“Sara Hovarty Jennings. That’s H-o-v-a-r-t-y, Jennings. They took my dog away from me yesterday afternoon, the cops, when they impounded my car. And they brought him here.”
Still smiling—they’d broken the routine, shared a joke—the girl focused on the screen of her computer and tapped away at the keyboard. Sara stood there at the counter studying the girl’s face while the dogs barked distantly and a pale finger of sun poked in through one of the windows she’d briefly considered smashing the night before. She watched the smile fade and then die. “I’m sorry,” the girl said, looking up at her now, “but we can’t release the dog at this time.”
“What do you mean? I’m the owner. Do you need proof, is that it?”
The girl looked embarrassed, the way people do when they’re about to drop a bomb on you. “No,” she said softly, and Sara could see that it wasn’t her fault, that she was sympathetic, somebody’s daughter just doing her job. “It’s that—well, the report says here that the dog bit someone, is that right? And that you don’t have a certificate of rabies vaccination?”
Sara went numb. She just shook her head. The dogs barked and barked, but it was joyous barking—they were barking for their kibble and the cold comfort of their cages.
“She’ll have to be quarantined for thirty days—”
“He.”
“He will, I mean. It’s right here, see?” She swung the monitor round so that Sara could see the regimented blocks of words suspended there, as if they meant anything, as if the official who’d typed out the order had any authority over the dog she’d raised from a puppy so tiny he couldn’t even climb the two steps to the back porch.
“My dog doesn’t have rabies,” she said.
But the girl was ahead of her here, the girl, who despite her youth, sympathy and good humor, had been in this very position before, a girl in uniform just doing her job. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We can’t take that chance. It’s the rules.”
7.
TWO LONG DREARY PLAYED-OUT days dragged by, every ticking minute a new kind of torture. She couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. The TV was just noise and every book and magazine she picked up might as well have been written in code for all the sense it made. She paced back and forth across the kitchen floor till she practically wore a groove in it and shunned the ringing phone, though caller ID told her it was Christabel or one of her clients or—endlessly—her mother calling from her condo in San Diego to magnify her complaints and whisper the details of her confidential crises in a voice so thin and reduced you might have thought it was coming from beyond the grave. Either that or the phone was tapped. Who knew? Maybe it was.
She’d tried to reason with the girl at Animal Control but all she got was “Sorry” and “Those are the regulations” and “There’s nothing I can do,” and then she tried to educate her so she could comprehend what a free-born citizen was and how her arbitrary rules didn’t apply, but that wasn’t working, not a chance, and finally she’d lost it, actually snatching something up off the counter—a ledger of some sort—and slamming it to the floor with a sharp reverberant boom that startled them both. The girl pulled her cellphone out then and informed her she was going to have to leave or she’d call the police. “And I mean it too,” the girl said, her mouth bunched in a pout, and she was a child—a willful, stupid child. And how could you argue with a child?
On the morning of the fourth day, which was a Saturday and the last day the shelter would be open till the following week, she knew she had to do something—she could feel Kutya’s spirit crying out to her just as intensely as if he were right there in the room with her—but she couldn’t imagine what it might be. It was seven o’clock. She made herself some coffee and a packet of oatmeal. Suddenly the phone rang—her landline—and this time she picked it up.
A familiar voice came at her, but at first she couldn’t quite place it. “Sara?”
“Yeah?”
“Cindy Burnside.”
“Oh, yeah. Hi.”
“We were expecting you on Tuesday, or did you forget?”
“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t forget—I ran into some trouble and I should have called you, I know, but, well, it was the police. They impounded my car.” Her voice went thick. She was on the verge of tears. “And Kutya. They’ve got Kutya down at Animal Control.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“He bit the cop that pulled me over. Nipped her, really. Barely broke the skin if you want to know.”
There was a silence.