Here to Stay (7 page)

“Yes, but you have great curiosity, Elijah, and a good mind. I’ve never forgotten the way you observed our dogs, trying to find out what makes each animal tick, watching how they interact with one another. Myself, I imagined you might become an animal behaviorist, something like that.”

Elijah flinched at his father-in-law’s perceptiveness.

Alan Atherton turned, gazed at Elijah. They were the same height, perhaps Elijah a half inch taller. “I know you love Sissy, and I know you’ll take care of her. But I hope it’s worth it to you,” he said, “and that it will never make you bitter.”

The words were almost a malediction to Elijah.
Bitter? Because he’d married the woman he loved? He found himself saying, “I certainly hope the same.”

“D
ID HE GET YOU
in trouble?” Mrs. Atherton demanded, using a curiously old-fashioned expression.

Sissy tossed her head indignantly. “Of course not. Elijah wouldn’t do that.”

“So this marriage hasn’t been consummated,” Mrs. Atherton clarified.

Sissy stood up from the couch. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

Her mother rose, too. “I cannot believe you did this to us, not to mention Clark.”

Sissy said nothing. It was time for her and Elijah to get going. Her heart twisted with the realization that this was probably the level of acceptance her husband could expect from her parents in the future.

At least Kennedy will be decent to him,
she told herself, wanting to get back to Kansas City to tell her sister that she’d married Elijah.

“You know,” Sissy said, “this family has always prided itself on being such a
good
family, but Elijah probably thinks he’s married beneath himself. He has no idea we were so tacky.”

“Beneath?” Mrs. Atherton exclaimed incredulously.

“We’re going to go tell his mother next. I bet someone in that house will say congratulations.”

“The Workmans have every reason to congratulate themselves on his ensnaring you. But rest assured, your father and I will protect any future inheritance of yours.”

“Ensnaring me? You think he’s a gold digger?” Sissy wanted to burst out laughing. Elijah was a man who
loved to work, who liked
making
, not
taking
, money. “I’ve loved Elijah since I was about twelve. I’m
happy
to be married to him.”

“That’s only because you don’t know what marriage is. Marriage is like a long conversation, and you’ve decided to have it with someone who doesn’t even speak the same language.”

“So…you’re not going to be civil to my husband.”

“I’m always civil,” her mother replied.

“Though we don’t exactly have your blessing.”

“Of course, you do,” her mother answered. “You’ll certainly need it.”

Sissy took a breath. She had a plan. She’d come here with a plan. But for the first time she was afraid. “I’ve come home to get some things. And Teddy, of course.”

Her mother stared. “Teddy is part of our kennel.”

“I am his owner. My name is on his AKC registration.” And she had earned some money—not much, but some—from his stud fees. Of course, now she herself wanted the best puppy he could produce.

“You’re not thinking of breeding him in Kansas City, are you?”

Sissy decided not to answer. Teddy was
her
dog.

“Does Elijah even have a place to live? A yard? And what is that thing out in your car? I don’t think either of you is ready for this.”

Knowing how strongly her mother felt about dogs, Sissy thought
this
referred to the possession of Teddy.

“You can’t afford children,” Heloise continued. “They’ll have to be raised like the Workmans.”

“I won’t object to that,” said Sissy. “I rather like the way Elijah has turned out.”

Her mother sniffed. “I thought you were old enough to think of someone besides yourself, Sissy. But now you’ve gotten into this situation, and you’re going to bring children into it, and you want to take Teddy, too. I can’t let you do this.”

Sissy had never been so angry in her life. She would not address further what her mother had said about children, which was so far beyond rude. Instead, she struck where she thought it might hurt most.

“Actually, Mom, you can’t
not
let me. He’s my dog.”

“Y
OU’RE MARRIED
?” Elijah’s mother was a small woman, with dark hair worn in a severe and old-fashioned bun. Elijah had inherited her brown eyes.

At her feet, Teddy and Whiteout, who had determined they were friends, were sniffing the baseboards.

Mrs. Workman turned to Sissy, clasped her hands and said, “Oh, I’m so glad. Oh, how lovely.” Then, “But…” She looked toward Elijah.

Elijah knew what was coming. Matthew, the brother just below him in age, was in a Trappist monastery and they were expecting him to be ordained the following spring. “We’ll speak to a priest, see if we can have the marriage blessed, Mom.”

She still seemed uneasy, but nodded, willing to leave this detail to Elijah.

