. . .
John had a dog called Bob he had found as a puppy by the side of the road. I thought Bob was just some kind of bird dog, but John swore he was a genuine German shorthair and vowed there were “papers on him somewhere” as Betty looked slightly dubious. Bob had purplish spots—liver spots, I think they are called—and a head that reminded me of a jockey in a cap, his long ears falling straight down like flaps. He was an impressive creature, so alert he seemed to zip in a straight line to his destination like an arrow in flight. When he ran through the yard, one could see how perfect was the curve of his chest.
Betty adored Bob, maybe even more than John. I have rarely seen her so taken with any living creature. He ran toward her, jumped up to greet her every time she came around. Betty knelt to pet him, to stroke his soft ears, to contradict whatever John told him. She laughed when he approached, and saved him scraps from the table. “Don’t touch that,” Betty would say if I tried to throw something away. “That’s for Bob.”
Not long before my trip home, Bob had gotten sick and was hacking away, spitting up. Worried, they took him in the Cadillac to Monroe City to the vet. He sat up front, wiggling and squirming, with my mother in back trying to calm him down. “Here we were,” Betty told me, “these two old people trying to get this crazy dog who wouldn’t sit still, who was just all over everything, who I was just waiting to see spit up all over that Cadillac, to Monroe City to the doctor’s. It was like a little adventure. I like to think we saved him.”
Bob came along when John took Betty and me for rides through the country in his Cadillac. Because he had carried the mail, he knew all the back roads, the way to the covered bridge and to places by the Salt River where the breeze was cool. Betty loved sitting up in the front seat and waving at the other widows who got together at each other’s houses. “They play dominoes,” she remarked.
We went to Hannibal to gaze over the Mississippi. We went to prime rib night at the Junction. John helped my mother plant rows of daylilies along the side of our driveway. Watching him trying to stoop over to plant bulbs, I found myself liking him more than I ever had before.
“Are you going to marry him?” I asked her.
“Are you kidding? I get enough of him.”
“He doesn’t want to?”
“I don’t know. Not exactly. He’s too cheap. He’s afraid I’d spend all his money.”
“Is he rich?”
“If he was rich, we’d be married . . . That was a good one. I made you laugh.” She looked surprised. “I made you laugh.”
. . .
Betty is pretending to be mad because it distracts her from thinking about how nervous she is to perform at a church where people have heard her play the piano for twenty-five years.
“How do I look?” she asks before I take her to church.
“You look lovely, younger than you have any right to.” I put my hand on her shoulder. I try to touch her gently as I am sometimes awkward.
“Can I please help you?” I ask.
“No one can help me . . . the forgetting,” she says, conceding, breaking the silence for the first time. Her hands are shaking; she assesses them as if they were trapped inside a pair of ugly gloves. I don’t know if she can play the piano. I don’t want her to break down in front of everyone.
Suddenly, she looks exhausted; I go to hunt some makeup. When I return, she is glaring at a commercial for a new burger from Hardee’s. Called the Jim Beam Thickburger, it is made with whiskey and appears to be larger than the head of the average construction worker.
“Look at that man eat that hamburger,” Betty says. I want to kick the television because it is so unfair that everything she has is being taken away.
13
After I have Betty tucked away at church with the hymns marked in her book, I start my errands and ask God, if he is listening, to help my mom. Please. At the convenience store, the boy who mows our lawn bends over the sharp rocks around the bushes, hunting something. His jeans are too long and baggy. He wears his gray parka with the hood up, even as the heat builds. It is hard to see his face; it’s just a pale blur. Paying for my gas, I see that he is holding a Band-Aid box and ask the man at the counter, “What is that kid doing?”
Looking for cigarette butts, the man tells me. “He does it all the time.”
“Do you know him?” I ask. “He’s from around the lake,” I am told. “What lake?”