The Dog Year (7 page)

“Most days, I don't feel much of anything.”

Tig put her pencil down. “When did that start?”

Lucy cleared her throat, remembered coming home after the accident. The silent house. Oatmeal on the counter congealed and uneaten, evidence of her morning sickness, a feeling she now regretted hating. She saw her husband's coffee cup. She shrugged.

“I've got a full schedule, Lucy. Lots of people in and out of here. The longer this takes, the less you get to be a surgeon.”

“Jeez, what's the rush? I'm just clearing my throat here.”

“I've found that addiction and denial need less kid-glove treatment and more tough love, Lucy. We don't have a ton of time if we're going to save your job. It doesn't do either of us any good to soft-sell it.”

Lucy dropped her head. “I love denial. I don't know how I'd get through a day without it.” She swallowed hard. “After my husband died—” She stopped, held her hand up to signal Tig to wait. She tried again. “Richard had a penchant for reading obituaries. He cut out the more memorable deaths or photographs and tacked them to the fridge.” She shrugged. “Sometimes it was a story he liked. Other times, there was something about the face of the person who'd died. It sounds morbid, I know. He saw it as a reminder to stay in the present.” Lucy stared at the swirl in the carpet, heard her husband's voice,
Life is what you do, Lucy, my sweet. And you do it until you die
.

“He liked to quote Zorba the Greek when he was being philosophical about life. The last obits he saved were photographs of two men, printed next to each other in the newspaper. Bob Grabben and Stanley Stolen died on the same day in August.” She stopped, looked at Tig. “I remember wondering if Mr. Stolen or Mr. Grabben had ever shoplifted, self-fulfilling prophecy and all. I guess I started after that.”

“You think your husband was giving you some kind of coping strategy?”

“A message from beyond? God no.” Lucy paused and looked around the room. “That's all I got. I don't know. I had to do something.”

“Are you going to keep taking stuff, Lucy? Do you think you can stop?”

Lucy's eyes drifted off and floated to a corner in the room. “Women like me, we aren't just given things. There's no one standing in line to help us hang a light fixture, change a tire.”

“Women like you?”

“You wouldn't understand. You couldn't, not with your long neck and perfect eyebrows.” Tig sat back. “Women like me,” Lucy said, “we have to ask. Stand in line. Take.”

“So that's what you tell yourself? That's your justification?”

Lucy scoffed. Closed her face like the door of a safe in an old western. Spun the lock shut. “I want to go back to work. When can I go back to work?”

Tig scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Lucy. “This is a non-traditional AA meeting; I don't actually lead it, but I listen. The group is a wonderful mix of people—a microcosm, I believe, of what's really out there. Listen, Lucy, you do my job for a while and here's what you learn. No one is normal. Everybody struggles with something. Marital problems, depression, codependency, maybe a looming fascination with shoes or leather bags that keeps her working overtime shifts to pay off her debt. Whatever. Stop thinking everyone else has it together. It's not true. Precious few people have life figured out. ‘Normal' just isn't normal anymore.”

“Let me ask you this . . . the ball-licking guy? Does he get to keep working? Because I could have done something like that instead. I just need to know for the future.”

“Twenty meetings, Lucy. Get started, and come back to see me in a week.”

*   *   *

Lucy clenched her jaw and moved quickly out the front door of the clinic, arriving at her car breathless. Alcoholics Anonymous. No effin' way. Once out of the parking lot, she fastened her seat belt, and turned on the radio. Etta James's voice belted out, “At last, my love has come along.”
She snapped the radio off and instinctively made the turn that would take her home, but at the final possible second she yanked the wheel and bumped over the curb and into a parking lot, nearly skidding into a bicycle rack. Her large leather purse flew off the seat, revealing two suture kits, a stack of plastic medicine cups, and a 50-cc IV bag. Three rolls of bandage tape bounced onto the floor.