Elijah’s teenage sister, Maureen, sat at the kitchen table in her waitress uniform, ready to go to work at one of the lakeside fish places. “Congratulations, Elijah. It’s nice someone will have you.”

Which earned her an ice cube down the back from Elijah’s water glass.

Sissy felt accepted and was glad. She’d visited the immaculate but very simple house many times before when she and Elijah were teenagers. She liked the Workmans, though when they were all together, they made a crowd. She wasn’t used to that.

Nervous, she watched Whiteout put his front feet up on the counter. She gave his leash a sharp jerk. “Off!”

Maureen said, “At least one of you will know what she’s doing.” And she gave Sissy a friendly wink.

Lake of the Ozarks

A
N HOUR LATER
, while Sissy and Elijah sat on the front deck of their honeymoon cabin, the dogs lay at their feet, each with a bone. The escape from Sissy’s parents’ house, had been made more unpleasant by the discovery, when they returned to the car, that Whiteout had jumped out and begun digging up her mother’s rose bushes.

Then, there was her mother’s fury at Sissy’s taking Teddy, in the end the only way she could fully unleash her anger at her daughter’s marriage.

Sissy moved to sit on Elijah’s lounge with him. She grasped his closest hand, his left, with the ring that matched hers. “I don’t have a wedding present for you.”

“Or I for you,” he said, pulling her against him. “This chair’s not quite big enough for both of us.”

“We’ll just have to get closer. Okay, let’s make a bargain. We’ll each name a gift we want. And I won’t ask for anything you can’t give me, and I know you won’t, either.”

“Like making love five times a day?”

His warm eyes delved into hers, and Sissy couldn’t help kissing him. “I love you,” she said.

“I have everything I want,” he told her, “but what is it you want?”

She sat up suddenly, urgently, and gazed at him. “A kennel. I want to raise and show shepherds as my parents do. But I want it to be
our
kennel, yours and mine.”

Elijah’s heart sank. Sissy, who knew how expensive it was to show dogs in conformation, let alone to raise them, thought he could afford this. Even if he made enough money…

He thought uneasily of Barbara and of everyone else at the Humane Society. It briefly occurred to him that his job might actually be in jeopardy if he did this. Trying for tact, he said, “Wouldn’t you rather stay with your parents’ kennel? Show with them? Otherwise you’d be competing against them.”

“I
want
to compete against them,” Sissy answered, her voice fierce. “I want to meet my mother in the German shepherd ring, and I want to win.”

Warily Elijah watched her eyes focus on some far-off victory.

“Don’t you see, Elijah?” she said, turning to him. “She thinks I’m coming down in the world in every way, that even Teddy will suffer from our marriage. She wanted to breed me to Clark Treffinger-Hart—I know that sounds crass—but you’re my choice, Elijah, and she said the most horrid things about the life we’re going to have together. We have to have our own kennel, and by God it’s going to leave hers in the dust.”

Elijah met her eyes. “Sissy, you might be coming
down in the world in some ways. I don’t make that kind of money.”

“But I have ideas. You see,
I’m
a really good handler. I can make money as one, as well as teach obedience. And I know how to do a lot of things myself. The grooming, for instance. Elijah, I want this so badly. I want to get to Westminster.”

The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Sissy wanted to go to the top. The top of her world.

And her world, in the view of the United States Humane Society, was one of questionable merit.

But Elijah didn’t say that—wouldn’t say that—not to this woman he loved. He would get flack for it, and he had no idea how they could pay for it, but how could he strike down her dream? “Okay,” he said and kissed her. “We can try to start a kennel, in a small way. But not with the goal of hurting your parents. I don’t want that.”

“If you’d heard her, you wouldn’t feel that way,” Sissy replied.

But Elijah could imagine the kinds of things Heloise Atherton had said. What he felt was saddened; Sissy’s mother couldn’t like him or feel resigned to Sissy’s having married him, yet he’d wished that she would. And he didn’t intend to injure his relationship with her parents further. He said softly, “Yes, I would.”

T
HEY MADE LOVE
in the queen-size bed in the cabin’s larger bedroom, and Elijah dispensed with condoms for the first time. “Oh, God,” he whispered when he was inside her, when they were one. “Sissy…”

She looked at his face, the craggy, handsome face that
kissed every part of her body, and his eyes were shining, wet with emotion.
He loves me. He really loves me.

Her heart surged, too, and she tried to be closer to him. The intense pleasure he brought sought her out, vibrating through her, washing over her.

