben’s mom. He’d thought it would be easier to transfer the extra set of bowls, dog bed, and a few toys from her condo, so that when he came home on weekends he still had supplies at his own house.
I’d heard about Adelaide the first time I’d met Ben, when he realized who I was—his mother had been a fan of my newspaper column from the beginning. As we came through the door of her condo she was lying on the sofa with a leg propped up and capped with an ice pack, and her face lit up when she saw me.
“Brook Ogden!” she said. “You look just like your picture in the paper. How delightful to finally meet you. I’m sorry I can’t get up at the moment.”
“Please don’t,” I said, coming across the room and offering a hand to shake.
She laughed and lifted her arms. “I’m afraid it has to be a hug. I feel like I know you already, between my son and the column. And you were such a dear to have my door fixed.”
I leaned in for her quick firm hug; she smelled like rosemary and clean linen. Stepping back, I watched mother and son together while she and Ben chatted about her knee and she absently stroked Jake’s soft white head. In person there was a stronger family resemblance—I could see now that the laugh lines around Ben’s eyes were Adelaide’s, and the fullness of his lower lip, the slight overlap of his two front teeth.
Ben had told his mom on the phone that we were coming, and that Jake would be staying with me for a while. While he went into the kitchen to gather the dog’s supplies, I held the leash and sat at a chair where Adelaide could talk to me without craning her neck. Jake stretched the leash to get to her, and she reached out a hand.
“Despite what my son seems to think, I’m not made of glass,” she said. “You can let him go.” He went immediately to Adelaide, sitting beside her and gently bumping her shoulder with his nose until she petted him. “I’m going to miss this boy. He’s good company.”
Guilt pricked me. “I’m sorry—I think Ben’s just worried that—”
She waved a hand, which Jake followed with his nose like a bouncing ball until she dropped it back onto his head. “It’s for the best, I know. Jake doesn’t seem to know his own size.”
I smiled. “He is kind of a giant lapdog.”
She moved her gaze to me. “It’s nice of you to take him for a little bit. I’m so glad Ben has someone he can count on.”
Her words gave me a strange little lurch in my belly.
“I presume Ben told you how much I love your column?” she went on. “And your radio appearances.”
“Thank you.”
“I expect you help a lot of people. You give such kind, positive, practical advice.”
I was trying to resist basking in her compliments like a lizard on a rock. Generally I could control my childhood insecurities, but Adelaide was offering the kind of unvarnished approval I wished I could hear from my own mom, and rarely did.
“Thank you,” I murmured again, rather than throwing myself belly-up on the ground like Jake and lapping up her praise.
Ben came back in with a brimming grocery bag in one hand and a plush dog toy in the other. “I left the treats, Mom, in case I bring Jake over for visits when I’m home on weekends.”
“Oh, please do. The house is going to feel a little empty without him.” A shadow crossed her face, and—like a patellar reflex—I wanted to fix it.
“I can bring him over now and then to see you,” I blurted.
She and Ben looked at me.
“Really?” his mom said. “Well, I’d love a visit, if you have time. From both of you.”
“Done.” I pulled out my phone and we exchanged numbers.
“That was nice of you to offer to visit my mom,” Ben said once we were outside at our cars. I’d followed him over, since he had to leave directly for Cedar Key. “And unnecessary. I know how busy you are.”
“I don’t mind. I liked your mom.” I grinned. “And she likes my column. Maybe I’m just being self-absorbed.”
He moved closer, pressing me against the
warm metal of my Honda behind me, and pulled me to him with the hand not holding Jake’s leash. “I don’t think so,” he said in a low tone I felt shiver through my body. “I think you’re pretty great, actually.”
I wrapped both arms around him, liking the feel of his hand at the small of my back. “You do, huh?”
He nodded, a tiny grin flirting with the corner of his lips just before he lowered them to mine.
Heat flared up inside me, and I pushed away from the car and angled into him, sorry as hell that he was about to get in his car and head out, and I had to get in mine and head home without making the kind of intimate connection Ben’s kiss was making me crave.
I yelped as something jabbed me right between the butt cheeks, and spun around to see Jake grinning up at me, wagging his tail.
