The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (33 page)

Sleeping was what she was doing. Mrs. Auberchon called her name softly several times, but it was the same as speaking to just the bed or the pillow. The room was in shadowy daytime darkness.

Mrs. Auberchon asked the nurse if any of Mrs. Walzer's children or grandchildren had come to see her. The nurse put on a sympathetic expression: oh, you know, they live far away; they have busy lives, jobs; they know she's well cared for here; they call all the time. One of Mrs. Walzer's daughters had told this nurse on the phone that the family as a whole had decided to wait to travel here until their mother/grandmother was up and around and at home. They wanted to give her something to look forward to, like an incentive for getting herself healed and out of the hospital.

Absence was an incentive? Someone thought this way?

“They're a very close family,” the nurse declared.

“I see,” said Mrs. Auberchon. She went back to Mrs. Walzer's bedside and looked at her white hair on the white pillow, her loose and fragile skin all mottled with age spots, her slightly open old-woman's mouth, her chest rising and falling in the long, slow spaces between sedated, old-person's breathing. If she were this woman's daughter, she thought, she would have done some traveling. She would have guessed that in the room where this woman lay, the invisible presence of loneliness was the biggest thing there was.

Mrs. Auberchon could feel it. She could almost smell it. This woman had been a baker her entire life! She was a baker still! A baker should not be day-sleeping on pills in a room that smelled of being lonely!

And yet, not once in all the time she knew Mrs. Walzer did Mrs. Auberchon call her a “close friend,” not even to herself. She thought about how, every time Mrs. Walzer had said something that broke Mrs. Auberchon's rules of their conversations, she, Mrs. Auberchon, would turn away, embarrassed by showing good manners, as anyone might do, she now felt, when sitting at a table with someone who sneezed without covering her mouth, or let out a belch, or outright farted.

Breaking the rules meant getting personal and also bringing up any time of Mrs. Auberchon's life that wasn't now—and yes, it was just that way, like someone disturbing her by sneezing, belching, farting.

And where would Mrs. Auberchon look away to? To her own future. Her own years in front of her as an old, white-haired woman, not here, not in the inn. Wasn't Mrs. Walzer all along just someone to come and keep her company on treat-making days? It wasn't as if the inn had neighbors. You cannot be a good innkeeper by socializing with guests, which anyway she had none of right now. And it wasn't as if she'd become friends with the Sanctuary staffers. She certainly wasn't one of them. All these years, they'd remained a little exotic to her, like rare breeds of dogs.

She was sure that when Phyllis and Margaret and Louise and Agnes found out she planned to fix up that nearly derelict eyesore of a lodge, they'd throw all of their combined weight, which actually wasn't much, against her. Well, let them. She felt they still thought of her as a rescue who keeps on needing to be rescued. And look what they'd have to deal with! Soon she'd be rescuing them! Well, sort of.

She knew very little of their pasts. She knew almost nothing about nuns, so she couldn't be certain if they were unusual. They'd never confided a thing to her of where they'd come from or why they'd broken away from whatever they used to be part of. “Broken away” was her own phrase for how to think of them. Something about them, all four of them, made her think of dogs who looked around in their lives one day and made up their minds they had to get away from whoever it was who was being too much of an alpha with them.

Or maybe they were sick and tired of being kept in a place that was simply too small. Or maybe they'd even found themselves, in a way, as confined and attached as Shadow. They were always so partial to Sanctuary dogs who'd been rescued from being tied all the time in a yard. Those were always their favorites, and that was a fact.

Anyway, Mrs. Auberchon didn't care what they thought of her. She was going to do what she wanted. In her mind, the lodge was deteriorating more with every passing hour. Having gone in her thoughts from shabby to derelict, it was now on a path toward ruin. She wouldn't use the words “fix it up.” She would say, she decided,
I am going to make sure it gets saved like my own self.

Not that any of this was personal! She was being, she reminded herself, completely practical, realistic, and forward-looking, unlike the nuns.