Sometime later, holding her carefully, Elijah said, “I feel like we’ve always belonged to each other. I think we were made for each other. Now I’m with you as I’ve always wanted to be, and I only want more. I want to be inside you to know what you think and feel.”

Sissy pressed her face against his dark hair. “That’s how I feel, too.”

He met her eyes, and his seemed very beautiful to her. “You are so worth waiting for.”

Sissy thought she knew what he was saying, that she had been his first. She touched his face, trying not to replay the question that had troubled her once before. Did he believe she had been a virgin when they’d first made love? He was so gentle, so careful never to hurt her.

She considered things she could say now.
I wish I’d waited for you.
But that wouldn’t be quite true. If she hadn’t slept with her professor, she might not have slept with Clark, might not have realized she didn’t want to marry him, so might not be with Elijah now. One change anywhere along the line could have altered her life, and she was so grateful to be married to Elijah, in love with him. “I love you,” she said.

But she didn’t like his believing she’d had no other lovers. It hadn’t bothered her for Clark to believe that, but she didn’t want any misunderstanding or misperception between Elijah and herself. The problem was, if he
carried that idea of her, it might be important to him. She didn’t want to disappoint him with the truth.

She didn’t want to risk his loving her less.

After the incident with the babysitter and Gene’s retreating to the kennel, from where our bitch Martha defended his sanctuary, it was my wife’s opinion that Martha regarded our son, Gene, as one of her puppies.

—
Among the God Dogs,
Elijah Workman, 1990

July 20, 1969

S
ISSY SAT
beside Elijah on the plaid couch that they both agreed was ugly yet extremely comfortable, and stared at the image of their planet on the television.

“God,” Elijah whispered.

Sissy echoed the thought numbly.
God, don’t let it be true.

A man on the moon? No, not that. Many times in the years since she first left Echo Springs to go away to college she had felt her world turning upside down, but never so certainly as now.

She had everything she wanted in this moment. She was married to Elijah, who’d come home from work with shadows behind his eyes from what he’d seen.
She’d discovered that she and the animals who shared the small house had the power to chase away those shadows. And they’d begun buying the house, which was small and tacky, but
theirs
. On top of all that, she had bred Teddy to two different bitches and was expecting a good show puppy from each breeding.

She had never expected this, though.

Her period should have begun three weeks earlier. She hadn’t worried at first. She’d been late before, when life had become difficult, and she’d discovered to her horror that the man she’d been seeing was married. It had been exam week even. And certainly, running away from her own wedding counted as a difficult event.

She tried to work things out in her head, looked at the calendar a good deal, remembered the precise night she’d gone to Clark’s bed. There’d been no concern about her becoming pregnant, not with their wedding just days away.

If
she was pregnant, it
could
be Elijah’s baby. It just wasn’t very likely.

She was pretty sure she was pregnant. Her breasts had changed, seemed to be changing each day.

It annoyed her that Elijah seemed to notice nothing. And it relieved her. The last thing she wanted was to appear worried. About anything. And she knew how Elijah would react to the simple news that she was pregnant—he’d be thrilled. He’d love her more than ever. It was part of his old-fashioned nature, a nature she found endearing, strangely at odds with his rugged, craggy good looks, the look his wolfish grin gave him.

And yet…And yet what a relief it would be to
dispense with pretense, to say, “Elijah, I wasn’t a virgin when I married you. I am not the embodiment of your romantic daydreams. I’m
human
.” And flawed.

Well, he knew she wasn’t perfect. He kept things tidier than she did. Never having lived in a home with servants, he and all his siblings had always been given household chores. She wasn’t even an especially great cook, but he was in love with her anyhow.

Teddy jumped up on the couch beside her and began licking her face. She buried her fingers in the dog’s fur.

The telephone rang, and she started to get up, but Elijah said, “I’ll get it.”

Sissy listened from the couch.

“Maureen? Well, hi.”

Warmth filled his voice as he greeted his sister. “You’re in Kansas City? How did you get up here? What?”

A long pause. “I’ll come and get you.”

Sissy stood up.

“It’s Maureen,” he said. “She’s at the Crown Center.”

Sissy looked at the clock on the wall.

Elijah was already grabbing the keys to the Nomad.

“I
GOT A RIDE
with the church group,” Maureen said from the backseat.

Elijah knew it wasn’t that simple.

“You know, there was a trip to the cathedral to hear this singing group.”

“How did you get separated from them?”

“I didn’t ‘get separated.’ I said I was going to stay with you. It’s all right, isn’t it, Elijah?”