That wasn’t exactly the kind of intimate connection I’d had in mind.
twelve
“What the hell is that? A polar bear? A yeti?” Sasha took a step back on my front walk, eyeballing Jake, who’d scrambled past me the moment the door cracked open. She and Stu had come to pick me up for Sunday dinner at Mom and Dad’s. Not attending was not an option, short of being unavoidably out of town, hospitalized, or—in the case of my mother for a few difficult months I wished I could forget—suddenly separated from your husband of thirty-three years.
“It’s Jake—Ben’s dog,” I said. “I’m watching him.”
“Oh, my God!” Stu exclaimed, stepping inside as Sasha followed and I closed the door to keep Jake from bolting. He dropped to his knees in front of the dog—he’d wanted one ever since our German shepherd, Mugsy, had died when we were teenagers. But my mom disallowed another pet “when you kids are going to be going off to college soon and leaving me and your father to take care of it,” and running his own landscape business since then meant he wasn’t home enough to be a good dog owner.
“Look at him! Who’s a big, beautiful boy?” Stu asked Jake, working the dog’s ears and head like a human car wash. “Who’s the best doggy? Who is it? Who is it?” He sounded like a crazy person, but I couldn’t help grinning. My brother was just a big kid. He and Jake might have been meant for each other—Jake’s tail was wagging so hard I was grateful my living room was bare of knickknacks, and his long pink tongue was lapping all over Stu’s face and into his laughing mouth. I grinned at Sasha’s revolted expression.
“FYI, it may be days before I come near you now that I’ve seen that, Stuvie,” she said. “There’s not enough mouthwash in the world.”
“It’s just doggy slobber,” he said, still in his crazy-baby voice. “There’s nothing dirty about that, is there, Jakie? No, there isn’t! No, there’s not!”
Riled up to new heights of ecstasy at having found his soulmate, Jake plowed right into Stu as he knelt, knocking my brother over so hard we heard his head crack against the bare concrete floor. I cringed, but Stu only laughed, letting Jake plop down on top of him and wrapping his arms around the dog’s huge furry body.
“That is one big bastard,” Sasha said.
Jake seemed to notice her for the first time as she spoke, and he scrambled up off of my brother—I worried he might puncture a lung with all his weight on the long nails on his giant Grinch paws—and beelined toward Sasha.
He lunged and shoved a nose between her legs and I scrambled for his collar.
Sasha took a quick step backward and pointed a finger at Jake. “That is not how you greet people. Sit.”
Jake’s butt dropped to the ground in front of her as if it were magnetized, and he sat staring patiently up at Sasha.
My mouth fell open. “How did you do that?”
“He’s a dog, Brook. You’re a human. You have to know who’s in charge.”
“I do know,” I muttered. “It’s Jake.”
“Aw, don’t be mean to him,” Stu said, sitting up. “He’s just a big bear. Aren’t you, you big bear?”
Jake trotted back to Stu, tongue lolling happily at his playmate, until Sasha made a sharp, staccato noise in her throat—a loud “eh-eh!” sound that startled me and Stu as much as it did Jake, who froze in his tracks. “Sit!” she commanded, and Jake did.
“Seriously, Sash, this is amazing,” I said, stunned. “I had no idea you were so good with dogs.” Her parents had never let her have a pet. They could barely be bothered with Sasha; the last thing they could have wanted was another creature demanding their attention.
“It has nothing to do with being good with animals. It’s just setting parameters. Get up, Stu—you can’t encourage him to have no manners like that.”
“Yeah, okay, you have a point,” he conceded, pushing Jake back so he could stand, and again I was shocked—Sasha handled my brother as well as she did Jake.
“Stay,” she commanded, and neither Stu nor Jake budged, both looking at her, waiting for her next decree. She winked at Stu. “Okay, goofball. Now that he knows he’s not in charge, you can play with the doggie.”
She might as well have fired a starting gun—Stu dropped down again and buried his face in Jake’s ruff, rubbing him all over and making muffled exclamations into his fur about Jake’s goodness and handsomeness and general state of perfection as Jake’s eyes practically rolled back in his head in delight.
