A Home for Goddesses and Dogs

by Leslie Connor

  I could see the girl now—Florry—crouching in front of a row of wire cages. One door hung open. I saw a pair of little shining animal eyes in the dark corners. But mostly, I saw Florry. She was small and probably a few years younger than us, with nut-brown hair that hung forward in stringy pieces and brushed her jutting jaw. Her arms were wrapped close to her body as if she were holding her coat shut. She scrunched up her nose and snickered. She seemed distant and dreamy, and just as it hit me that she was special, Sari leaned close to me and whispered, “She has an intellectual disability. Should have told you. Her speech is unusual, but if you listen, everything makes sense. She loves animals.”

  “Hey, Florry,” Raya said. “We brought a new friend. This is Lydia. Can we come in?”

  “Yee-ah,” said Florry. “But you be’er be quiet round here. Y’on’t scare ’em.” She gave us a bit of a big blue eyeballing.

  “We’ll be quiet,” Sari said. She kept her voice warm and whispery. Florry stood up, still pulling her coat close. Was she cold? Poor kid. No. She was holding something in her arms—a bundle with some weight to it.

  Then she turned and I could see the creature she held against her chest—a beautiful curl of rich reddish fur with long ears laid neatly back.

  Oh, a rabbit. Bun-bun.

  “Who do you have there?” Sari asked.

  Florry formed the words slowly and deliberately. “Bellshin hey-yaw.” She set her lips against the rabbit’s head. She looked up and fixed large eyes on us. Then she nuzzled a smile into the rabbit’s fur. She said, “We just got ’em. And we’re the onliest few what raises ’em.”

  Raya leaned toward Florry. “Wait. You’re what?”

  Florry twisted gently side to side but did not repeat herself.

  “Only a few?” Raya said. Then her eyebrows popped up. “Oh, you’re telling us not very many other people raise this kind?” Florry didn’t speak but her face changed. She brightened—ever so slightly. “And what’re they called? What was that you said before?” Raya asked.

  Again, Florry didn’t answer. This was her way, I decided. She wasn’t being sassy or rude. But if you didn’t get it at first, she waited you out.

  Sari said, “I heard bell and shin, and something like hey-yaw.”

  “Me too,” I whispered. Raya and Sari both looked at me, probably surprised that I had spoken. “Bell shin,” I whispered. I ran the sounds together. “Bellshin. So, wait. Is it Belgian? Belgian something?”

  The pleased look filled Florry’s face—like the first fraction of a second of what might become a smile but then it doesn’t quite break open.

  “You’re right, Lydia.” Sari gave me a gentle nudge. “Now what’s hey-yaw?”

  Raya shook her head. “I got nothin’.”

  “Well, it’s something to do with rabbits, right?” I took a look into the wooden enclosure, where two more of the red rabbits hopped along on their fine-boned feet. They stood tall off the floor, ears high. Then one stretched upward with forefeet on the wooden wall. The poses reminded me of illustrations from an old book of fables Mom had. Fables, including the story of the tortoise and the hare—

  “Hare?” I said. “Belgian Hare?” I wondered, Was that a thing?

  Florry’s face wakened again. She might have even nodded a little.

  “There it is.” Raya drew a check in the air. “You’re good, Lydia.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered. I crouched in the hay. A rabbit came near, then bumped its nose on my sleeve.

  “They so soff,” Florry said. She tilted her head until her ear touched her shoulder. I wanted to know more about Florry Gerber. And I wanted to draw the gorgeous Belgian Hares.

  “Florry,” I said. I slid my phone from my pocket and showed it to her. “Is it okay if I take some pictures?”

  “I yon’t cay-yaw.”

  I don’t care.

  My ear was adjusting.

  She stooped and let the rabbit she was holding gently to the floor. The other two hopped right over to it. Touched base, nose to nose.

  I did photograph those Belgian Hares—from overhead and down low in the hay, face on and tails turned.

  By the time I finally stepped out of the stall, Raya and Sari were at the open door, out of earshot, I figured. I turned back to thank Florry Gerber. Then I whispered to her, “Hey. You’re the Goddess of the Rabbits, aren’t you?”

  She wrinkled her nose at me and snickered. Then Florry Gerber said the strangest thing of all. She called right out loud, “I know your muh-tha!”

  My mother?

