Dog Bless You (15 page)

Lili laughed, but said that she shouldn’t. “Do you
think he’s over her?”

“I sure hope so. It’s been nearly two years.”

Rochester scrambled after a squirrel and I pulled him
back. “My therapist back in prison would say that Rick is dating difficult
women to avoid making a commitment to someone reasonable,” I said. “What do you
think?”

“I think you got more out of being in prison than
you’re willing to admit,” she said. “It sounds like you came out of there
knowing yourself a lot better than when you went in.”

“I wouldn’t argue with that,” I said. “But all in all
I’d rather have gone to some fancy rehab center like all the Hollywood stars.”

We crossed the bridge over the canal and turned onto
the towpath. “Keep an eye out for plant thieves,” I said.

“It’s Sunday morning,” Lili said. “If Mark and this guy
are having a relationship, they’re in bed together right now. Not out
scavenging for plants.”

“We’re out here.”

“Yeah, but we’ve been together for months already. That
initial surge of lust and desire has passed.”

I opened my mouth in mock anger, then pulled her close
for a long, deep kiss.

She finally pushed me away. “I want to take some
pictures.”

Rochester was a natural ham, looking up when I clicked
my fingers so that his ears stood up. She followed him, snapping casual shots,
even getting a good one of him paws-up on a weeping willow.

It was fun to watch her in her photographer mode, and I
wondered if this was the way she’d been when she was a working photojournalist,
traveling the world taking pictures to accompany news and feature stories. She
looked happy and fully engaged, and I hoped she always maintained that sense of
pride and pleasure in what she was doing.

Just before noon, she said, “We’d better get back to
your house. I’ll need to make a pit stop at my place before we go to the
reception.”

“Sure we can’t just skip out?” I asked, as we turned
and began walking home. “No one will miss us.”

“Of course they will,” she said. “And I want to get a
look at these kids. Don’t you?”

I held my hands out, palms up, as if I was weighing
alternatives. “Spend the afternoon with you, or with a bunch of inner-city
teens,” I said. My hands went up and down. “I pick you.”

“That’s sweet, but we’re still going.” She leaned over
and kissed my cheek.

On our way back to the townhouse, we passed Owen Keely
watering his parents’ yard. “So much for Sunday morning in bed,” I whispered to
Lili. We waved and said hello.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, nodding. “Ma’am.”

Lili and I smiled, but as soon as we were out of range
she said, “I hate being called ma’am. It reminds me of old women in long
skirts. And he’s not that much younger than we are.”

“I think it’s a military thing,” I said. “But you’ve
got to admit it’s nice to meet someone who’s so polite.”

Back at the house, we both read for a while, working
our way through
Catching Fire
, the second book in the
Hunger Games
trilogy, and then I took a shower and changed into college-appropriate khakis
and a polo shirt while Lili played with Rochester. When I walked halfway down
the stairs, I stopped at the landing and looked below.

Lili was sitting Indian-style on the floor next to his
crate. She had already tossed in a couple of chew toys and filled the water dish
that clamped onto the side. Rochester was lying flat on the floor a few feet
away from her, his head resting on one paw, looking at her. She had a bag of
tiny training treats in her hand, and she was trying to coax him to crawl
closer to her to retrieve each treat.

“That’s a good boy,” she said, dropping a treat on the
tile just far enough from him that he had to scoot forward a few inches to
retrieve it. I knew that her goal was to trick him into crawling into the crate
on his own. He didn’t like being stuck in there, even though all the
dog-training manuals said he ought to feel safe and sheltered inside.

 “It’s not going to work,” I said from the landing.
“He’s too smart.”

“I agree that he’s smart,” she said, placing another
treat on the floor. “He knows he’s going in the crate eventually. I think he’ll
figure out he can go in willingly, with treats, or with you dragging him and no
treats.”

Rochester was a smart dog; I’d seen lots of evidence of
that in the year and a half that I’d had him. But he didn’t always have common
sense; he continued to chase squirrels, for example, even though it was clear,
at least to me, that he was never going to catch one—and wouldn’t know what to
do with it if he did.