Sitting behind the steering wheel, Elijah said, “Of course.” And it hadn’t been such an outrageous excur
sion—Maureen was eighteen. But he didn’t think she should have been left alone at the Crown Center at this hour. “We were just watching the moon landing,” he said.

“Right,” Maureen said.

“We’ve put a man on the moon,” he marveled.

“Yes,” his sister said, distracted.

Sissy said, “I’ll make up the guest room for you. It will just take a moment. Did you have any dinner?”

“Yes, yes.”

S
ISSY HAD LEFT THEM ALONE
in the living room with Teddy and Whiteout, and Elijah looked at his sister. She wore a long skirt with a white peasant blouse over it, her long, dark straight hair down. She was pale, though. “Elijah, please don’t be angry and old-fashioned. I just had to get away. I have to tell someone. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Well, I do know.” She lifted her eyes, looked at him. “I’m pregnant.”

Elijah sucked in his breath. His first reaction was outrage at whoever had let this happen to his sister. His second reaction was shock that Maureen had been intimate with someone. His third was that everything could be made right. “Who is the father?” he said.

“Just a guy.” She shook her head. “No one who’s going to marry me or anything. I met him at a concert in Jefferson City.”

Elijah felt his mouth fall partway open.

“I’m going to have the baby. It will be all right. It’s just…I haven’t told Mom yet I just wanted—well, moral support.”

No. She wanted
him
to break it to their mother. His hand in the ruff at Teddy’s neck, the dog nuzzling his
knee, he tried to think of something to say. Maureen worked. She lived at home with his mother, his other sister Jackie, who was two years younger than Maureen, and their youngest brother Adam, who was a year younger than Jackie. “What are you going to do?” he said. “Are you going to work and…Mom can’t watch the baby while you work. She has a job, too.” Then he realized getting frustrated wasn’t useful.

“Okay,” he said. “Everything will be okay.” He managed a smile. “I’m going to be an uncle.”

S
ISSY LAY IN BED
beside him, feeling Elijah’s alertness, his eyes staring at the ceiling. She knew he was thinking about his sister.

“It happens,” Sissy said into the dark. “You know it does.”

“I’m just…surprised. I never thought she’d do something like that. Meet a stranger at a concert and sleep with him that night. Do you know she doesn’t even know his last name?”

This is your chance, Sissy. Say it now, for you and Maureen.

But knowing what she knew, that she might be carrying Clark’s child, she couldn’t.

“Shh,” Sissy whispered. The walls were thin. “Elijah, this is no time to sit in judgment of her, all right?”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

She didn’t answer. Let him figure that one out for himself.

“I thought she was like the rest of us.”

“The rest of who?” Sissy asked.

“My family, people we know, you and me.”

She said, “I’m not as much like you as you seem to think.”

A quiet pause. “You know what I mean,” he said at last.

What Sissy knew was that he hadn’t heard. Or didn’t want to hear. It occurred to her that Elijah had never asked if he was her first lover.
He doesn’t want to know
.

The realization freed her. She would behave as he was behaving. She would go to the doctor, learn if she really was pregnant, tell him, watch him be thrilled…

And never let him know that he wasn’t the father?

The magnitude of the lie assailed her.

She pushed it away. No need to think about it now. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant.

Maureen was, pregnant and unmarried. And Sissy was getting a clear picture of Elijah’s opinion of that. The opinion that he—and Sissy—were people to whom such things didn’t happen.

November 14, 1969

T
HE PUPPIES SISSY PICKED
from the two breedings were a sable bitch named Martha with a very pretty face and a black-and-tan male called Acorn. At twelve and eleven weeks respectively, they were all ears and very busy. Elijah liked them, though Sissy felt the hesitation from him that she would expect from a different member of the Humane Society. She knew he had mixed feelings about breeding dogs, though he liked the animals themselves.

As predicted, he’d been delighted by the news she was pregnant. Her due date was March twelfth, and Sissy had opted not to enlighten Elijah to the possibility—nay,
probability
—that the child wasn’t his.
The suspicion clearly hadn’t occurred to him; he was just happy they were having a baby and concerned for her health and happiness.

When she’d told her parents that she and Elijah were expecting a baby, her mother had said, “He’ll want twelve, I imagine.”

Sissy had retaliated by describing the two puppies she’d gotten out of Teddy from two different bitches. She took Teddy to a show in Jefferson City, and he beat her mother’s dog Lionel, who hadn’t yet finished. Of course, this wasn’t the satisfaction Sissy wanted. Teddy had been bred by her parents.