She rolled her eyes in disgust and spoke directly to the mess. “Really?” she said, as if the rolls of tape were triplets who refused to stay in their car seats.

She gathered the supplies, piled them onto the passenger seat, and covered them with her coat. Sitting back, she gazed at the yellow awning above the painted window of Lavish Lattes and Luxuries. It fluttered like a wife in a housedress, waving her inside. She thought of Etta James, belting out her signature song. At last
 . . .

The door chimed prettily as Lucy pushed into the store. It was a riot of hand-thrown pottery, jewelry, and the smell of rosemary and lavender. Here, she could anonymously escape her life, uninterrupted by memories or do-gooders on patrol. Only college girls on break from classes worked the register, and never could Lucy's appearance compete with the furious texting that was taking precedence at the counter. What the hell, she thought. No one would notice what she was about to do, and there would be no starting AA until . . . well, until she said so.

The store was stocked with ceramic containers filled with lotions and flowers growing in saltshakers. Papier-mâché suns hung in corners next to Christmas lights and paper ball lanterns. Gourmet chocolates sat on tables, tempting ceramic frogs that held notices of author readings and jazz on Saturday nights.

This place is truly Luscious,
she thought picking up a ceramic bunny and putting it into her purse.
So unlike me.

She'd never been able to come to terms with the name her mother had bestowed upon her. There was nothing luscious about her. One look made it clear. And everyone knew she knew it. She didn't have the swagger of the easily beautiful, the knowledge of her own visibility in the world. In fact, she was acutely aware of the contradiction between her name and her looks and walked with an,
I know, I know
in her posture. If she'd been a Tracy or a Susan, she wouldn't have gone through her early life with quite so many questioning looks. That's why these days she rarely called herself anything but Lucy. She glanced at the girl behind the counter, put a hanging fern between them, and selected a tulip candleholder, hesitated, and put it back on the antique kitchen set.

It could not be easily fixed, her lack of lusciousness. She was not a makeover waiting to happen. She'd been reinventing herself with marginal results since she'd become aware of her aesthetic failings, way back in third grade. It had been a harsh lesson doled out by the one hearing-impaired boy in her grade. Jeffery Wonager looked at her and signed “Ugly You.” There were a few signs everyone in their class knew: stupid, fat, boring,
ugly
. Even then, considering the multiple possibilities, Lucy knew there were worse things than being ugly—but not many.

Her brother had been there, of course, defending her even then. He'd shouted, “Jeffery Want-a-girl, you big loser!” forgetting the insult fell on truly deaf ears.

People had gotten the message though: Mess with Lucy and you'll get Charles on your case. Charles, the only gay fourth grader in the history of Ulysses S. Grant Elementary School. It wasn't much of a threat, but in the homophobic town they'd grown up in, there was a collective, unspoken fear that gave Charles a lot of power: If he'd consider being gay in a small Wisconsin town, who knew what other impossible acts he might be capable of.

A small cache of silver rings sat in an accessible glass display case at the end of the counter where the college girl on duty stood gazing at herself in the reflection of a shiny watering can. Lucy touched the rings, glanced at their inexpensive price tags, slipped several onto her finger.

Lucy worked tirelessly on her appearance. She bought expensive clothes and spent a fortune on facials and beautiful haircuts to tame her freckles and kinky red hair. She'd had braces in high school, teeth whitening in medical school, and a mouth guard for preservation during residency. She bleached and plucked and waxed every last errant hair on her body; not that anyone since Richard ever saw what she had going on south of her chin. But she was a like a loyal marine in the beauty battle, even if it didn't exactly result in winning the beauty war.

The shop girl finally noticed Lucy, with one hand in the silver rings, the other holding a florid bouquet of mums, autumn roses, and amber daisies. As Lucy handed everything over to the girl to be rung up, she silently calculated the price. There was the sale price to be factored in, the 10 percent discount she would receive as a frequent shopper, and the additional buy-one-get-the-second-one-half-off discount. She quoted the total to the college girl at the register before the electronic wand was even lifted from the counter.

