Stepdog (15 page)

“So you're leaving your job at the museum, then, Sara?”

“My manager said I could take a three-month leave to sort of study at another museum,” she said. “Till we know more.”

“She's sent electronic flocks of her résumé to museums around L.A. County,” I said. “Already had some nibbles. Somebody will want her. She's a great catch.” To demonstrate, I caught her around the waist and pulled her to me from behind.

She turned to me as I released her. “Somebody
does
want me,” she said. “Well, maybe.” She bit her lower lip, and oh that grin of hers was always so adorable. “I heard from the
Getty
. They want to interview me in person.”

“Fantastic!” I said. I felt a certain relief. Knowing she had something worthwhile to do out there would make me feel less guilty for taking her so far away from all of her people. I gave her a big fat kiss, and patted the nearer stool for her to sit on. “Tell us about it.”

“It's a new position they're creating,” she continued, beaming. She folded one leg under herself as she always did when she sat on
the stools. “Sort of like what I do now, but I'd be setting the job up and training somebody to actually do it. And while I'm there, I would be learning about some programs they have, and bringing those ideas back to Boston to try to incorporate them. I'll tell you more about it later, probably not interesting for Danny.” She flashed him a knowing smile, then turned back to me. “The one thing that's important, though, is that the in-person interview window is nearly over, so . . .” She grimaced. “I . . . need to get to Los Angeles earlier than you do.”

“Okay,” I said uncertainly.

“The only date they're willing to see me is . . . the twenty-seventh.”

It took me a moment. “That's the day after we leave here,” I said. “That's before we're even due in New York.”

“Before
you're
even due in New York,” she corrected. “You're going to drop me off at Logan and I'll fly to L.A., and then . . .” She let it hang in the air.

“And then after your interview, you'll fly to New York and I'll pick you up there,” I finished, anticipating.

She grimaced and shook her head. “There's another complication. I was having the final conversation with the landlord, and somehow it turned out that when we said we had a dog, he thought we said we didn't have a dog. Dogs aren't allowed.”

“In the place we just signed a
lease
for?” I said. Cody, as if sensing this conversation was about her, looked very alert and trotted over to push her nose against Sara's leg.

“Well, he released us from that because of the misunderstanding. He was really very sweet about it.”

“What, so we have nowhere to
live
?” I said. My incredulity attracted Cody's interest. She left off nosing Sara and started to nose me, but I gestured her off me.

“Maybe I should be going now,” said Danny.

“I'll find a place,” said the ever-efficient Sara. “I have a couple of college friends out there, I can stay with them and look for something. So it's sort of a blessing that I have to go out there anyhow, so I can find us housing.” She gave me a compassionately disappointed look. “I'm sorry, sweetheart, but you've got to drive across on your own.” Pause. “With Cody, I mean.”

There was a pause as we looked at each other.

“Okay, big man, I'm away now,” said Danny with a nervous laugh. “Have to be hitting the road.”

I know we were both perfectly pleasant to him as he exited but I'm not really sure how, because it seems to me we just kept staring at each other until we were alone.

“You're joking,” I said.

“I'll join you en route as soon as I've gotten the housing sorted out. Maybe I can meet you in Flagstaff so we can at least do the Grand Canyon together.”

“Amazing,” I said. I took a moment to absorb the disappointment. “Well, I can make lemonade out of lemons. You won't mind if I chuck all that hysterical overplanning out the window, will you? I'd rather wing it.”

“No,” said Sara. “That route has all the dog-friendly places—”

“Oh, for fuck's sake!” I shouted toward the ceiling. “Everything is always about the fucking dog!”

The fucking dog, excited by my excitement, jumped up and
rested her front paws on my leg. I pushed her off. Undisturbed, she trotted into the living room and found a bone to chew on, on her bed.

“I am uprooting
my entire life
as a show of good faith,” said Sara. “We don't actually
need
to be moving to Los Angeles yet. So if I need to know that you're someplace where the dog can get exercise, can't you give me that?”

“But you're missing the point,” I said. “Of course I'd give you that, I'd give you whatever you needed, I adore you and I'm grateful for all of it, but we
wouldn't need
that hysterical level of order if it wasn't for the dog.”

“Actually,” Sara said fiercely, “we
really
wouldn't need it if we weren't going to Los Angeles to
start
with. I married you so you could do a series that was supposed to shoot in
Boston
. If I'm willing to accommodate you by moving to Los Angeles, can't you be willing to accommodate the dog?”