It was a Friday morning when Acorn made his first mistake, pooping in the living room. Elijah, knotting his tie, watched her rub the puppy’s nose in the poop, saying, “No! Bad dog.” She followed it up with a smack to his bottom.

Elijah said, “Just put him outside, Sissy.”

“Oh, you think I’m supposed to do nothing when he poops inside?”

Elijah was often surprised by Sissy’s primitive methods for training dogs. “I don’t think what you just did is going to make any impression on him except that you’re scary.”

Sissy glared at him.

“He doesn’t
want
to do that inside, Sissy. He’s five feet from the door. He’s a puppy. It was really my fault. I let him out of the crate, but didn’t take him outside first thing. He’s just a little guy.”

Sissy stood rooted to the spot, staring down at the puppy, whose long tail was drooping. She looked at what he’d done to the carpet, then glared at Elijah. “Then
you
clean it up.”

“Fine,” he replied. “In exchange for one thing.”

She eyed him warily.

“No hitting,” he said. “Ever.”

“How do you expect me to train dogs if—”

“I don’t care,” Elijah said. “My parents never hit me. I never hit Lucky, and I’ve never hit Whiteout. This is a rule being put down by your own personal representative of the U.S. Humane Society. No hitting. Live with it.”

Sissy looked as though she wanted to smack
him
. Instead she said, “I don’t agree with that rule.”

“Then we’re going to have a problem.”

She glared at him and stalked from the room.

S
HE WAS GLAD
when he went to work that day. Elijah thought he knew so much about dogs, but
she
was an obedience trainer from a family of trainers. Her mother had gotten a score of 200 in Open with Ruby.

Sissy had to admit that when she got a dog to do what she wanted by force, part of her hated it, but they could make her so angry when they wouldn’t listen. And she knew the bottom line of Elijah’s morning edict—no one was going to hit their child, either. As though she would!

Their child…Sissy pushed that uncertain thought far away.

At the end of the day, as she was walking toward the bathroom, she discovered white paw prints on the dark green carpet. One set went into the bedroom, the other into the bathroom, where she found the cabinet door open and Martha standing in a white puddle. She looked up at Sissy, wagged her tail and sat down in the paint-like substance. Somehow, she or Acorn had unscrewed the lid from a bottle of shoe polish and dumped it out.

God, what a mess.

“Bad dog,” she said sharply and instinctively reached out to smack Martha’s bottom.

And stopped.

She remembered Elijah saying about Acorn,
He’s just a little guy
.

She should have kept the puppies in their crates or in the yard or watched them.

Tears springing from her eyes, tears of exhaustion from the weight of worry about the paternity of the baby she carried, Sissy picked up Martha and carried her to her crate. Wiping her eyes, she shut the door and went to look for Acorn. He was lying on the bed, on a quilt liberally spotted with white footprints, beside Whiteout, who was licking his head. Teddy was outside in his run.

Sissy picked up Acorn and took him to his crate, which she’d lined with thick towels as she had Martha’s.

The front door of the house opened, and Sissy went out to see Elijah come in pulling an animal on a lead.

At first Sissy didn’t recognize it as a dog. Its head was shaved, the back sewn up. It was a white dog, and she thought it might be some kind of fighting breed, but it was small.

“Elijah, take it outside!” she exclaimed. “The puppies!”

They’d had long conversations about the need for him to maintain separate clothes to be worn in the filthy shelters he visited and helped shut down or reform. Eventually she would be breeding dogs in their house, and it was imperative not to bring home diseases that their kennel could catch.

“They bathed her at the vet.”

“What’s wrong with her? We don’t need another dog.” Then she saw his eyes and realized she’d spoken too fast and too angrily.

“Just German shepherd puppies?” he asked.

“God, what’s wrong with the back of its head? Was it a dogfight?”

“She’s from a laboratory,” Elijah said, “and she’s deaf, but she’s probably getting the idea that she’s not very welcome.”

Indeed, the little dog was edging backward. The puppies cried in their crates, and Whiteout had arrived to see the newcomer. “Gentle, Whiteout,” Elijah said.

“They might kill her,” Sissy said frankly. “She’s weak. That’s how packs work.”

She saw his eyes again, and he said, “Well, in case our child should happen to be weak, let’s start protecting the weaker members of the pack.”

“How dare you?” she snapped. “Of course, our baby is going to be weak, and just who do you think is carrying our child? Who do you think is protecting this baby?”