I had gone to Mineral Point to see my kids and on the way back home I saw a dead yellow dog glowing in the washed-out day. I pulled over. I got out of my van, walked back twenty feet or so, and there was the dog, lying on its side, like it was asleep, only the back legs didn’t look right and his eyes were open and a bit of tongue was hanging out of its mouth.
I kneeled down next to that dog and stayed that way for a long time. I didn’t feel like moving. In fact, I was still there when this red Geo Tracker pulled over to the side of the road, just ahead of my van.
A tall woman with auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail got out of the Tracker. She was wearing faded jeans and a gray zip-up sweatshirt. Brown boots.
“Did you hit it?” she asked.
“No, I just found her like this,” I said.
“I’m a veterinarian,” she said.
“It’s too late,” I said. “She’s long gone.”
“I know. I take it she’s yours?” she said.
I looked up at her, right in the eyes.
“Yes,” I said. I gave a quick look back at the dog. “He’s… She’s mine.”
“What was her name?”
I rubbed my hand over my face. I fought back a sneeze.
“Joey,” I blurted out. This was my son’s name, but it just came to me. “Well, Joanna. But we called her Joey.”
“How old was she?” she said.
“Um… I got her from a shelter,” I said. “I don’t really know. Maybe five?”
“Looks about right,” she said.
She squatted down next to me and put her hand on my shoulder.
“She used to get me the newspaper every morning. Out the front door,” I said, “And back ten seconds later with the rolled up newspaper in her mouth.”
“Wow. Did she get lost?”
I burst into tears. I was thinking of my son, Joey, who was really wailing when I said bye to him. My daughter Claire is twelve and she, like her mother, ended the weekend not on speaking terms with me. The weekend had not gone well. Things had not been going well, in general.
I felt the veterinarian’s hand squeeze my shoulder.
“It’s very hard to lose them like this,” she said. “Did she run away from home?”
“Yes,” I said. I was almost sobbing. I couldn’t get a grip.
“Where do you live? Is it far from here?”
“Not really,” I said.
“I live in Madison,” she said. “That’s where my clinic is.”
She stood up from her squat, so I stood up with her.
“I live in Madison too,” I said.
“Joey ran all the way here from Madison?”
“No, we were in Mineral Point. Visiting my kids.”
“I’ve heard that’s such a cute town,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “My experiences there have not been good.”
I looked up at her, wiping my cheeks. She was tall and there was something vaguely equine about her features, in a pretty sort of way, I mean. A strong jaw and lean, well-muscled limbs that made you believe she didn’t take much in the way of crap.
“She ran away from the car. She got out of the car and just ran. A few miles back, she was whining like she really had to go, you know, outside. So I pulled over. She never takes off on me, so I didn’t bother with the leash. I figured she’d just go in the ditch, do her business, and hop back in the van.”
I busted up into sobs again.
“She loved riding in that van,” I said.
“She looks like maybe she’s been dead a while. How long have you been kneeling here, crying?”
I pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and looked at the time, as if I was considering something.
“Oh,” I said. “Hours.”
“You poor thing,” she said. And just like that, we were hugging. It was hard to tell why I was crying. All I know is that it felt good, all of it: the tears, her hand patting my back, my face in the soft front of her shoulder, the scent of a woman’s sweat and baby powder coming from under her arm.
“Why don’t we load Joey up into my car?” she said. “If you want, I can take care of the cremation through the clinic. I can give you the ashes on Monday.”
It had been a long time since anybody had wanted to do something nice for me. It was hard to resist.
She went to her car to get an old blanket. I slipped the collar off the dog and put it in my pocket. When she came back with the blanket, she set it down next to the dog and started redoing her ponytail. Then we wrapped up the dead dog like a burrito and carried it to the Geo. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a card and pen and handed it to me.
“Prairie Pals Vet Clinic” the card read.
“I’m going to the clinic now. Give me your phone number and I’ll call you on Monday? When she’s ready.”
I just nodded. There I was, sobbing again. It earned another hug. Then she walked off to her Geo, but turned around and came back over and shook my hand.