“Nobody has to accommodate anybody,” I retorted. “You don't
have
to come to Los Angeles. I never
said
you had to come to Los Angeles. You could have renewed your lease and stayed here. We could call the L.A. bloke back and I could take that place on my own.”

“No, you can't, we can't live on separate coasts,” Sara said impatiently.

“We can do whatever we want!” I retorted. “We're grown-ups!”

“We're married,” Sara countered sharply.

“We're married grown-ups! It's the twenty-first century. We can define the rules of our marriage for ourselves, for fuck's sake.”

“For the next two years, we have to be a seamless couple and behave exactly the way the U.S. government thinks a married
couple should behave. We can't be living on separate coasts because you don't want to accommodate my dog. If you're going to Los Angeles, I'm going with you.”

“Don't accuse me of forcing you to move to Los Angeles!”

“I'm not—”

“You say you're not, but actually you are, you're saying you have to give up everything you care about because you're doing me a favor, meaning I am totally beholden to you! Don't play that guilt card on me!”

T
HIS WAS THE
beginning of a period I'd just as soon skip details of. Moving is never fun to live through, and therefore not much fun to read about, is it? We survived it without
too
much drama.

The single thing we both agreed about during that run was that Cody and I would keep our arboretum routine going—Sara wanted it for Cody to have regularity, and I wanted it for me to have sanity. Sara had lots of good-bye parties that I was sure were designed to make me feel guilty for taking her away from her people.

Near the end of all the planning and stress and disruption, my actual green card—the thing for which all previous things had happened, except that first kiss—finally arrived in the mail. We hardly even noticed it.

F
inally the day arrived. April 26. The day of Shakespeare's christening, and also of his death. So, a good day for transitions, especially for theater people.

All the plans had been laid and were ready to hatch. All the arguments had been argued and either resolved or definitively shelved. Sara's college friends were waiting for her late-night arrival in Los Angeles, where she had an interview and five apartment-seeking dates over the next two days. Boxes had been shipped. The decisions about the dog's lifestyle (not ours, mind you, but the dog's) had been made. Sara had given me stunningly detailed directions, as if she did not trust me to drive to the grocery store, let alone across the continent.

Sara had created a travel pack that would share the backseat with Cody and her dog bed: water, clothes, toilet paper, first-aid gear, a flashlight, a compass, motor oil, dog food, an extra leash, poop bags, a cell-phone charger for the car, matches, an umbrella, a water dispenser for Cody, and then in the front seat there was a GPS into which Sara programmed every lodging and restaurant
the dog and I would be patronizing. To placate her I bought a smartphone with navigational apps as backups.

The dog and I would be spending our final night in the Boston area in Danny's living room. But for the final few hours of the day itself, there was the dilemma of what to do with the dog during our awkward last hours of cleanup. Sara fretted that as soon as Cody saw her dog bed go into the car, she would get stressed out, and we couldn't have that, now could we? So she wanted to remove Cody from the premises for a few hours while we packed the car and did the final clean. Only we couldn't think where to put her, as Danny and all our other friends would be working.

Then I'd thought of Jay.

“One of my arboretum friends could take her.”

“Who, the kid from Bay State Caffeine?”

“No, this guy's forty-something, he lives right by the arboretum. We were in his house—” and then I realized where
that
explanation would lead, and shut up very rapidly.

She gave me a curious look. “Why would you have taken Cody to his house?”

“He's a friend of mine who I knew from before, he just moved to the area and we ran into each other at the arboretum and one day it was freezing out, so he invited me in for a cuppa.”

“You've never mentioned that.”

I shrugged, relying on my acting chops to summon the appearance of nonchalance. “I forgot. Didn't seem especially noteworthy. Anyhow I see him almost every day along with Alto and the mom with the two little boys and others. They can all vouch for him He's sound and he loves dogs, had one himself that died recently, and Cody loves him.”

Sara frowned thoughtfully. “Let me think about it. We could just put her in a kennel for a few hours, too. Although I distrust most kennels.”

“K
ENNELS ARE AWFUL
,” said Jay, when I broached him about the possibility the next day. “I had a friend whose dog contracted some rare disease in a kennel and died. Don't subject Cody to a kennel. I'd be delighted to take her.”

“A
ND YOU REALLY
know him? And trust him?” Sara was giving me the third degree about it.

“Yes! Yes, I do. I really wouldn't suggest him if I had the slightest doubt—he's sound! Do you think I would do anything to endanger Cody? Knowing the hell I'd be in with you if I did? I've been to his house. You want me to describe it for you?”