  21

  Paper Friends

  As we left the Gerber driveway, Raya and Sari were walking just ahead of me, our boots scraping, once again. My two welcomers were quiet. I knew why. Mom had been right: dead mothers make people uncomfortable. They’d heard Florry announce that she knew my mother. Raya and Sari had both blanched.

  Now, on the road, Raya turned back toward me and spoke. “So. Man. Sorry about that.”

  “Florry must have gotten confused,” Sari said. “It takes a little longer for her to understand some things.” Suddenly I was walking between them. Sari patted my shoulder with her mitten-covered hand.

  “It’s fine,” I said. Maybe I should have helped by saying what we all knew: Florry Gerber couldn’t possibly know my mother. But it was so much more interesting to me that she believed she did.

  “That was sweet what you said to her,” Sari said. “The Goddess of the Rabbits. . . .” My blood rushed. I hadn’t meant for Sari or Raya to hear that.

  “Florry liked it,” Sari went on. “She knew you were saying something special about her. What made you think of that? Goddess?”

  “It just popped into my head.” I shrugged.

  “That’s so cool,” said Sari. “I like thinking of Florry as a goddess.”

  “Yeah,” said Raya. Her eggplant-colored head bobbed and her eyebrows arched. “And ya know, it’s accurate.”

  Accurate but strange. That’s what she really meant.

  I probably seemed so weird to these girls. Whatever. They’d been nice to bring me out. Soon they’d drop me home. I’d see them at school and we’d say hello because our class was tiny, and we really couldn’t get away with not greeting one another. We knew significant facts. We were raising tiny trout.

  I pulled my jacket closer. Checked the sky. Something was changing here in the middle of the day. The wind was slicing through the sun’s warmth. Hello, Weather Goddess. I drew my hands up inside the sleeves of my jacket, into the cuffs of Mom’s sweater. I gathered her knitting around my fingers. We walked on. Raya and Sari began to chat again. I dropped several steps back, where my mind could wander.

  I thought about the last year that I’d gone to school. Fifth grade. Just another Monday . . . until I’d walked up on something in the lunchroom—something I wasn’t meant to hear.

  Beth-Anne Carlo had been to my house the Saturday before. We’d planned on a trip to the city flea market, but we’d had to scratch that because Mom’s energy had tanked early that day. (It happened a lot. We couldn’t predict.) So we’d spent the day baking cookies instead and making collages. We’d gone through old magazines and had cut out colors and patterns. We’d found the best faces, best noses, eyes, and mouths. We’d cut them at funny angles, mixed and matched them. “Cubists for the day,” Mom had said.

  The new faces were weird, fascinating, and plain hilarious. We kept playing, dropping a large eye on the same face with a small one. That sort of thing. Beth-Anne and I had both fallen on the floor laughing.

  “Look! We Frankensteined them!” she’d said.

  Then Mom had had an idea: we should create Great Goddesses of the Flea Market. For the first time, I’d thought about that—how the goddesses had so often replaced, or stood in for, the things we’d had to miss. Mom let us pick photos from the Wasserman Studios folio. Beth-Anne and I “dressed” our goddesses in bright, paper-scrap colors. We surrounded them with trinkets and baskets full of ridiculous things for sale,
like pink fish heads, spotted apples, and even spare hands, just to be bizarre. We cut and tore, pasted, and painted for hours. We’d had a great day. Or so I’d thought.

  On that following Monday I’d come up behind Beth-Anne, who’d appeared to be holding a lunch-table audience captive. Slowly, I’d tuned in. “So there I was,” she’d complained, “stuck for my entire Saturday with Lydia, her mother, and all their paper friends. . . .” She’d waggled her fingers beside her ears.

  There’d been a lot of snickers at the table. Sympathetic groans. Then Amelia Sykes had spotted me standing there and she’d cleared her throat. The girls had ducked their faces. Lunches had been left and Beth-Anne had looked truly horrified.

  I’d gone home that day and I’d sifted through the papers on our table. I’d unearthed a few fairly recent goddesses. I looked at the faces, some serene and some intense, some a little angry, I suppose. It was funny, I couldn’t always remember which ones were more Mom’s handiwork and which were more mine because we’d passed them back and forth. But Mom hand lettered all the titles—like “The Goddess of an Early Spring,” “The Goddess of Perfect Sleep,” “The Goddess of Home Repairs.”