“I’m Laura,” she said.
“Jim,” I said. “My name is Jim.”
When I got in the car to look at the dog’s collar, I learned the dog’s real name was Lucky.
“Not so much,” I said. “Poor thing.”
* * *
I could relate; I wasn’t so lucky either. A few months before all of this, I’d been let go from my job as a copywriter for the World’s Edge clothing company in Dodgeville after a decade of service. I wrote a little copy that got me fired. Like this: “A co-worker, whom you first encounter wearing this sort of casually elegant sweater set near the copy machine, will turn into a raging and unstable slut after twelve years of grueling marriage.”
After that, I read a book about crisis as opportunity, and so, with unemployment about to run out, I’d set about trying to launch my own business as a life coach. I cleaned out my savings account doing some marketing and some ads in the back of the alternative weekly. I had a cool logo. The business was called SmarterYou.
I had exactly one client, Malcolm Nibbs, a former software engineer who wanted to open a modern dance troupe. He paid me to listen to him, not much, and sometimes I had to watch him dance too. Our deal also included ten percent of all his dance troupe’s profits the first year.
On the surface, I was not exactly the ideal guy to launch a business as a life coach — out-of-work, failed marriage, eczema on the backs of my arms. Perhaps it was true, what my ex-wife said when I handed her my new business card: “You have become so full of shit it’s hard to look at you.”
On Monday afternoon, Laura called me on my cell phone and said she’d be happy to bring the dog’s ashes over to my place. I was still living in the old family house on the west side of town. It was hard for me to afford, but initially I wanted a familiar place for the kids to visit, although they rarely did. The house was in foreclosure.
Still, when I got off the phone with Laura I behaved like a man with some fight left in his soul. I headed out to Target for dog supplies and food. I bought two dog dishes made of metal. I soaked a rawhide bone in hot water and then mangled it with a knife and a meat tenderizer. I bought a couple of squeeze toys — a hedgehog and octopus — and I ran a little olive oil and dust over them. I took the new dog bed and dragged it around the dirt in the front yard. I went three doors down and borrowed my neighbors’ two golden retrievers from the back yard. I let them run around the house and coaxed them up on the furniture with Milkbones. I encouraged slobbering and shedding. When I brought those two dogs back to their yard, the neighbor was out looking for them.
“There they are!” she said. “Thank you so much!”
“No sweat!” I said. “Someone must have left your gate open!”
After this, I set out a frame I’d bought at Target that featured a stock photo of a golden puppy running through tall grass and yellow flowers. I peeled off the price tag and set the framed photo on the small desk in the living room. I threw all the Target bags in the trash and ran the receipt through the paper shredder.
I showered, dressed, and was seated, drinking a beer at the kitchen table, when Laura knocked on the door. I opened it. She was holding a box.
It was Laura who started crying first.
“God, I hate this part of the job,” she said.
We stood in the foyer, and I stepped aside so she could see everything: the dog bed, the bowls, the hedgehog, the octopus, and the mangled rawhide bone.
Part Two
When Laura came over, she was wearing a nice pair of low-slung khakis with a thick leather belt and brown tank top and boots. I could tell that she had not come straight from work, because her hair was down and make-up had been applied and when she got close to me I could smell the freshly-showered, freshly-lotioned sort of smell that I missed so much living all alone. She handed me a little box. On the outside was an imprint of the dog’s paw print, set in clay, and inside of it was a plastic bag full of gray ashes and a few chunks of bone.
“Oh dear,” I said.
“What are you going to do with them?” she said, once she got a grip and stopped crying.
“I don’t know,” I said, and realized this was not a good answer. “But there’s this place Joey used to love to go walking. It’s wooded, a little park near the west side post office.”
“Okay,” she said. “That sounds nice.”
“Do you want to come with me to do it?” I said.
“If you want me to be there,” she said. “I can follow you over there.”
