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“Will I what?” As if he didn’t know.
“Give her a chance.”
Beth was pushing for a commitment Lloyd was unwilling to make. He looked around, as if for inspiration, and spied a turd—one single small sausage—exactly where the puddle of pee had been, six inches from the nearest puppy pad.
“Well, the little girl’s here now,” he said. It was the best he could give her. “You drive safe.”
“Sixty-five the whole way. I get passed a lot, and some people honk at me, but any faster and I don’t trust my reflexes.”
He said goodbye, grabbed some more paper towels, and picked up the sausage. Laurie watched him with her amber eyes. He took her back outside, where she did nothing. When he finished the puppy-rearing article twenty minutes later, he found another puddle of pee in the archway. Six inches from the nearest puppy pad.
He bent over, hands on his knees, his back giving its usual warning twang. “You’re on borrowed time, dog.”
She looked at him.
3
Late that afternoon—two more puppy-pees, one actually on the pad nearest the kitchen—Lloyd attached the toy-sized leash and took Laurie outside, carrying her in the crook of his arm like a football. He set her down and urged her along the path that ran behind this small development of houses. The path led to a shallow canal that eventually flowed beneath the drawbridge. There car traffic was currently backed up, waiting for someone’s motor sloop to pass from Oscar’s Bay into the Gulf of Mexico. The puppy walked in her usual side-to-side waddle, pausing every now and then to sniff at clumps of weeds that from her perspective must have looked like impenetrable jungle thickets.
A dilapidated boardwalk known as Six Mile Path (for reasons Lloyd had never understood, since it was a mile long at most) ran along the side of the canal, and his next-door neighbor was standing there now between signs reading NO LITTERING and NO FISHING. Further down was one meant to say WATCH FOR ALLIGATORS, only ALLIGATORS had been spraypainted over and replaced with ALIENS.
Seeing Don Pitcher hunched over his fancy mahogany cane and hauling at his truss always gave Lloyd a small but unmistakable frisson of mean satisfaction. The man was a jukebox of tiresome political opinions, and also an unapologetic gore-crow. If anyone in the neighborhood died, Don knew it first. If anyone in the neighborhood was running into financial headwinds, he knew that, too. Lloyd’s back was no longer what it had been, nor were his eyes and ears, but he was still years from the cane and truss. Or so he hoped.
“Look at that yacht,” Don said as Lloyd joined him on the boardwalk (Laurie, perhaps frightened of the water, hung back at the end of her leash). “How many poor people do you think that would feed in Africa?”
“I don’t think even hungry people could eat a boat, Don.”
“You know what I… say, what have you got there? New puppy? Ain’t he cute?”
“It’s a she,” Lloyd said. “I’m keeping her for my sister.”
“Hey there, sweetie,” Don said, leaning forward and holding out his hand. Laurie backed away and barked for the first time since Beth had brought her: two high, sharp yaps, then silence. Don straightened up again. “Not too friendly, is she?”
“She doesn’t know you.”
“She shit around?”
“Not too bad,” Lloyd said, and for awhile they watched the yacht, which was probably owned by one of the Richie Riches at the north end of Rattlesnake Key. Laurie sat at the edge of the splintery boardwalk and watched Lloyd.
“My wife won’t have a dog,” Don said. “Says all they are is mess and trouble. I had one when I was a boy, a nice old collie. She fell down a well. Cover was all rotted and down she went. Had to haul her up with a watchacallit.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. You want to be careful of that one near the road. She runs out in it, there goes your ballgame. Look at the size of that fucking boat! A dime to a dollar she grounds.”
The yacht didn’t ground.
Once the drawbridge closed and the traffic was moving again, Lloyd looked at the puppy and saw her asleep on her side. He picked her up. Laurie opened her eyes, licked his hand, and went back to sleep.
“Got to get back and burn some supper. Take it easy, Don.”
“You do the same. And keep an eye on that puppy, or she’ll chew up everything you own.”
“I’ve got some toys for her to chew on.”
Don smiled, revealing a set of mismatched teeth that gave Lloyd the chills. “She’ll prefer your furniture. Wait and see.”
4
