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While he was watching the TV news that night, Laurie came to the side of his easy chair and gave those same two sharp yaps. Lloyd considered her bright-eyed stare, weighed the pros and cons, then picked her up and set her in his lap.
“Wet on me and die.”
She didn’t wet on him. She went to sleep with her nose under her tail. Lloyd stroked her absently while he watched cell phone footage of a terrorist attack in Belgium. When the news was over, he took Laurie outside, once more using the football-carry. He attached the leash and let her walk to the edge of Oscar Road, where she squatted and did her business.
“Right idea. Hold that thought.”
At nine o’clock, he lined the playpen with a double layer of puppy pads—he could see he’d have to buy more tomorrow, along with more paper towels—and lowered her in. She sat, watching him. When he gave her some water in a teacup, she lapped for awhile, then lay down, still watching him.
Lloyd undressed to his underwear and lay down himself, not bothering to pull back the coverlet. He had learned from experience that if he did that, he would find it on the floor in the morning, a victim of his tossing and turning. Tonight, however, he fell asleep almost immediately and didn’t wake up until two o’clock, to the sound of high-pitched cries.
Laurie lay with her snout stuck through the bars of the playpen like a lonely inmate in solitary confinement. There were several sausages on the puppy pads. Judging that at such a late hour there would be few if any passersby on Oscar Road to be offended by the sight of a man in his boxers and a strappy tee-shirt, Lloyd put on his Crocs and carried his visitor (which was how he still thought of Laurie) outside. He put her down on the shell driveway. She waddled around for a bit, sniffed at a splat of birdshit, peed on it. He told her again to hold that thought. She sat down and looked at the empty road. Lloyd looked up at the stars. He thought he’d never seen so many, then decided he must have, just not lately. He tried to remember the last time he had been outside at two in the morning, and couldn’t. He looked at the Milky Way, almost mesmerized, until he realized he was falling asleep on his feet. He carried the puppy back inside.
Laurie watched him silently as he changed the puppy pads she had shat upon (there were also small yellow stains on two of them), but the keening began again as soon as he put her in the playpen. He considered taking her into bed with him, but that was a very bad idea, according to So You Have a New Puppy! The author (one Suzanne Morris, DVM) stated unequivocally, “Once you start down that road, you will have great difficulty turning back.” Also, the idea of waking up to find one of those little brown sausages on the side of the bed where his wife had slept did not please him. Not only would it seem symbolically disrespectful, it would mean changing the bed, a chore that also did not please him.
He went into the room that Marian had called her den. Most of her things were still there, because, in spite of his sister’s strong suggestions that he do so, Lloyd hadn’t yet had the heart to clean the place out. He had mostly steered clear of this room since Marian’s death. Even looking at the pictures on the wall hurt, especially at two in the morning. He thought a person’s skin was thinner in the small hours. It didn’t start to thicken again until five, when the first light began to show in the east.
Marian had never upgraded to an iPod, but the portable CD player she had taken to her twice-weekly exercise group was on the shelf above her small collection of albums. He opened the battery case and saw no corrosion on the triple-As. He thumbed through her CDs, paused at Hall and Oates, then went on to Joan Baez’s Greatest Hits. He mounted the CD and it spun satisfactorily when he closed the lid. He took it into the bedroom. Laurie stopped whining when she saw him. He pressed play, and Joan Baez began singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” He placed the CD player on one of the fresh puppy pads. Laurie sniffed at it, then lay down beside it, her nose almost touching the Dymo Tape label reading PROPERTY OF MARIAN SUNDERLAND.
“Will it do? I goddam hope so.”
He went back to bed and lay with his hands under the pillow, where it was cool. He listened to the music. When Baez sang “Forever Young,” he cried. So predictable, he thought. Such a cliché. Then he fell asleep.
