One Good Dog (24 page)

“He says thank you.”

“If I had one like him, I wouldn’t need you know what.” Artie waggles his bushy eyebrows, intimating that he has illegal weaponry stowed out of sight.

“Where were you when I was trying to find him a home?”

“I like my freedom. No pets.”

Adam and Artie have had this conversation before. In the year or so that Adam has walked through that door seven days a week, Artie has always been on his stool behind the counter, cigar clenched between his teeth, newsprint streaked on his forehead and crossword puzzle under his hand. Adam seriously doubts the man has any freedom at all. If Artie thinks he’s unencumbered, it’s his delusion.

Adam fills his travel mug, snags a couple of packets of cheese crackers, a
Globe.

“That’s four and a quarter.”

Adam hands Artie his last ten, pockets his change, and wonders how soon he’ll get his kiss-off money from the skateboarders.

A second dog biscuit comes across the counter. “That’s for later.”

Gina is unlocking her door as they walk out.

“Morning, Gina.” Adam nods to her, is rewarded with one of her smiles. Which he knows is for the dog.

“Hi, Adam. How’s it going?”

“Could be better.” He just doesn’t have the energy to play at civilities with his unpredictable neighbor.

“You look a little ragged. What happened?”

Such small courtesies, a short lifeline tossed in his direction. Although he’s certain that she’ll snap it back, Adam decides to grab it anyway. “You want a coffee? It’s a long story.”

Chance is straining against his leash, trying to get closer to Gina. Adam steps forward, loosening the tension. Gina bends to stroke Chance’s head, runs her hand along his back, scratches his rump, and then stands up. “Sure. I’ve got time.”

Adam hands Gina the leash and his coffee, goes back into Artie’s to get another one for himself. He’s smiling and he doesn’t know why. His pulse is just a little stronger, as if he’s already downed sixteen ounces of dark roast.

The parrots squawk their greeting to Gina, who opens their cage and puts in a breakfast of seed and fruit, changes the water, feeds each one a tidbit by hand. She leaves the door to the cage open, eyeing Chance and wagging a finger at him. “Leave it.” Chance wrinkles his brow and flops down on the floor, heaving a great sigh, like a bellows emptying.

Gina sips from her coffee cup while moving from tank to tank, scooping debris, sprinkling in food, checking temperatures as Adam spins out his tale of Ariel and her Saturday-night adventure.

He won’t talk about his stillborn consulting job; it would force him to reveal too much about himself that she shouldn’t know. It is too shaming.

She says nothing, but her activity doesn’t suggest inattention. It’s easier to talk about Ariel’s attitude toward him, her
defiance—her similarity to his sister in looks and attitude—without Gina looking at him. Adam finds himself telling Gina more than he should about his strained relationship with Ariel, and about his sister’s more permanent rebellion.

“So where is she now?” Gina’s done with the chores and now moves behind the counter.

“I took her home yesterday morning.” His coffee has gone tepid.

Gina sets the canister of fish food back on the shelf, hesitating a moment longer than the task should take. She turns to him. “I mean your sister. Whatever happened?”

“I have no idea. She walked out that door and that was it.” Adam clears his throat, sniffs a little to suggest that this fact no longer has the power to hurt him. “My father never went after her.”

“Well, you did the right thing, going after Ariel.”

“What else could I have done? Sat home waiting helplessly? As it was, I was helpless and I did wait helplessly, but at least I was near to hand when the cops called.”

“She knows you were looking for her. She knows how much you care.”

“I’m not so sure.”

One of the parrots has emerged from its cage and has worked its flightless way to where Gina leans against the counter. Cocking its head right and left, it finally launches itself to her shoulder, where it begins to pull gently on her hair.

Adam remembers the packets of cheese crackers in his pocket and pulls one of them out. “Can Polly have a cracker?”

“His name is Fred, and yes. He loves that kind. Just break a piece off for him.”

Adam offers the orange-yellow cracker to the bird, who
runs his beak against it, then gingerly takes the offering, keeping his tiny bird eye on Adam while he does this.

“Did you tell Ariel’s mother what she did?” Gina lifts the bird off her shoulder and onto her hand.