I’d only been to this place once before, a little hiking area on the edge of town. The last time I was here, I was stalking my ex-wife, who was then my wife, and who was having an affair with a man named Clemson, an apparel industry exec turned glass-blower who now owned a studio in Mineral Point. My ex-wife and Clemson had been parked there on Saturday morning. I found them sitting there talking. It was easy to know it was her — she had a Dodge Stratus with a “Belly Dancers for Nader” sticker on the bumper. I had the kids in the car, and I just sat there and watched them talking and laughing, sitting close. My wife got together with Clemson at a World’s Edge Leadership Conference; they were in something called a Trust Circle together. When I fell, said my ex-wife, and he caught me, I just knew that my heart had found a home.
What are you going to do when confronted with such pernicious bullshit?
Laura and I parked in the small gravel lot and it was not until I turned off the engine and look up that I saw the large, unmistakable sign that says, NO DOGS ON TRAIL.
“This is where you walked Joey?” she said.
“She liked it,” I said. “She was a rebel.”
It was then that I decided that I really loved the sound of Laura’s laugh. I wanted out of my lie, right then, but I couldn’t figure out a graceful confession and I wasn’t going to lose this.
After the ashes were scattered, Laura suggested that we go back to her place.
“I have to go home and feed my cats,” she said. “And let my dog out, but you can come, you know, if you want. We can pick up Chinese.”
“It’s hard to go home to an empty house,” I said. “That’s what I miss about Joey the most. The click of the nails on the floor, the excited pant when she sees you.”
I realized that it was possible that I was laying it on too thick; I backed off a little.
She fed her cats while I took her dog, a blue heeler named Phyllis, for a walk around the block.
“Did she go?” Laura asked when we came back in the house.
“Yeah, she went. A lot.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know. Up the street. By a fire hydrant.”
“Did you pick it up?”
“No.”
“Are you one of those owners? Please say you aren’t one of those dog owners who lets their dog shit everywhere.”
“Oh no. Not me. I just forget a, you know, thing.”
She reaches into a kitchen drawer and hands me a small blue plastic bag.
“Would you go get it?” she said.
I thought she was crazy, but figured there must be some sort of dog-owning ethics that vets have to be very conscious of in public. I went back with the bag, found the turds, scooped them up, and tied a knot.
Soon, we were eating pork loin in a black bean sauce. I wasn’t all that hungry.
She didn’t know much about me, she said.
I told her that I had been in the business sector as a copywriter but that I had been laid off from World’s Edge in Dodgeville.
“That’s where I get my swimsuits,” she said.
“Yes. They have a lot of those.”
I pictured her in a swimsuit. I kept talking: “My wife had an affair,” I said. “Then she left me, though I wanted her back.”
When I said all of this, I saw that her face had fallen somewhat and that maybe I had just weirded her out.
But then she said, “I’ve been engaged twice and both times the man had an affair a week before our wedding date. Actually the second time, with my second fiancée, he had slept with a man, just to, you know, make sure he wasn’t gay.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Turns out he was pretty damn gay.”
“Wow,” I said.
We were a couple of damaged goods and the night felt like it was about to veer into some sort of maudlin pity party, failed marriages, jilted brides, and dead dogs. I didn’t want that. But it was important that I turned the attention back to my dead dog, for a minute.
“You know, Joey really liked Chinese food.”
“You fed her Chinese food?”
“She liked it.”
“Dogs eat anything. But it must have made him very sick, all that richness, sauces, and hot peppers.”
“Nope. Never got sick. He even liked the hot mustard,” I say.
“No way. There’s horseradish in there. He would have gotten very sick.”
“It’s not that hot,” I said.
“Yes it is,” she said.
I doused my egg roll with all of the hot mustard and started to shove the whole thing into my mouth. It made her laugh like crazy, so I went through with it. Swallowed it down. Later, when I was puking in the bathroom, Laura couldn’t stop laughing.
“Okay, okay,” I said, when I was finally done retching. “Maybe he didn’t eat the hot mustard. I lied.”
Part Three
I went home that night wondering, perhaps, if it weren’t for the hot mustard incident and the subsequent whimpering and vomiting, maybe I’d have gotten a chance to sleep with her. Laura was remarkably independent and smart and she had great legs and she sat around as if she was wholly comfortable with her lanky, lean body.