“Whoa,” the girl said.

“If you think that was fast, you should see me at euchre. I crush 'em at the nursing home. We play for teeth.” The young woman laughed. She may not have been a mathematics whiz, but at least she had a sense of humor.

In addition to being a skilled surgeon, Lucy knew a thing or two about people. She knew that they didn't notice Brillo Pad hair and close-set eyes if they were having a good time. The other thing they didn't notice was the act of slipping a smallish silver ring into the outside pocket of a purse while ostensibly rummaging for a Visa card. A moment of magic. Lucy knew she had the ultimate disguise: She was a smart, funny, well-dressed woman, not a common criminal. Everyone knew thieves were male and came with either a skateboard, a piercing, or a gun in tow. But her? No way.

Back at home, she unfolded her brochure to examine the meetings schedule for her town's chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, and with a blank expression on her face, examined the ring on her finger.

“No way,” she said to herself.

T
he interesting thing about surgeons is this: They have gone to the head of the class their whole lives; skipping grades, taking AP classes, testing out of math and English, and generally leap-frogging into a future peopled with other adults who rule the school. Sure, they're working for it, but since they're so successful, they don't have to manage as much loss as do regular mortals. The individuals who don't win every spelling bee and merit scholarship learn about disappointment. They acquire a coping skill or two. They try yoga, self-talk, read
The Little Engine That Could.
And when they get up after a blow, they graduate to
Dealing
and
Life 201
and so on. But not surgeons. Not people like Lucy Peterman. So while she may have been a postgrad when it came to memorizing cranial nerves, she was still in kindergarten when it came to coping.

“I changed my mind, Charlie. I don't want to go to the cemetery today.”

“This was a good idea, Luce. We're almost there.”

“The counselor didn't say I had to go immediately, she just said soon.” Lucy gripped the door handle of her brother's sedan. “I said I'd never go back. I know other people visit, but I don't need to. I know he's dead.”

Charles pulled under the archway of St. Ann's Cemetery. “If you do this for me, I'll stop bugging you about moving back into your room.”

“What am I supposed to do here? Talk to him? Pray?”

“I don't know. Go to his grave. Then maybe you can eventually go into your bedroom, and after that, pack up the stuff you stole. It's a process.”

Unfailingly practical Charles. You'd think that Lucy the brain, the med school grad, was the grounded, practical planner, but no. She was more the romantic dreamer. The one who wanted to go to school to learn how to save the world, one breast at a time. But once Charles dealt with the truth of being gay, he's had to create his own blueprint of what the American Dream would look like for him. He majored in computers, saved for adoption in case it factored into future plans, and saved for retirement.

Now he stayed in the Volvo and waited while Lucy slogged across the bumpy ground of the cemetery. She noted the forever-bloom of plastic chrysanthemums in their plastic holders, tilting as if they were exhausted by the work of continually honoring the dead. She imagined them saying, “Enough already, can't I just lie down?”

She straightened a particularly lazy wreath that was missing most of its synthetic blooms. She gave off a little grunt, shoving the spike farther into the ground. “Everybody's got a job to do,” she muttered to the wreath. “This is yours.”

Taking a left at an obelisk that should have been marking a famous Kennedy instead of the very un-famous Orcus Farmer, Lucy saw the hydrangea tree she'd planted in the spring. It had bloomed splendidly then, but now it sported beige paper tears for the winds of fall to scatter in sadness across Richard's grave.

Richard Lubers. Lubers was the reason Lucy hadn't taken his name in marriage. Lucy Lubers was more than even she could stand, even for loyalty. Nineteen seventy to two thousand thirteen. He'd been clear in his funeral planning that the only other thing he'd wanted on his headstone was the proclamation
I LOVE LUCY
.