Lili fed him another treat, and he inched closer. I
stayed quietly where I was on the landing as she took the last treat and put it
just inside the entrance to the crate. Rochester eyed it, then looked up at
her. Then he hopped up and ran into the living room, where he curled up on the
sofa.

I resisted the urge to laugh. I just went to the
refrigerator and pulled out a package of Swiss cheese. At the sound of the door
opening, he hopped back off the sofa and came into the kitchen, looking up at
me with those big brown eyes.

I pulled off a piece of cheese and waved it in front of
his nose. Then I tossed it into the crate, and as he scrambled in after it I
shut the door behind him. He was still eating as Lili and I hurried out the
front door.

On the way up to Leighville, we talked about how we
were going to approach our seminar duties with the College Connection kids.
Lili planned to take them out into the woods at the back of the campus, give
them cameras, and ask them to take pictures of things that they might have seen
in the book—trees, plants, water, animal tracks. Then she’d take them to the
photography lab and help them put together their own collages.

“I’m thinking about communication,” I said. “The way
information is so restricted in Panem. I want to create some kind of a game for
them to play, one that involves writing, sending messages and so on. Give them
some exposure to college level writing, but make it fun.”

“That would be cool,” she said. “Since all three of the
books center around the games.”

“I’ve been reading this book about how game structure
can be applied to academics,” I said. “You need to provide a clearly defined
goal, and steps that the kids can take to achieve it. Then you have to give
them feedback so that they feel like they’ve accomplished something.”

“It’s an interesting idea,” she said. “But you’d better
get your act together fast. You do know you’re teaching Tuesday and Thursday
morning?”

 “Is there a schedule already put together?”

She shook her head. “You really need to read your
email. The kids are all staying in Birthday House, and they eat breakfast
together every morning at Burgers Commons.”

Like almost every college and university, Eastern named
buildings after their donors. Howard M. Burgers, an alum who’d made a fortune
in fast food, had funded the renovation of the main dining hall a few years
before, and it had been named for him. The story behind Birthday House, the
high-rise dorm where I had lived when I was at Eastern, was that the money for
it had been donated by an alumnus named Hoare. There was no way Eastern was
going to name a dorm Hoare House, though, so the donation was made on the man’s
birthday, giving rise to the name.

We stopped at Lili’s so she could shower and change,
and while she did I used her computer to access my college email account. Sure
enough, there was an attachment I hadn’t noticed which spelled out the
week-long schedule for the CC kids. I’d been assigned a slot on Tuesday
morning.

Lili and I arrived at the auditorium in Granger Hall to
find a group of about fifty teenagers milling around in the lobby, looking at
the student artwork that had been hung on the walls. “They don’t seem too
terrifying,” I whispered to her.

Probably two-thirds of them were female; about fifty
percent were African-American, another thirty percent Hispanic. A group of
white girls clustered together, with a single white boy floating at the edge of
their group. The rest were a mix of Asian, South Asian, and kids who probably
had to check the “other” box on any official forms. They all wore lanyards
around their neck with a plastic badge at the end giving their first name and
the city they were from.

An awful lot of them had tattoos of one kind or another,
and I couldn’t help wondering if some of them might be gang-related. Almost
every girl had something in the way of ear jewelry, from rows of studs to
dangling rings to those big plugs called gauges.

Everyone began to file into the auditorium, and we
followed. The program was mercifully short; President Babson welcomed everyone,
and Dot Sneiss, the college registrar, gave them a brief overview of what to
expect over the next week. Then she began introducing each of the faculty
members. I was lucky that there were four of us representing the English
department, and we all stood together. Lili was the only one representing fine
arts.

After the program was over, we all walked back outside,
to where aluminum folding tables had been set up with picnic foods. A group of
Eastern students had been hired to act as mentors, and they organized the kids
into groups to eat and play ice-breaker games. I noticed Yudame, one of my tech
writing students, among the mentors. He was a light-skinned Puerto Rican kid
with a dandelion puff of blondish-brown hair. He pronounced his name You-Dummy,
which always amused me.

The CC kids had been divided into four smaller groups,
each of about a dozen, and each assigned to one mentor. It looked like someone
had been careful to compose the groups, as they each looked to be balanced
between race and ethnicity.