5
September gave way to October, the best month of the year in upstate New York, where he and Marian had lived until his retirement, and in Lloyd’s opinion (IMHO, as they said on Facebook) the best month down here on the west coast of Florida. The worst of the heat was gone, but the days were still warm and the cold nights of January and February were still on the next calendar. Most of the snowbirds were also on the next calendar, and instead of opening and closing fifty times a day, the Oscar Drawbridge only impeded traffic a dozen or so times. And there was so much less traffic to impede.
The Rattler Fish House opened after its three-month hiatus, and dogs were allowed on the so-called Puppy Patio. Lloyd took Laurie there often, the two of them ambling along Six Mile Path beside the canal. Lloyd lifted the dog over the places where the boardwalk was overgrown with sawgrass; she trotted easily beneath the overhanging palmetto that Lloyd had to bull his way through, head bent, arm outstretched to push back the thickest clumps, always afraid a tree-rat might fall into his hair, although none ever did. When they arrived at the restaurant, she sat quietly by his shoe in the sunshine, occasionally rewarded for good manners by a piece of french fry from Lloyd’s fish and chips basket. The waitresses all oohed over her, bending to stroke her smoky gray fur.
Bernadette, the hostess, was particularly taken with her. “That face,” she always said, as if that explained everything. She would kneel beside Laurie, which gave Lloyd an excellent and always appreciated view of her cleavage. “Oooh, that face!”
Laurie accepted this attention, but did not seem to crave it. She simply sat, examining her new admirer before returning her attention to Lloyd. Part of that attention might have had to do with the french fries, but not all; she looked at him just as studiously when he was watching TV. Until, that was, she fell asleep.
She toilet trained quickly, and in spite of Don’s prediction, she did not chew the furniture. She did chew her toys, which multiplied from three to six to a dozen. He found an old crate to store them in. Laurie would go to this crate in the morning, put her forepaws up on its edge, and examine the contents like a Publix shopper evaluating the produce. At last she would select one, take it into the corner, and chew it until it bored her. Then she would return to the crate and select another. By the end of the day, they would be scattered all over the bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen. Lloyd’s final chore before going to bed was picking them up and returning them to the crate. Not because of the clutter, but because the dog seemed to take such satisfaction from surveying her accumulated booty each morning.
Beth called often, asking about his eating habits, reminding him of the birthdays and anniversaries of old friends and older relatives, keeping him up to date on who had died. She always ended by asking if Laurie was still on probation. Lloyd said yes until one day in the middle of October. They had just come back from the Fish House, and Laurie was sleeping on her back in the middle of the living room floor, legs splayed to the four major points of the compass. The breeze from the air conditioner was ruffling her belly fur, and Lloyd realized she was beautiful. It wasn’t sentiment, only a fact of nature. He felt the same about the stars when he took her out for her final pee of the evening.
“No, I guess we’re past the probation stage. But if she outlives me, Bethie, you’re either taking her back—and fuck Jim’s allergies—or you’re finding a good home for her.”
“I copy you, Rubber Duck.” The Rubber Duck thing was something she’d picked up from an old trucking song back in the seventies and had hung onto ever since. It was another thing about Beth that Lloyd found simultaneously endearing and as annoying as shit. “I’m pleased it’s working out.” She lowered her voice. “In truth, I didn’t think it would.”
“Then why did you bring her?”
“Shot in the dark. I knew you needed something more labor-intensive than a goldfish. Has she learned to bark?”
“It’s more of a yark. She does it when the postman comes, or UPS, or if Don drops by for a beer. Always just the two. Yark-yark, and done. When are you coming up this way?”
“I came last time. It’s your turn to come down here.”
“I’ll have to bring Laurie. There’s no way I’m leaving her with Don and Evelyn Pitcher.” Looking at his sleeping puppy, he realized that there was no way he was leaving her with anyone. Even short trips to the supermarket made him nervous about her, and he was always relieved to see her waiting at the door when he came home.
“Then bring her. I’d love to see how much she’s grown.”
“What about Jim’s allergies?”
“Fuck his allergies,” she said, and hung up, laughing.
6