It felt wonderful to be mad at the nuns all over again. They turned blind eyes to passing hours! They knew she had a nest egg, and they could have asked her for help! They were, in their own way, stupid! They couldn't even look after their own website! The website had deteriorated too! They were terrible at being in touch with the outside world!

Plus, they were purely and simply old and getting older by the minute.

And so Mrs. Auberchon, huffed up as a protection against the heavy, smothering feel of the invisible loneliness, told sleep-deaf Mrs. Walzer goodbye. Off she went for a visit to the bank, which she knew would be a good one. And here she was, in her room. She'd gone straight to her computer. The pitties were still in the stage of being settled in—that is, the ones who didn't need to be in the infirmary, which was full. They were calling it isolation, but there were almost as many humans as dogs. The jail and the holding area were kennels now. Volunteers were night-shifting, and the only ones allowed access were those who knew what they were doing with rescued fighters. It was sort of like an emergency ward, she knew. She was not an ER type of worker. No one needed the presence of a voice, talking and reading. Not yet.

But she had plenty to do. She had just finished looking at a Siberian husky website with tips for coping with shedding, mouthiness, and about one hundred other problems described by people who had those dogs in their lives. Before that, she looked at opinions people had about whether or not a Siberian husky could be successful as a therapy dog. You don't have to be a “close friend” of someone who needs a therapy dog to go ahead and bring them one.

Yes, Siberians make terrific therapy dogs, some people said.

Absolutely, completely no way, said others.

But you might as well ask the same question of a human. What type of human should be a therapist? A small one? A thin-haired one? One who didn't have eyes of different colors? One whose name wasn't Rocky?

She had taken a break from reading about pit bulls and fighting, which she could only do for short periods at a time. She wished she could feel all right about being Warden to the pitties without all this homework. She had tried to convince herself it wasn't necessary. But she knew it was. She hadn't yet opened the books she'd bought that came with photographs. She was putting that off, especially the one with a sticker on the front saying, “Contains graphic images that may be upsetting.”

Tacked to the wall beside her bookshelf was a list she had made.

 

Rocky is not allowed to get up on inn furniture.

Rocky is not allowed to sleep on my bed.

Rocky is not allowed to lick skin except hands.

Rocky is not allowed to sit begging while humans eat.

Rocky is not allowed to eat human food.

Rocky is not allowed upstairs in the bunkroom.

Rocky is not allowed to dig holes in the yard.

Rocky is not allowed to bark for no reason.

Rocky is not allowed to mingle freely with guests.

 

She was just about to start a search for pictures and video clips about Siberia itself, for some background, when she realized that someone was knocking on the front door.

Already? She had told that man she wanted tips on hiring professional renovation people for an old structure needing lots of work. He might have thought she meant the inn, which also would have meant she was exaggerating the need; but that didn't matter. He'd promised to ask around and have someone get in touch with her.

Mrs. Auberchon loved going into the bank, since the arrival of the new manager. She never stopped feeling pleased with herself for the way he came out of his glassed-in box of an office to greet her as a preferred customer, as he put it. He was not a native of the village but a friendly, sort of bulky and slow-moving man about her age, a little balding on top of his head, which he didn't try covering up like some men did, which meant he didn't have the personality flaw of being vain. He was as good at greeting her as Boomer. In fact, today she realized that a golden retriever was exactly the type of dog he'd reminded her of all along—a golden retriever in a suit that never fit quite right, who had gone through, as Mrs. Auberchon knew from Mrs. Walzer, an extremely ugly divorce, in which he was the innocent, blameless party. Mrs. Walzer kept her money in that bank, too. But her personal estimation of the manager was that he was as bland as store-bought white bread, and lacked social graces, and needed to be put on a diet.

Today when she asked to have a statement of her balance, he took care of it himself. He told her he was delighted that she was planning to put her nest egg into action. He was expressing this feeling, he said, as a fellow human being, not as a banker.