“Ricky, you got a lotta 'splainin' to do,” she said to the grave as she stood there, unsmiling and quiet. There had been so many things he'd prepared for
in the event of his death
.
Insurance, estate planning, even funeral decisions. It's as if he'd known his days were numbered, as if he'd known that people—that
she—would
need direction, and soon. More likely though, it was just his way of thinking ahead and forever caring for her. He was that kind of man. A one-in-a-million man.

They'd met in residency. Richard, an only child, raised by a single mother who then died of breast cancer, was as committed to caring for women as any man could be without a uterus of his own. Earnest, careful, and completely devoid of subterfuge, Richard didn't know how to flirt, woo, or flatter. He would have made a terrible spy, but he made a wonderful partner. “You have got to get a hobby,” she used to say to him. He would respond, “You, my love, are a full-time job.” This really wasn't true because all of Lucy's bristles were smoothed like spackle on drywall when he was around. But now he wasn't around anymore, and Lucy's life had a Richard-shaped hole in it that she needed to figure out some way to fill.

She brushed off the rugged top of his headstone and traced the writing on its face with her finger. L
OVE.
She looked around. The only other person in sight was the groundkeeper. When they'd arrived, he'd been on the far side of the cemetery on a riding mower loud enough to double as a rocket ship. Now Lucy saw him steadily making his way over to where she sat as she tried to conjure up the feeling of Richard's hand on the back of her neck, his lips on her ear. The mower was a kind of grief-seeking missile finding the quickest path to her side around all the headstones and monoliths in its path. Trying to think reverent thoughts amid the irreverent sounds of a rabid grass clipper made Lucy, even in her sorrow, laugh at the absurdity.

“All right already,” she said to no one in particular. “I'll get out of here and spend time among the living, for Christ's sake.”

*   *   *

Back at the car she plopped herself into the passenger seat. “There. Check that off the list.”

Her brother buckled his seat belt. “What's with the grass guy?”

“I know; what was that about? It might have been some weird ownership thing.” She deepened her voice to sound like a radio announcer. “‘This is grounds keeping time, mourning time is after work or at night.' Or else it was Richard in his usual no-nonsense fashion telling me to get the hell out of here.”

“A little harsh on both accounts; but not bad advice, overall.”

She glanced at her brother. “I wish I could remember the accident.”

“Why? The witnesses kind of filled in the blanks, didn't they?”

“Yeah. Deep shoulder, overcorrection, ditch, roll, death, miscarriage.”

Charles lowered his eyes, giving a respectful moment of silence for his sister's loss. “Shit, Lucy.”

“I keep thinking if I say it like that, I'll believe it. Get over it.”

“I would think it was a blessing, not remembering.”

“I want to know what we were talking about. His last words.”

“If I know Richard, it was probably, ‘Fuck!'”

Lucy laughed and then laughed again harder. “That would be so Richard. Mild-mannered, bespectacled Richard. Never a harsh word until there is, and then it's a doozy.” She gulped, making a sound somewhere between humor and sorrow. “I only remember one thing: him reaching across me, arm out, like Dad used to do if he stopped too fast and we were in the front seat.”

“He was something, no question.” The groundkeeper made another pass around the graves directly in front of them, his tractor's engine roaring in great crescendos with each row mowed.

“I'll figure it out, Charles. This grief thing. I'll figure it out.”

“It's not a puzzle, Luce. There's not going to be a final exam. Think of it as an art project. A time to create something new.”

“That's not how I see it. If you lose an arm, you don't grow a new one. You tie off your shirt sleeve and clean your house with the other one. You figure it out.”

“Coming from a reconstructive surgeon, that's a pretty brutal assessment. You do see my difficulties with your belief system, right? Listen to your therapist: You've got to let people in.”

Lucy laughed. “What do I need other people for? Other people wouldn't make me laugh when I want to knife a groundkeeper. I don't want any other people getting all up in my business.”

Charles took his sister's hand. “You still need to meet new people. Promise me you'll try.”

She smiled at him. “Okay. Maybe only for a minute. But I'll try.”