“Not yet. Sterling wasn’t home when I dropped Ariel off, not back from her weekend with her new paramour. The thing is, if I do, they’ll both hate me; if I don’t, who knows. Maybe Ariel will learn to appreciate my silence.”

“I’m sure she appreciates what you did, or tried to do. If not now, she will eventually.”

“I hope so.” Adam offers another piece of cracker to the parrot. “It’s been really hard lately to get the women in my life to cut me some slack.” Their eyes meet over the head of the cracker-crunching parrot. In Gina’s he sees a flicker of something, something she’s keeping back. As if she knows something about him. “What?”

“Nothing.” A slight flush touches the apples of her cheeks. He thinks of reaching out and laying a finger on those cheeks to see if they feel warm to the touch. The thought is so compelling that he raises his hand. Suddenly, Gina steps backward; the parrot flaps clipped wings to keep his balance.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.” The warm flush is now scarlet. “Just fine.”

And then it hits him. Gina knows about Sophie, about his episode. She’s Googled him. There is no burying past sins anymore. Anything and everything is laid out there for public consumption. Newspaper articles and the infinite discussion on blogs all there for the mere typing of his name on a search engine. Potential employers, potential friends can find all the dirt on you. The most personal of stories writ large across the electronic concourse of the Internet.

Adam is powerless. His reputation has been sullied forever by his loss of control that day, that moment. The grinding ambition coupled with the misleading message, exacerbated by hunger and an incipient, if phantom, attack of angina, topped by his personal assistant’s increasing and unrepentant ineptitude had triggered a breakdown. A self-immolating act of breathtaking nihilism. He’s paid for that error. But all the press or blogs or watercooler conversations ever recall is the act, the unforgivable act, of slapping Sophie.

He sees himself in Gina’s eyes and is horrified. To her, he is a man who acts upon a baser impulse. She can’t know that it’s one driven up from the dark reaches of his background and upbringing. The raised hand. He’s watched other foster children younger than he put into closets. He’s sat hungry while others ate. He’s seen the belt slide out from under the belt loops, the snap of it, halved and threatening. He’s been struck. All in the name of good behavior, manners, respect. Mistakes.

But he has conquered this, pulled himself up out of the morass, bettered himself. He has denied himself the self-indulgent practice of remembering the darkness, recalling in his rare stories only the two foster mothers who were kind to him, and even their kindness was of the practical kind. Marge and Mrs. Salter. He’s never gone back to see them, these two out of seven. He’s pushed them and their kisses on his forehead into the same closet as the five who treated him as a piece of inventory.

Adam wants to tell Gina all of this, to explain himself to her, to get her to stop looking at him with these wary eyes. Eyes that tell him no matter how civil she is to him, how impressed that he’s taken on Chance, she will always be aware of
his single self-destructive act and judge him by it. The lifeline snatched from his hand.

“I’m not the person you think I am. What happened was an aberration. I’m much better than that. I don’t …” He is about to say “hurt women,” when he hears the anger in his own voice, the rising volume of frustration. Adam startles the dog out of his doze. “Come on, Chance.” He leaves his cold coffee and newspaper behind.

The jagged edge of panic slices through Adam. Daylight demons, far more insidious than those of the night, circle his mind.

With his record, he won’t even be able to get a job at McDonald’s. He can’t even get his old job of bus driving back. He’s going to end up in line with the men at the center, being served, not serving.

The savings that the court allowed him to keep, out of which he’s been paying child support and every other court-determined expense of his estranged family, has diminished to a laughable amount. He’s got maybe three months’ worth of rent and car insurance money. When he hears those “get out of debt” commercials saying if he has more than ten grand in credit-card debt, call today, he sometimes thinks he should make the call. He has never been so out of control of his finances. He gets the irony of it. He lost control; therefore, he is out of control. The man for whom the platinum credit card
was invented, who had never allowed a balance of two dollars owing at the end of the month: unemployed, unemployable.