Lili and I loaded up paper plates with hamburgers and
fries, and walked over to where Yudame had staked out his section. “Hey, Prof,
let me introduce you to my team,” he said, standing up.

I scanned the group as he named them. Courtney was a
skinny tough-looking white girl in a white wife-beater T-shirt that showed she
had tattoos down both arms. Her blonde hair hung in dreads and she wore a ball
cap backwards. Chinelle was twice her size, with a huge chest that nearly popped
out of her low-cut blouse. She wore tight jeans and high heels, and her dark
skin shone with some kind of makeup. The last to be introduced was Ka’Tar, and I
remembered that was the name of DeAndre Dawson’s half-brother. Could there be
two kids with that same Klingon-influenced name?

He was a skinny kid with skin so dark it was almost
black. I remembered Shenetta Levy had sad something about DeAndre’s brother
being handicapped in some way, but I couldn’t remember how.

Yudame raved about what a good teacher I was and I had
to jump in and say, “I already put in your grade for last term, Yudame. You
don’t have to suck up any more.”

That got a laugh from the kids. We started to eat and
talk to them, and I learned that they were mostly from New York and Philadelphia,
as well as a few other urban cities in the northeast. They ranged from fourteen
to seventeen. Two had just graduated from high school, but the rest were still
enrolled.

“That’s great that you’re all still in school,” Lili
said.

“You gotta be in school to be in this program,” a
heavyset black girl named Ashanty said. “They won’t let you in if you ain’t.”
Her hair was pulled into cornrows so tight just looking at them gave me a
headache.

“But you can be in any kind of school, right?” Yudame
asked.

Ashanty nodded. “I’m in this program for teen mothers.
I have a little boy and they have a day care right there at the school.”

The other kids chimed in, and I was surprised at the
range of educational opportunities available, from programs like Ashanty’s to
parochial schools, technical schools, work-study programs and pre-college
academies.

When we finished eating, Yudame announced that the kids
were going to play volleyball. As they stood up, I asked, “Ka’Tar, can I talk
to you before you leave?”

He looked suspicious, like he had done something wrong
but didn’t realize it yet. He shuffled over to where Lili and I stood under the
shade of a maple tree. “D’you have a half-brother named DeAndre?” I asked,
deliberately trying to keep my tense vague in case I was right—and in case the
boy didn’t know that DeAndre was dead.

“True dat,” he said, lowering his head and scuffing at
the dirt with the toe of one shoe. “He the reason why I came here. He tole me
about it.” Then he looked up at me, suspicious. “How you know about DeAndre? He
dead.”

Up close, I saw that the fourth and fifth fingers of
his right hand were fused together. I didn’t think it was right to tell him
that my dog had discovered his half-brother’s body. “I never met him. But I
know Shenetta. She was here in Leighville yesterday. Maybe she and Jamarcus are
going to move down here.”

“Shenetta good people,” he said. “DeAndre always said
so.”

“Yeah, she is,” I said. “Well, I don’t want to keep you
from volleyball.”

“’S all right,” he said. “They always pick me last,
cause of my hand.” He held it up. “DeAndre, he always saying he gonna get the
money to get me fixed up.”

My heart felt like it was going to break. I barely knew
the kid, but I could see the hurt and disappointment playing on his face. He
turned away from us and shuffled toward the volleyball net.

Lili put her hand on my upper arm. “You can’t fix the
world,” she said.

“He’s not the world. He’s just one kid.”

“I know. And I’m sure he’s had a tough life. But at
least he’s here for the week, and maybe he can see something better in the
future.”

She took my hand and squeezed, and we walked back to
where we had parked.  “I should work on my program for the kids,” she said,
when we reached my car. “I can’t believe I signed up to teach every day.” She
shook her head. “What was I thinking?”

“You were thinking that you wanted to do some good for
these kids,” I said.

I drove back to her apartment. “You’d better go home
and get your class planned,” she said, when I pulled up in front of the
building. She leaned over and kissed me, and then hopped out of the car. “Now
go take care of your dog,” she said.