. . .
This is what my mother does now, night after night: Walking past the living room on her way to bed, she says, “I have to stop in here a minute,” and pauses at the piano, picks up the hymnal. Sitting at the edge of the bench as I wait for her to slip off, she studies the pages for a while. After brushing her teeth or putting in her curlers, she returns to the hymnal, turning more pages. Sometimes after she is in bed, after I have turned off the light, she will get up—once, twice, sometimes three times—and go back to the piano, then return to her room to jot things down on the back of the envelope she keeps by her bedside.
Time and time again, I ask, “What are you doing?” Time and time again, she will not say. Finally she concedes, “I am trying to remember the names of the hymns. I cannot remember the names of the hymns anymore.”
Under her bedside table a conglomeration of things—empty eyedrop bottles, used Kleenexes, coupons, and tiny notes she has scrawled on index cards—are piled in a crazy heap, which I call the bird’s nest. “That is my spot. You are not supposed to look there,” she tells me if I refer to it. “Sometimes you make me feel so embarrassed.”
She doesn’t want me to see the papers that fall from the end table by her bed, the lists she keeps of words that will no longer come that she is trying to keep track of.
On one I found she has written, “eggnog, eggnog, eggnog, eggnog.”
Sometimes I turn to the hymns whose numbers she writes down; I read the lyrics, wonder if they are clues to what is on her mind, but they don’t reveal anything to me. Sitting at the piano bench, I take in the paintings she commissioned from an artist in Moberly for our new living room when we moved to Paris. They are little oil renderings of pink roses.
. . .
The lonely dog just stares at me, as if he knows I am sending him away with a stranger. I look at him, wave a little, but do not leave the car. I am not budging until Marci arrives to take him. I always liked Marci; in high school I made posters for her bid to become homecoming queen. She lost, but was gracious. I was not; it was as if the tiara had been ripped from my own head.
After she arrives, the pound man frees the dog, who rushes out—a few flashes of fur and madly wagging tail—to shake himself. If that dog who has consumed more than a hundred dollars’ worth of my food bounds up to this woman who couldn’t even win a queen contest before he licks me, I am going to give the orange jumpsuit to a church auction.
Marci waits expectantly—entirely inappropriately, I believe—for the dog to come to her. I hold my breath.
Love is a battlefield.
But there is a surprise. He runs to me. Whatever happens, he is really my dog. I pick him up as he thrashes around, licking my face. Marci takes pictures of us with my iPhone. The dog looks rabid and I am no ad for Slimfast, but they will do. Marci tells me what her grandsons have decided to call him, a horrible name that I immediately repress. In my fantasies, I have named him Nicky, which suits his warm nature, but which can be shortened to Nick if he gambles or is drawn toward organized crime.
In the trunk of my car there is the crate I have purchased and lined with lots of my old clothes. I want him to breathe my scent and mourn the man who got away. I ask Marci if the dog can ride with me to her house. She agrees; transferring the crate to her car would be a pain anyway. Nicky bounds into the front seat of the Infiniti, sniffs indiscriminately as he surveys everything, his nose poking over the dashboard and his ears fallen back. It is exactly as I had imagined. He drools on the seat, as I do often.
“Don’t be a stranger,” I tell him as I back away toward the car, before I can change my mind. As he zips off toward another part of the yard, he whips his head around to look back at me and half his body turns. It is maybe my favorite thing he does.
On the way home, I keep my eyes peeled for the lawn-mower boy. Sometimes I spot him walking by the side of the road on Cleveland Street, carrying a white trash bag. He doesn’t cut our grass anymore and I worry he has been fired. I always wave. He does not.