Despised by his daughter, his ex-wife. And the woman that he finds he thinks about, whose good opinion is being withheld because of his control issue. A woman who is so unlike Sterling. Who is comfortable with herself, content with her life as it is. Whose ambitions have been realized in the owning of a shop filled with fish and a home filled with rescued dogs. He would call her a simple person, but that would suggest mediocrity. Gina is anything but mediocre, and he feels her disdain more powerfully than even his family’s. If his life had been different, if he’d pursued a less ambitious course, he might have found someone like Gina and settled down. Lived his life worrying only about fuel prices, not corporate takeovers. Accepted his rough beginnings and improved on them by being a good husband, a good father. Chosen to get his satisfaction from his family, not his career. Chosen a wife who loved him for who he really was, not for his potential success.

Adam sits on the edge of the futon and puts his head in his hands. He should call Stein, he knows this, knows he needs a voice other than his own in his ears. He needs someone to tell him that he is going to be all right; that this is the dark time, but the light will come.

Absent a comforting voice, Adam’s thoughts sink deeper. If he were to disappear, who would miss him? Disappear like Veronica? Unlike his sister, he has no sibling to wish he would come back. His family might even be relieved to have him gone. Adam knows that
disappear
isn’t the word for what he’s thinking. Oblivion. Release from this black hole that he inhabits. How painful it is to think that his death might bring
only a momentary regret to those who know him.
Too bad about Adam March.
Sterling could enjoy a social notoriety as an ex-widow. Ariel would get time off from school. Compassionate leave. Sympathy grades. His life insurance is paid up—a policy that he bought a week before they were married, and then proudly adjusted to designate their newborn daughter as a beneficiary along with Sterling. Adam has the unoriginal thought that he is literally worth more dead than alive.

So it has to look like an accident.

Unless his ultimate revenge is to leave Sterling and Ariel without that money. A slap in the face for their treatment of him, for their rejection of him as a man who is, at heart, not a bad man.

Adam thinks of Sophie. How glad she might be if he were dead. He’d be doing her a favor.

The bottle of scotch has appeared at his hand. The glass is empty. How much scotch would he have to drink to die of alcohol poisoning? There must be a formula. If he weighs 160—okay, maybe 170—and is six feet … He’s not up to the math. Can he do it with the half liter left in this bottle, or should he run out and buy some more? Would vodka be more efficient? Add a little Tylenol PM?

Adam pours another half glass of scotch. No sense rushing things and vomiting up all his hard work. He has all day. Oops, no, he hasn’t. For the first time in his adult life, Adam calls in sick. Rafe takes the call with good grace, “Take it easy, man. Don’t worry about it.” Rafe’s swallowing his story of ‘feeling like crap’ adds an additional helping of guilt to Adam’s quota.

No note. That would screw everything up. Unless he left
one in an unobvious place, to be found later, after the inquest. After the insurance is paid out. After his sorry body is cremated and his ashes are scattered. Or not. He’ll probably get left in a box in Sterling’s closet, eventually to be discarded with other out-of-fashion possessions. Or left at the crematorium. Unclaimed freight.

This is such a good plan. He has been forcibly disconnected from the world, and now he’ll make the disconnection permanent. There is no one who cares about him, or needs him. Or will notice for five days that he’s missing. Except Big Bob. Well, that’s good. They’ll find him before he starts to stink.

Chance walks up to Adam and sits down, lowers his big boxy head and drops something out of his mouth: the tennis ball that Gina gave them, which Adam hasn’t seen since that day a month ago. The ball bounces; the dog pounces, scrambles around as if the thing were alive and worthy of capture, then returns to sit in front of Adam. He drops the ball again.

“Who taught you that game?” Adam kicks the ball across the room with his toe.

The dog’s tail end is in the air, the ball between his paws. He noses it in Adam’s direction, where it clunks up against the scotch bottle. Adam retrieves the ball, tosses it in the air, and catches it a couple of times, then flings it against the opposite wall where it hits with a dull thump. The dog plunges after it ecstatically, tail wagging, barking at Adam to keep up the game. He drops the ball at Adam’s feet, looks at him with eager eyes, eyes that declare he is the one who will care. A dog will be the only one to miss him.

And what would happen to Chance if he died? Back to the shelter? Back into the hands of the boys who fought him? Would Gina take him?