“And he likes dogs.”

“Yes,” I said, with such absolute confidence that it convinced her.

“It's only for a few hours anyhow,” she said to reassure herself. “All right.”

So, late morning of the twenty-sixth, Cody jumped into the car to stay close to her dog bed, giving us both suspicious looks. The suspicious looks had actually been going on all week. She knew something big was up, and she was not happy.

“Want to come?” I offered Sara.

Sara, her hair adorably tied with a green bandanna, shook her head, and rubbed her slightly grimy forehead with her slightly grimy forearm to avoid touching her bleach-covered rubber gloves to her face. “But tell him thank you, and let's get him a bottle of wine or something. Do you know what he likes?”

“Scotch, I think,” I said. “I'll grab something on the way.”

“All right.” She kissed me. (She had already indulged in endless permutations of “Good-bye, my best friend, the most important creature in my life, my one and only, the best puppy in the whole wide world, I'll miss you more than anything” with the dog.) Then she went back inside.

I drove to Blanchard's for the Dewar's and then realized I had no idea how to actually
drive
to Jay's, only how to walk there from the far side of the arboretum. So we had a few false starts but eventually figured it out. I'm a big advocate of intuitive driving. (As if any other kind would work in Boston, anyhow.)

I parked in his driveway behind a white Lexus SUV, got out, and rang the bell. Cody sat politely on the porch beside me.

Jay, humming Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah” to himself (like he always did) came to the door in his long black coat, welcomed me, welcomed Cody, rubbed her head, and invited me to tea.

“Thanks, I better pass,” I said. “We're trying to get the last little bit done before her plane at six.”

“I understand,” said Jay, with a slightly melancholy smile. “But I must say I'm disappointed. I'd have liked to say a proper good-bye before we part ways forever.”

I chuckled. “It might not be
forever,
now,” I said, blushing with pleasure but playing the self-deferential card with total sincerity. “The whole thing could tank and we could find ourselves back here in six months hanging out with you in the arboretum.”

He gave me a knowing look. “I don't think so. I have a feeling.”

“Well . . . I'm hopeful but I'm superstitious, so I don't even know how to respond to that.”

“I've rendered an Irishman speechless,” said Jay. “That's got to
be bragging rights for something.” He glanced beyond us at the car. “So that's your chariot for this historic sojourn?”

“'Tis,” I said. “Seems a bit daft.”

“My father had a MINI when I was a kid,” he said, looking vaguely wistful (which to be fair is sort of how he always looked).

“Mine, too! I learned to drive in one.”

“May I take a look?”

“Of course,” I said with a gesture. Jay left his stoop, came down to the car, and began to walk around it, studying it nostalgically.

“Practically made of tinfoil, aren't they?” he said, kneeling down and testing the thickness of the wheel well. “Amazing.”

“Oh, here's a little thank-you, by the way,” I said, remembering, and brandishing the scotch.

He smiled, rose, and took the bottle, holding it up as if toasting with it. “That was very sweet and entirely unnecessary,” he said. “I shall raise a glass to you when first I open it.” (Do you see what I mean about how he'd have made a grand ruined baron?)

He looked down at the dog. She had been staring up at the two of us, watching our exchange intensely as if trying to learn English.

“Hello, Cody,” he said, with a smile.

Instant collapse to tarty-dog position. Jay reached all the way down from his great height and rubbed her belly, humming “Hallelujah” softly. Cody shimmied back and forth, like one of those fortune-telling fish you hold on your palm. He rubbed her some more. Her tail thumped the ground.

“We are going to have fun,” he said to her.

“Made for each other,” I said cheerily. I was so glad to know she was in good hands, and especially chuffed that I could take credit for it.

“Absolutely,” said Jay. “Get on back to your bride and finish the cleanup. So you'll be by, when, four or five hours?”

“Hopefully no more than three,” I said.

“No rush,” he said comfortably.

We exchanged phone numbers. It's funny we'd never done that, but we were so used to seeing each other regularly. Then we shook hands and I headed back to Sara's apartment.

Sara had stopped for lunch and I joined her before gearing up for the last little bit. We put some great Trad tunes on her iPad and danced around the apartment with the mop and broom for a couple hours. It was fun. Then we turned the music off to spend our last few moments of work in Zen-like quiet.