I sat watching the dog’s delight. “Isn’t he cute?”
Sasha raised an eyebrow, but she was smiling too. “So’s the dog,” she said with a wink.
But as right as she was—both of them were adorable, lost in their mutual love fest—it wasn’t what I was thinking. Seeing my brother and my best friend with Ben’s dog gave me a glimpse of what they might be like as parents—Stu the perfect playmate and hands-on daddy, Sasha the one who kept order—and I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.
I left Jake behind at my house—there was no way my mom was going to tolerate slobber and dog hair and nails scratching her hardwood floors. After corralling him in my bedroom, I secured every single thing that I thought he might use as a chew toy—shoes, laundry, even electrical wires—and put actual chew toys on the floor as a distraction. Maybe I was getting the hang of this caretaking thing.
Mom was bustling over the stove when I arrived at six, the smells of roast chicken and rosemary and sautéing onions wafting through the house. I still wasn’t used to seeing the kitchen so thoroughly changed from the one of my childhood. My dad had been working on renovations for months during which Mom had had to operate in a gutted kitchen, with cookware stashed in closets and drawers all over the house and a two-by-four counter set up on sawhorses. For a long time I wondered if that had been part of the reason for her abrupt decampment from our family.
Now the kitchen looked like an ad in Martha Stewart Living: sleek granite countertops set off by tiles of smooth glass in rich spice colors that made me want to lick them, new stainless appliances, all framed by the glowing wood cabinets my dad had made himself over painstaking, careful months in his garage workshop while my mom grew bored and restless and finally left, like a Hollywood-movie cliché, to get back to her long-delayed “career” in theater.
I set the salad I’d made on the granite counter and leaned in to kiss her cheek as she stirred a brown gravy on the stove.
“Hi, Ma. Smells good.”
“I overcooked the chicken. It’ll be dry.”
At least she wasn’t any easier on herself than she was on me.
“I’m sure it’ll be delicious.” I poked into the sauce a finger that my mom summarily swatted away.
“Your brother’s late. Can you set the table?”
“Sure.” There was no mention of Sasha’s tardiness—all our lives, she could do no wrong. “We rode together. He and Sash stopped in the garage to say hi to Daddy.” I went to the silverware drawer and pulled out what we’d need, then fished cloth napkins from the pantry. Paper ones were not okay for Sundays.
/> “So how are rehearsals coming along?” I asked as I butterflied the edges of the first napkin.
“Oh! Slowly. Virginia Woolf is chockablock with dialogue, and you can’t paraphrase Albee. Our George is terribly uncertain with his lines, and he’ll skip whole pages when he flounders. I’m having to learn his part too so I know how to get us back on track.”
For all her disparaging report, her face glowed—the way it did every time she spoke about anything to do with theater.
“You’ve got pretty big chunks of your own dialogue to learn too, though, don’t you?”
“I do.” Mom nodded, then looked up directly at me. “How did you know that?”
I shrugged. “I rented the movie with Liz Taylor when you got cast.”
She turned back to her gravy, but not before I saw the expression of pleased surprise creep over her face. I was trying. We both were.
I finished laying out the place settings just as Stu and Sasha came in from the garage and Mom called out the three-minute warning—everyone’s cue to wash hands and report to the table. Sasha and Stu headed to the guest bath, so I wandered into Mom and Dad’s bedroom to use theirs.
Mom’s suitcase was neatly tucked into a corner, mute testimony to their strange new relationship. From Tuesday to Saturday, she lived in Naples in the tiny studio apartment she’d rented after her first foray back into theater last year—when she’d garnered fantastic reviews and grudging admiration from me for her real gifts onstage in The Lion in Winter. As soon as her rehearsals let out on Saturday afternoon, she came back and lived the other half of the week with my dad. He seemed okay with it, and I had to admit my mom was happier lately than I’d ever seen her.
Dad had come in from his workshop by the time I came out of the bathroom.
“Doll!” He threw his arms open wide and I stepped into them for one of his all-encompassing bear hugs. Dad always made you feel that seeing you was the best part of his whole day.