I asked her if I could possibly see her the next day, but she said was busy the rest of the week and I was sad about that. I figured this was her way of blowing me off and I accepted it. I thanked her for the cremation and she refused to charge me for her trouble.
My son Joey came over the next weekend, unexpectedly; his mother was going to St. Paul for the weekend with Clemson; she was desperate for a babysitter and my daughter was already away with the Girl Scouts but Joey needed someplace to be. I was thrilled.
Joey and I had just woken up on Sunday morning when Laura called and asked if she could come over.
“Today?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure. When?”
“You didn’t call me all week,” she said. “Why? What happened?”
“You said you were busy.”
“I was. But I could take a phone call.”
“I thought you were trying to tell me something.”
“I was. I was trying to tell you that I was busy. But that’s all.”
“Oh.”
“I want to see you, Jim. Can I come over?”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Sure. My son is here. From Mineral Point.”
There’s a pause.
“He leaves this afternoon,” I said. “You want to come over tonight? I’ll be back around seven.”
“Can I meet him? Can I come this morning? I’ll bring over some doughnuts.”
“Doughnuts?” I said, stalling, as if I never heard of such a thing.
“I’d love to meet your son.”
“Okay,” I said. “Great.”
Joey was watching cartoons in the living room. I felt bad because when he came to visit me all he wanted to do was lie on the couch and watch DVDs. His mother limited television to thirty minutes a day. At my house, whatever he wanted was cool. I sat down next to him.
“I have a friend named Laura,” I said. “She’s coming over.”
“Okay,” Joey said. “Mommy has a friend named Clemson.”
“I know.”
“And Bob.”
“Oh?”
“And Theo.”
“Fine. Good for her. She’s very social.”
“And Kumar.”
“Joey, look: want to do something neat? Want to pretend you have a different name?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Laura’s a stranger. You can keep your name a secret from her.”
I knew that it would not make much sense to Laura if my dead dog and my young son had the same name. There was no way to tell her, not yet, that I had to make up the dog’s name on the spot and blurted out my son’s name. Ha, ha, ha. It didn’t seem funny enough yet. So my only hope was that my six-year-old son would agree to change his name for a while.
“Any name you want, Joey. How about Oscar? Or Ernie? Or Burt?”
“I want to be Avocado.”
“What?”
“That’s the name I want.”
“Why?”
“I love avocados.”
“Well, Joe, you know, I love cake. But I can’t have the name Cake.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not a name. It’s a thing. It’s food. You can’t be named after food.”
“Then I want to be Sullivan.”
“What?”
“Yeah, there’s a kid at school name Sullivan. Bobby Sullivan.”
“How about Bobby?”
“No, I wanna be Sullivan.”
“Can we call you Sully?” I say.
“Yeah. And tell her I play soccer. That I’m a goalie and I’m super good.”
“You don’t play soccer, Joey.”
He winked.
While “Sully” and I were brushing our teeth, I told him that he also should pretend that we once had a dog named Joey.
“You know, if it comes up.”
“Okay,” he said. He looked bewildered, but there was no more time for coaching.
I showered in about thirty seconds, slid on my Sunday jeans and an old Purdue t-shirt, which I hoped would subtly let her know that I was the graduate of a Big Ten university and not a dumbass, despite my current career situation.
The doorbell rang.
“Laura,” I said, “I want you to meet my son, Sully.”
She stuck out her hand for a shake and my son reached up and gave her five.
“My name is Sullivan,” he sort of yelled, jumping in the air, enthused by his lie.
“Well, Sullivan, it’s very nice to meet you.”
She didn’t bring up the dog, maybe because she didn’t want the boy to cry. Either way, our doughnuts went well. Sully ate five. Later, when we were alone in the kitchen, Laura offered to come with me on the drive back to Mineral Point, but I played the cautious parent.
“Let’s take this slow,” I said. “He’s not used to my dating.”
She gets closer. “Oh,” she said. “We’re dating?”
That is when I kissed her and if old “Sully” wasn’t in the next room watching “Dragon Tales,” we might have gotten down to business right there on the floor.