Sara swept and I held the dustpan. As is nearly always the case when I let my mind wander, I got a song stuck in my head—an earworm, the Germans call it. It was Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah,” because Jay had been singing it when I'd dropped Cody off. Of course, he sang it almost constantly. I thought he'd just been humming it, but in retrospect, he must have been singing, because one line in particular was stuck in my head.

“Maybe there's a God above,”
I heard myself mumble.
“. . . but all I really learned from love . . . was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.”

“Oh God, please stop it with that song!” Sara said, setting down the broom against the kitchen counter. “Especially
that
line, it's so creepy.”

“It is?” I asked, feeling chastened. I stood up, tapped the dustbin a final time in the garbage bag, and then set the dustpan on one of the chairs.

“Rory, think about it:
All I really learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
. That's vengeance justified as self-defense.”

“I never really thought about it,” I confessed, and reached for the broom, so I could clip the dustpan to the shaft.

“And those lyrics remind me of Jonathan,” she said almost to herself.

I froze, and felt the world tilt a bit, and slide.

“Who's Jonathan?” I asked, setting down the dustpan.

“My ex?” she said, as if I should have known this. “The one whose name Lena spits at? He
loved
that song.”

“His name was Jonathan? Like, starts-with-a-
J
Jonathan?”

She frowned at me. “Jonathan always starts with a
J
. Sometimes I even called him Jay. You knew that, Rory.”

“No, I really don't think I did,” I said, fighting off just a bit of panic.

She shrugged. “Why's it matter?”

“Well, it's not like we talked about him much. So . . . right. His name is Jay. Jonathan. And he likes that song. He's not, em, tall and bald by any chance, is he?”

She stared at me for a moment. Then the penny dropped, and her eyes bugged with alarm. “Did you just hand my dog to a tall bald guy named Jay who loves Leonard Cohen's ‘Hallelujah'? Especially the line about how failed love leads to
vengeance
?”

“. . . I'm sure there are plenty of people named Jay who like Leonard Cohen—”

She had already grabbed my Manchester United sweatshirt and brandished it at me. “Go and get the dog back. Right now.”

“Sara—”

“Now,”
she said. And then, the worst possible question rose in her mind: “How the hell do you even know him?”

“From the arboretum,” I said, feeling miserably like a three-year-old who had been caught in a lie.

“I thought the guy in the park was an old friend of yours. You said he was a dog expert or something.”

I felt myself growing pale. I didn't know you could actually feel such a thing. “He's a new friend, and he's really good with dogs, he's really good with Cody—”

“You just handed my dog over to my ex-boyfriend?!” she nearly screamed.

“I admit it's a possibil—”

She hurled my sweatshirt at me. “Go and get her right
fucking
now!”

“I could call him first,” I offered meekly, not wanting to make a big deal out of this. Not wanting this to be a big deal. “He gave me his number.”

“Really?” she demanded. Not disbelievingly; more of a so-there tone. “Are you sure? Are you sure it's his number? Go on, then. Dial it.”

Wishing I were somewhere else, I pulled out my phone, found the number, and pushed call.

“Put it on speaker,” she insisted.

I did. It rang. Four times.

Then it went straight to voice mail for a carpet-cleaning company run by a lady from, by the accent, maybe Indonesia.

“This is not happening,” one of us said.

She pulled out her phone and frantically, feverishly, began to tap the keyboard screen, muttering numbers to herself. “I can't believe I still remember it,” she said. “There.” She tapped the final digit, and firmly handed me the phone.

“Me?” I said, alarmed.

“I'm
not talking to him.
I'm
not the one who gave him Cody!”

I heard the ringing and reflexively brought it to my ear, but felt a sick sensation in my stomach. Whether my Jay answered or not, I had completely fucked this up and no mistake. I mean I had
completely
—

“Hello, Sara,” said a horribly familiar voice over the line.

“It's not Sara, it's just Sara's phone,” I said awkwardly, dying inside.

“Rory,” said Jay, sounding pleased. “Hello. How's the cleaning going?”

“Why did you give me a false number?” I demanded. Sara gave me a long-suffering look, rolling her eyes as if she wanted to wipe the ceiling with her lashes.

“Did I? Must have switched a few digits by mistake. Anyhow, I figured Sara might still know it. I'm so happy she did.”

I held the phone out to Sara. Her eyes flashed. “You did this,” she hissed. “You fix it.
Now
.”

“Where's Cody?” I asked into the phone.

“Right here,” he said pleasantly. “Right where you left her. Right where I saved her life last month.”

“I'm coming over there now to get her,” I said.

“Mmm . . . Not sure about that,” said Jay. “She is my dog.”