  Anyway, I’d told Mom what had happened at school. Then I’d said, “I’m not really upset. I’m surprised. It seemed like Beth-Anne had a pretty good time here.”

  “Hmm. I thought so too,” Mom had agreed.

  “She made a goddess. A great one,” I’d said.

  “But you know what, Lyddie, probably both things are true. Beth-Anne had a fine time. We saw that. But she also expected something different on the day, and so she felt stuck here too. From there it’s a matter of attitude and how she chooses to tell the story. You know, what will get the biggest rise out of the friends at the lunch table.” She’d waited, then asked me, “So, what did you do?”

  “Well, Beth-Anne was embarrassed. I felt bad for her. So I just said, ‘Yeah, we had to totally change our plans.’ Then I ate my lunch. Some of it.”

  “Yeah.” Mom had nodded, her usual sweet smile on her lips. “Well done, Lyddie.”

  I’d never said anything more about goddesses—not to friends. I’d never invited Beth-Anne or anyone else over again. Turning point. My friends could not understand—not really—what it was like to have a mom who was so sick. (And no dad.) My life was too different from theirs. At the end of fifth grade Mom had decided to take me out of public school, and I hadn’t fought her on it.

  “Man! Do you guys feel that?” Raya said. She stopped still. I was jolted out of the memory. She stood on the road, turned her face up to the sky just briefly. “It’s turning out here. Brrr . . . ,” she said. She made a funny shivering noise with her lips.

  “I know,” Sari said. She made mitten fists. Her teeth chattered. But her jacket was flapping wide open.

  “Zip this!” Raya scolded. She grabbed the two halves of Sari’s jacket and pulled them together.

  “I c-c-can’t!” Sari squeaked. “I’m too c-c-cold to take my hands out of my mittens!” Raya sighed, hitched the zipper, and brought it up under Sari’s chin. “Th-th-thank you!” Sari chattered.

  “What are friends for?” said Raya. “By the way, you’re a dork.”

  “Y-y-yeah,” said Sari. Then they laughed as they walked, stamping their feet to make themselves warmer.

  I couldn’t help it, I smiled too. But inside I felt a weird split; I was half-happy and half-sad.

  22

  Ornery

  My old fifth-grade feelings stuck to me as I climbed the driveway to Pinnacle Hill Farm by myself. There was nothing wrong with Raya and Sari. They’d been all kinds of nice. But all morning, I’d felt like a log in tow. My life had a lot of unshareable parts—not things I was ashamed of, but things that seemed so exhausting to explain that I didn’t even want to try.

  When we’d parted at the bottom of the hill, Raya had checked with me. “You know where you are, right? This is your hill.” She’d pointed it out. I did know, but she was right to ask. As small as Chelmsford was, I felt spun around. We’d traveled off-road, and in fact we’d cut across a hilly field and a good patch of woods after that last stop at the Gerber farm.

  “We’ll come get you again, so keep the boots,” Raya had said.

  I’d looked at my feet. I’d never seen them in anything uglier than those brown boots.

  “There are more places to see,” Sari had told me as she’d waved her mitten.

  No, no . . . we are done. . . . Please don’t come back. . . .

  I’d felt bad for feeling that way, and that’s why I was crabby as I climbed the drive. I scuffed my foot hard on the gravel, watched a grassy wafer of damp manure fly off my boot. “Oh! Pee-ewe!”

  Aunt Brat’s boxy car was not in its spot outside the house when I crested the hill. Eileen’s junky truck was there, but with any luck, she’d gone with Aunt Brat, and maybe Elloroy had too. Then there’d be no people home. The nameless yellow dog would be in his crate, the old greyhound would be sleeping, and I could do what I wanted, which might be go upstairs and cry awhile. Or maybe even pull the lid off the goddess box for the first time since I’d arrived. I was dying to do it as much as I could not seem to make myself do it.

  You are a mess, Lydia Bratches-Kemp.

  I stepped onto the porch and the yellow dog crowed an alarm. Great. Now he was jumping up to the glass part of the door. Someone was home—or he’d escaped the crate. “Shut up,” I muttered. I cracked the door open. “Get down! Back! Back!” I called. He barked his head off. I stuck one arm and one knee inside and forced my way in through the smallest opening possible. I used my body to shove the dog back. If he got near the open door, he’d try to bolt. I had fresh blisters on both feet; I was in no mood to have to go tromping after him.

