My father found the thin red leash and the packet of liver treats he always kept in his knapsack. When he opened the car door, the heat wrapped around us like mummification bandages. Prepare for record temperatures this week, the weather reporters had been declaring the whole drive. We’d been able to keep the signal for NPR for a while, but in the western part of the state we’d found nothing but country stations, which my father detested more than Lite FM. He had a whole stack of Jazz CDs to muddle him-and us, by default-through.
My father walked carefully toward the dog. It glanced at him out of the corner of its eye, the pink edge of its tongue darting in and out of its mouth. When my dad reached out, the dog ducked away. ‘Come here,’ my father whispered. ‘It’s okay.’ He crouched and put the treat on the ground. The dog sniffed the air. When my father made a sudden move, the dog backed away again. It was a dance until the dog ate the treat, trusted my dad enough to come close, and my dad placed his hand on the scruff of the dog’s neck. The dog flailed, but my father put one hand on its neck and the other on its belly and it began to calm down. He looped the leash around its neck, walked it to our car and stuffed it in the very back of the station wagon, next to our luggage.
Before he shut the hatchback, my father peered carefully into the dog’s face. ‘Do you know it?’ I called.
‘Yep, I know her,’ he answered. ‘I know her parents, anyway. Or her grandparents. Or, I guess it would be greatgrandparents. But whatever. She’s a Smitty dog.’
I was afraid to ask what a Smitty dog was, for fear it would launch another tale about roadkill or throwing a manhole cover through a car window or sledding down the hill on cardboard boxes, because no one could find the sleds. That was all my father had been talking about the whole second half of this drive.
The dog curled into a ball, whimpering. The car smelled suddenly like wet fur and the chemical that dogs give out when they are afraid. Steven stretched, his t-shirt taut against his chest. ‘Are we going to keep her?’
My father didn’t answer, but I knew what the answer was: of course we were going to keep her. We had three other dogs in a Brooklyn kennel: Fiona, an Irish terrier, Wesley, a cock-eared Doberman my father had coaxed to him just like he had with this Smitty dog, and Skip, a Beagle who had shown up at our stoop a few months ago just as we were walking out the door, as if it knew we were the people dogs came to when they had nowhere else to go. When my mother left, the apartment was too big for three of us. Now, whenever I entered a room, a dog was there. Whenever I used the bathroom, I found a dog sitting on the bathmat, drooling. If I opened the door to go into our building’s hall, a dog tried to come. For a while, we tried to keep things nice, but with three dogs, it was hard. Finally, we just stopped trying altogether.
‘So, do you remember any of this?’ my father asked. ‘Hasn’t changed a bit. I can’t believe it.’
He navigated over a roller-coaster sized bump. We’d been driving down the same gravel road for about five minutes. The road was uneven, with big pits and puddles, and there were spots where the gravel was strewn out over the shoulder, indicating a spin-out. ‘Last time you were here…I don’t know.’ My father scratched his head. ‘You were three? Four? It was Christmas.’
‘Maybe.’ I squinted, pretending like I was trying to remember, but this just looked like a gravel road. A squirrel in a tree eyed us suspiciously as we passed.
‘We were only here for a little while, then it started snowing.’ He picked at the side of his thumbnail. He was nervous, I realized. ‘There’s the creek,’ he added, pointing. ‘It’s clean enough to swim in.’
‘Since when do you say creek like crick?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t say crick.’
‘Yes, you did.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Well, so what if I did?’
I glanced at him, then crossed my arms over my chest. ‘I don’t think I could swim in a creek. Or a crick. And besides, won’t we have, like, funeral stuff to do?’
‘Yeah, but you’re missing out if you don’t try it,’ he said. ‘It’s much nicer than swimming in a pool. And Samantha’s about your age. You can swim together.’
‘I didn’t bring my suit.’
Finally, we turned into the driveway of a low-slung house. There were a lot of weeds in the front yard and a very, very old blue pickup truck in the driveway. Off to the left was a white-shingled shed; in front of it was a red, three-wheeled lawnmower, lying on its side. The house had a large, faded wrap-around porch strewn with all sorts of junk-an old television, another lawnmower, a couple of white plastic porch chairs, a dog bed and a fifty-pound bag of dog food, rabidly torn open from the center. There was a dog on the porch, too, eating straight from the hole in the bag. I heard the crick out back, rushing. It could never be clean enough to swim in. My stomach started to hurt.
Dear Claire. Actually, a picture would have said way more than words.
A girl was sitting on the porch swing. She had long brown hair, and her old jeans hung loosely on her hips. She narrowed her eyes when she saw us but made no effort to get up. ‘We can’t see the body until after three,’ she shouted. ‘Just so you know.’