“You told me you’d leave by four at the latest.”
“Oh, I know. But there were so many people to meet after the show. One of the judges is from Ashland, and she said we should enter Royal in a show up there.”
“Ashland. All the way in Oregon?”
“Yeah.”
I came closer so I could show him the ribbon. It was blue and yellow and had the AKC logo on it. “We won first prize,” I said.
Who knows what set him off? Maybe it was the sound of my voice, or the fact that Royal was jostling him, trying to take his seat on the armchair. “First prize, huh?” he said. “And how much did this cost?”
I had no idea. I glanced at my mom for help, but he put his heavy arm on my shoulder and, pushing Royal aside roughly, made me sit down in his armchair. On the coffee table was a yellow notepad filled with his scribblings, and he tore out a page from it and told me to write down the cost of everything we had spent that weekend: gas for the van, lodging at the dog hotel, our meals, the show fee, everything.
My mom hovered about, saying things like Come on, honey, not now, and Why don’t we do this in the morning? But my dad waved her off and made me write down the numbers and add them. I wasn’t very good at math, and it took me a while to finish.
“How are you planning to pay for this?” he said.
I couldn’t understand why he was asking me these questions. I was thirteen years old, I didn’t handle the money. “Mom,” I said.
“Mom,” he mimicked. Then he turned on her. “All right, Mom. Do you have any idea how many shoe rentals and bowling games it takes to pay for the little weekend the two of you just had?”
“Come on, Anderson,” she said. “Not now. We’re tired.”
“Oh, you’re tired? How do you think I feel? I spent all day working, I couldn’t even take a break because Greg called in sick, while you two were out there in Fresno, having a good time. Do you know how much I made today? And how much you spent?”
When he got into one of his tempers, it was useless arguing with him because he could go on for hours. If he ran out of arguments, he would go back to the first one and start over. This wasn’t about the money. It wouldn’t have mattered if we had spent $50 or $5,000, he would have made a scene, because my mom and I had done something together that made us happy, and he felt left out. We went to bed and the next morning everything was back to normal—until a few weeks later, when my mom and I went to another dog show, in San Diego. He saw a picture of us riding a roller-coaster by the seaside, and he flew into another rage. After a while, my mom got tired of it. She sold the few dogs she’d bred, and we stopped going to shows. She kept just two, Royal and Loyal.
By the time I moved back home, those two were getting old. Royal was blind in one eye and Loyal had arthritis, and I kept telling my mom that sooner or later she would have to put them down. Gordon and Annie were collies, too, but Annie had the blood of a champion. At thirteen months old, she had better conformation than Royal did at his best. That’s what gave me the idea of entering her into dog shows. But I never got a chance to do that, on account of what happened that summer.
Jeremy
Nora had told me she was seriously considering taking over the Pantry from her mother, and even though I couldn’t imagine her as a restaurant owner, or any kind of a business owner, I encouraged it. I drove with her to the Costco in Palm Springs when she needed to buy supplies for the diner. I helped her install a wooden chandelier in the cabin, an antique she had found at a thrift store, and offered to repaint her kitchen. I did anything I could to tie her to this town, and to me. Something had shifted that night when we were in my house. Everything I had once feared about love—the risk it required, the pain it could cause—seemed insignificant to me now. From the moment I had seen her standing on her parents’ deck, lost like ten mislaid years, I had been willing to take the risk. And the pain that might still come my way was easy to push out of my mind when I took her in my arms.
Often, I reminded her about things she seemed to have forgotten: that she’d given a class presentation on heredity in Gregor Mendel’s pea plants, which was interrupted by an earthquake drill; that she’d built the campfire on the overnight field trip to Whitewater Preserve; that she’d lied about sleeping at a friend’s house the night a group of us had gone to Anaheim for a concert. But now I was also discovering new things about her: what she looked like at dawn, just before the light filtered through the window above us; how her voice softened when she talked to her mother on the phone, and hardened when she talked to her sister. She was smiling more easily, and more often, and for the first time in years I began to think about the future.
The only thing that could have made my life better would’ve been if my boss would stop being so difficult, and that, too, changed abruptly at the end of May. That morning, I hadn’t heard my alarm and was fifteen minutes late to the briefing, which earned me a sarcastic “Thank you for joining us,” from Vasco and three warrants to serve. The first two warrants were for drug possession and went without a hitch, but when I tried to serve the third, the perp took one look at me and went off through the back of the house. I chased after him, jumped over the wire fence, and ran into the desert for three hundred yards before I caught up to him. I slammed him to the ground and got on top of him. My knee was on his back as I cuffed him, my heart was racing, my gear felt like it had doubled in weight. It was high noon, a hundred and two degrees, and we were in a patch of empty land. How far did he think he could go? “Officer,” he said. “Listen, I wasn’t expecting a cop. I got spooked.”
And all for petty theft. I did a full search, expecting to find pot or meth or even a weapon on this fool, but there was nothing. My uniform was covered in dirt and sand, and there was a big hole in the right leg of my pants. I wanted to book him and go back to the station to change, but there was a service call waiting for me nearby, a disturbance out in Joshua Tree, in that dusty section where old homesteader cabins sat next to trailers surrounded by chicken-wire fences and guarded by mean-looking mutts. When I pulled up to the address, I found an old man sitting on a porch chair, shirtless and with a Mountain Dew in hand. “Afternoon, Officer.” He walked up to the cruiser window and stood so close that I could see the white hairs on his chest. “I’m the one that called. Name’s Jim. Jim Novacek.”
“What’s the matter, Mr. Novacek?”
“Gorecki, huh,” he said, looking at the nametag on my uniform. “You Polish?”
It was a hot day in the valley, even for May, and the air was thick with dust and sand. This kind of weather made people cranky, especially old people with nothing better to do—they called the police over the smallest little thing and then they wanted to chat. “What’s the matter here, Mr. Novacek?”
“Like I told the lady on the phone, this neighborhood’s not what it used to be. All those Mexicans everywhere now.”
In the backseat, the suspect sucked his teeth in agreement.
This happened from time to time, people assuming things about me. Part of it was my last name, but the other part was my light skin. Once, in high school, Victor Alcala, a handsome kid who was popular with girls, started taunting me. Hey, Big Tits, he called across the hallway. What time is the concert tonight? I kept my eye on my locker, shuffled my notebooks, tried to ignore the laughter around me. Yet help came quickly, and from an unlikely source: Stacey Briggs hurled back a string of racist taunts so vicious that they left Victor speechless. He never bothered me again. And I never corrected Stacey, never told her I had more in common with Victor than she ever imagined.