  I closed the door behind me, and the dog slinked away. He threaded himself in behind the furniture and gave me his suspicious look and a few deep woofs.

  “Lydia, you’re back!” Eileen came to greet me.

  “Yep.” Now Soonie came clicking across the floor as well. I gave her head an obligatory pat. “Okay, okay,” I said. I hoped she’d get it; I was done.

  “Good walk, was it?”

  “Oh, Yeah. Interesting. Farms,” I said. I let out a sigh.

  “Wonderful,” Eileen said. “Well, Brat’s at the grocery, but big news here. We’ve done it!” She wiggled a little cha-cha.

  “Done what?” I asked. (Had they won a lottery?) My blisters burned. I began the tender operation of stepping out of the borrowed boots.

  “We named the dog!”

  “Oh?” I said. I stood on one leg with one boot in my hand.

  “He’s Guffer!” she cheered. “But only if you agree. Like it?”

  “Guffer? Sounds fine,” I said. The newly named dog galloped forth. He snatched the boot right out of my fingers. “Hey!” I spoke sharply. “Give that back!” I lunged toward him. Wrong move. To the dog, that meant the chase was on. He leapt. He shook the boot for the kill.

  “Try the ‘Leave it!’ command,” Eileen suggested. “He’s catching on to that one. Sort of.”

  I was fuming. Maybe it was the blisters. Or maybe it was feeling that this Saturday morning, which I’d wanted to myself, was now gone. Or maybe it was hearing Eileen suggest that this dog—this Gumper, or Gruffer, or whatever—had caught on to even a single command. He had not! He was plain bad, and now he had a dirty, borrowed boot in his mouth and he was knocking mud and manure off it all through the house.

  “Leave it!” I snarled at him. “I said, leave it!” He dropped the boot, tucked tail, and ran, sideway-ish, behind the couch. Then he peeked around and stared at me while I swiped the boot off the floor. “Yeah . . . you sneaky piece of . . . ,” I spoke under my breath. But I knew Eileen could hear me.

  “Well. There, then,” she said, obviously a bit surprised. I could feel her looking at me as I set both boots into the tray by the door. I excused myself up the stairs. I kept my mad-hot face turned away from Eileen.

&nb
sp; Not much later I heard Aunt Brat arrive home. She and Eileen spoke in mumbly voices down in the kitchen. I guessed that they were putting groceries away. I guessed Eileen was telling on me—recounting my tantrum for Aunt Brat. I should go downstairs. Be helpful. But I didn’t. I sat on the bed popping the liquid out of my foot blisters and making decisions about whether to peel the skin off or flatten it back down to cover the raw spots.

  I heard Aunt Brat call up to me, “Lydia? We’re going to take the dogs around the perimeter.” They had a theory: this was how the new dog would learn where home was. Well, the edges of home, perhaps.

  “Okay by you?”

  “Sure is! See you soon!” I tried to find that chirp in my voice, but I don’t think it quite came up. I waited until I heard them go out. From my window over the flattish roof I watched them cross the yard. It was all of them: two dogs, two women, and Elloroy. Aunt Brat took long strides, Eileen lurched on her shorter leg, and Elloroy plodded, laying his long flat feet down in front of his body with care. The newly named—what was it? Goffer? Goofer?—led, of course, on the leash, turning back to lightly gnaw on Soonie if she trotted alongside him or passed him, which she did. The greyhound must win.

  They would not be out for long, I thought. I was alone and just a little cranky. Seemed like the perfect time to bust a bigger hole in that wall behind the sheep poster.

  And I did.

  23

  The Other Side of the Bricks

  The hole I made was roughly rectangular—and quick work. I set the flashlight inside and crouched down. I’d fit myself into small spaces before. I was long, but I was thin and foldable.

  I led with one arm and one shoulder, tucked my head, and pulled my body in sideways. I crouched in the chilly space, then stood up slowly, unsure how far above me the roof rafters would be. I stretched to my full height and shone the flashlight upward. I had at least a foot and a half to spare. I stood there grinning. How cool to be standing on this side of this ancient chimney—the side that no one ever saw!