Part Four
Laura and I had one of those weeks, the sort of week that could make a great musical montage, the song “Happy Together” or “It Had to be You” playing in the background.
On Monday, she came over after work and I made some salmon with potatoes and asparagus. We ate everything. We watched a movie. The movie was a romantic comedy about baseball fans: dumb, but there was some kissing at the end of the night. We sort of slow danced by the front door; we pressed up against each other. Laughing, she said she absolutely had to go home.
On Tuesday, we went downtown to hear a free concert. Jazz. I am not a fan of jazz, and Laura admitted that she was no fan of jazz either. We laughed about this for a while, both of us sitting by the water drinking beer, pretending to like jazz. On the way home, we confessed a weakness for Journey. You bet I had that CD. We made out in the car in front of her house to “Open Arms” and we didn’t stop until “Separate Ways” sort of busted up the mood. It had been a long time since I had made out in a car. I forgot how your tongue swells up with longing and the taste of pennies, how your stomach quakes, how it feels like someone is blowing up a balloon inside of your chest.
On Wednesday, we made out in her basement. She had a television down there and a big comfortable couch and we had rented a movie. A French movie that was largely about existential despair and abundant threesomes, and pretty soon, we were half-naked on this big sectional sofa, like teenagers making out with the parents asleep upstairs.
“Should we go up to my room?” Laura asked. I nodded with vigorous approval.
On Thursday, she told me she thought we needed a break.
“We’ve seen each other every night this week,” she said. “It’s madness.”
I agreed and camouflaged my hurt. I started preparing for disappointment and rejection. I drank a lot of beer that day and cancelled my lunch with Malcolm Nibbs, my only client. He was upset. I told him he was a terrible dancer and he should think about that. He thanked me for my honesty and wept on the phone about what a good coach I was to him. I told him to quit whimpering.
“You’re right, you’re so right, ” he said.
On Friday morning, Laura knocked on my door at seven, holding two cups of coffee. We took a shower together.
“I missed you,” she said in my ear. Wow, I thought. I wished my ex-wife could know, somehow, that my life was picking up for a change. I wished I had a web cam in my shower and I could e-mail her a video. She was always jealous of tall women; this would kill her.
On Saturday morning, we woke up early, at her house, and walked down to the lake with her dog.
We got home and went back to bed.
We woke up and made some lunch, and then we were back in bed again. We headed off to the dog park and stopped at Home Depot so she could get a new rug for her basement. Going to Home Depot felt more intimate than anything else. My life was changing. I could feel it.
“You fit me so well.” Laura said, and I couldn’t tell if she meant in a physical way, like that, very clinical, or in a spiritual, emotional way. I didn’t press it. I just said, “I know. I feel it too.”
On Sunday, one of her friends called, a fellow vet, an old grad school friend. This friend, Delilah, was trying to find a home for some little yellow puppies that had been abandoned at her office door.
“You should take one,” Laura said to me. “I mean, if they’re okay. If they get a clean bill of health, you should get one.”
“Well, Sully would love another one,” I said.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know if I am ready,” I said.
“I know. I understand. It takes time,” she said. “Sometimes you think a new puppy will fix everything, but you just miss your old dog even more.”
She started to rub my shoulders.
“Laura,” I said. “I have to tell you something. It’s kind of funny. Actually it’s pretty pathetic.”
“What?” she said. “What is it?”
And so, I confessed.
Part Five
When I had made my confession — well, you know, sweetie, that wasn’t really my dog — Laura said that I had tricked her into intimacy.
“I never clicked with anybody so fast,” she had said. “To think I let you touch me like that, that I gave myself to you like that, and it was all because of a lie.”
“It’s still me,” I said.
This is when she screamed.
“Get out.”
“Calm down,” I said.
“I feel like I’ve been violated,” she said. “I feel like something violent has occurred. Oh, god. It’s like you… get out of here.”