It seemed to Mrs. Auberchon that the low-voice conversation they fell into was a compensation for not getting to talk to Mrs. Walzer. The bank was in a hush. There were no other customers. The tellers were doing other things behind the counter, such as reading paperbacks and filing their nails. But should she worry? Did it seem she was wearing a sign that said, “I need to have a conversation”? Did the manager think she was
lonely?
Had she spoken to him like sneezing and belching and farting? Oh no! Did she give off a sense of herself as a woman who'd like to pat him like she'd pat a golden?

He called her Mrs. Auberchon, as everyone did, as he let the conversation go on. Was her nest egg from a lifetime of saving, or was it, say, a piece of luck, like winning a lottery?

No, no, she'd never had luck, she admitted; it was half the sale of a house. A house right here in the village? Yes. A house right here in the village that she had owned half of because someone else had the right to the other half, as in, not that he was prying, please stop him
immediately
if she thought he was prying, a case of a divorce? And she'd stood there trying to think of a way to return to the subject of please can you help me find structural-renovation people? But she saw they'd gone too far beyond it. He'd already committed himself to helping with that. Yes, she'd had to say, a divorce, a long time ago. But she still went around as a Mrs.? Yes, she acknowledged, she did. Well, did the person who received the other half of the nest egg still live right here in the village?

Oh, no, she confided, no, not at all. That person had only been interested in rushing away to a new life with his new . . .

That was when she stopped talking, feeling herself prickling from her head to her feet, chafing and prickling as if she'd broken out in an awful rash on the entire inside layer of her skin. What was she
doing?
It was a bank! She didn't know anything about this man! She was such a fool! She almost hadn't been able to cut the conversation off!

It chafed and prickled even more to realize that if she'd stayed there talking even one more minute, she might have found herself so totally out of control, she'd be blurting things out that she'd regret so horribly, she couldn't even think about it.

She'd hurried out and had the luck of spotting a taxi. If it weren't for reading about pit bulls and fighting and then Siberian huskies, she couldn't imagine what she would have done with herself when she was back inside the inn. Would she have gone into a tizzy, spinning about in herself as if she contained a little tornado? Would she have thought of that bottle she'd poured down the drain the same day she saw the true condition of the lodge? Would she have wanted to do something about getting one to replace it, not to be poured down the sink?

And then it was pit bulls and husky shedding and other problems and yes or no about being a therapy dog, and someone was at the front door, and what if he'd already contacted a renovation person who'd jumped into his car, or probably truck, and was coming over? She wasn't ready for that yet! She wanted to be in charge of her own project! She would have to send him away, but what if it was
him?
What if he was on a lunch break from the bank and drove out like an alpha to be prying and pushy? She was willing to be open to the possibility of future conversations between herself and the manager, but she'd had enough for one day! If he hadn't noticed that she'd had enough, he was someone she should never speak to again, except on bank business, if she ever went in there again!

Mrs. Auberchon caught her breath with difficulty and tried to be calm as she made her way out of her room and through the kitchen and the lobby. Yet she was shaky. She wouldn't give him a piece of her mind for failing to know she'd had enough of him for now, but she was good and ready to tell him he'd made a mistake, which looked bad enough to jeopardize any further give and take between them, perhaps permanently. She would send him away like a Sanctuary dog who'd come scratching at the door. Not like Boomer. Maybe he wasn't really a golden inside. She'd have to treat him more like Tasha, overbearing, pushy Tasha, who didn't know the meaning of no, who'd slobber around and give less than a damn about anything that didn't look like it would fill her own needs.

Mrs. Auberchon remembered that Tasha had chewed up the food processor. She remembered that she hadn't reported it. Why hadn't she reported it? Because Mrs. Walzer had a soft spot for that dog; that was why. Mrs. Walzer never recognized what a selfish, insensitive creature that Rottweiler was.