A few weeks went by and Laura still wouldn’t take my calls. I sent her e-mails too. I went to Kinko’s and sent her a fax. I didn’t go to see her. I didn’t think it was a good idea. I kept waiting for her to show up at my door, late one night, holding a puppy. I don’t know why. The autumn grew colder, than there was winter, and a disastrous attempt at a happy postmodern family Christmas in Mineral Point. My ex-wife said there should be no malice in our hearts, so she invited me to Christmas dinner. I’d thrown some ham at Clemson, and then my kids were sobbing.
I had a job at Walgreen’s. I lost that. Malcolm Nibbs found a new life coach. The bank was hounding me for mortgage payments. They wouldn’t restructure my loans. Neither would my credit card company. Neither would the student loan people. I was dealing with some very inflexible institutions. I developed some raging insomnia. I gained twenty pounds. My dandruff was insane.
* * *
And then it was Valentine’s Day.
I was looking for some pizza coupons — Papa John’s had a deal on some heart-shaped pizzas and I had a two-for-one coupon somewhere. I assumed most heart-shaped pizzas were eaten by people who were incredibly lonely, a sort of exercise in self-loathing. I was going to order two sausage and bacon pizza hearts and I was going to eat everything myself. If it killed me, I didn’t care. While I was looking for the pizza coupons though, I found the dog’s collar thrown in the back of the junk drawer in the kitchen.
I looked at the collar and picked up the phone and called the number there.
A woman with a pleasant voice answered.
“Hey, I know where Lucky is,” I said. “Did you lose a dog named Lucky?”
“Oh my god,” said the woman. “You found our dog? You found Lucky?”
“Yeah, yeah. She’s doing great. She’s on a farm in Lake Geneva with this old couple. She loves it. They let her sleep up in their bed, if you can believe it.”
“Oh wow. I am so happy,” she said. “I am so glad she’s okay. You have no idea what’s gone through my mind these last few months, I just assumed, she, you know? A car, or maybe she’d frozen to death?”
“Nope. She’s great. She is so happy. Healthy too.”
“Oh, my kids will be so happy. When can we get her?”
“What?”
“Pick her up. Where is this farm?”
“You sure you want to get her? She is really happy out there. I mean, she loves it. They feed her, like, steak, you know?”
“She was happy here too. My kids miss her, my husband misses her. We had just moved to a new neighborhood — that subdivision, Grass Lake, out by the highway — and she got disoriented, but, you know, I think she’d want to come home. We’re her family.”
“How about a puppy? Why don’t you just get a puppy?”
“Pardon me?”
I hung up the phone.
It started ringing a few seconds later. I probably should have called from a pay phone.
I stood there with the phone was ringing, looking at the dog collar in my hand, and then I got my coat and my keys. I went and got my boom box and the most romantic CD I had: Billy Joel, “The First Decade.” I bet you could’ve heard my heart beating all the way down the block. I had to get some batteries at the Kwik Trip and my hands were shaking. I couldn’t move fast enough. I had the boombox with me in the store, and was standing at the cash register trying to get those batteries in with shaking hands. The clerk had to help me. I tipped him a couple of bucks.
I drove over to Laura’s house in the freezing rain, got out of the car, and held a boom-box over my head. I knew the thing I should play was “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel, like I’d seen done in a movie once, we’ve all seen that movie. I figured Laura had too. But I didn’t have that song, so I thought I’d play Billy Joel’s “Honesty.”
I stood in the yard and hit play. But I hit the wrong track number and I was playing a verse of “Allentown” when she came to the door.
She was not alone.
“Jim?” she said.
I saw a man behind her, looking out at me, looking over her shoulder. He had a nice head of wavy, dark hair.
“Who’s that?” I said.
“It’s none of your business,” she said. Her dog was barking. Billy Joel kept on singing, Well, we’re living here in Allentown. And they’re closing all the factories down.
“I’m going to call the police,” Laura said.
“What’s his name?” I said.
Before she shut the door, she came out on the front porch and said, “That doesn’t matter, Jim. All you need to know is that he is a completely different kind of man then the one standing on my sidewalk.” She shut the door.
The music kept on playing. The rain was changing over to snow.
“Me too,” I said. “So was I.”
