Man in The Woods (32 page)

Authors: Scott Spencer

Tags: #Romance, #Spencer, #Fiction, #Humorous, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Carpenters, #Fiction - General, #General, #Scott - Prose & Criticism, #Guilt, #Dogs, #Gui< Fiction

BOOK: Man in The Woods

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As Paul walks toward the door, he gives Shep a final ear-tug. “Bye Shep,” he says, his voice breaking.

He notices that Dinah has sidestepped a few extra feet away from him, giving him a wide berth.

Kate finds Paul in the kitchen, crying openly and looking in the cabinet over the sink for Shep’s antibiotics, even though they are on the windowsill. There are bottles of aspirin, Advil, vitamin C and other supplements, and in his frustration he swats them all away, sending some deeper into the cabinet and sweeping others into the sink.

“She saw him on TV?” Kate asks.

Paul nods. He is holding on to the sink now with both hands because his legs feel useless.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m giving her his pills. I’ll give her the rest of his food, too. She’s driving back to Philadelphia and when five o’clock comes around he’ll wonder where his food is.”

“Paul…”

“Food, safety, and comfort. It’s what he thinks about.”

“The pills are on the windowsill,” Kate says, but Paul hears only half of what she’s said. His attentions are seized by the sound of running and when he looks out the old glass of the window he sees Dinah, wavy and prismatically tinted by the mouth-blown glass, racing for the Elkins Park Gourmet van with Shep at her side. She opens the door for him and he clumsily clambers in and then, with one panicked glance toward the house, she runs to the driver’s side.

“Hey,” Paul manages to shout, but she certainly can’t hear him—her van starts with a roar—and even if she did she wouldn’t stop. She throws the car into gear and swerves around Paul’s truck, Kate’s car, with gravel spitting out from her spinning wheels. And Paul, still holding on to the sink, cranes his neck and follows the van’s flight with his eyes for as long as he can, wondering if he will perhaps see Shep turning back toward the house for one last farewell glance.

Three hours later, Paul, Kate, and Ruby sit at the dining table over a meal of bow-tie pasta—multicolored to amuse Ruby—sauced with pesto Paul made from the last of the basil. He is bereft and would rather not speak and so it has fallen to Kate to explain Shep’s absence to Ruby, and she tells the story of the dog’s miraculous reunion with his owner in such a way that Ruby is actually happy.

“This house needs a dog,” Kate says. “This family needs a dog. I never thought I’d hear myself saying that, but it’s true.”

“We could get another dog,” Paul manages to say.

Ruby looks at them, her eyes bright with gratitude. “I want one like Shep, though,” she says.

“They’re all a little bit like Shep,” Paul says.

“Maybe a smaller version,” Kate says. She is already thinking about shipping the poor beast to Europe—and doing it soon.

“Oh, I forgot,” Ruby says, her voice rising. A bit of her old theatricality is returning. “Mr. Wexler wants to know if you can come to our class and talk to everyone.”

“Who’s Mr. Wexler?” Kate asks. “Your new teacher?”

“Only for social studies. Our fall unit is religions of the world. We don’t just do the regular ones. And after class he told me you can come to talk to the whole class.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Kate says, “I don’t know. I’m not an expert. It was just that one book.”

Paul looks up from his food. “We could go to the Windsor SPCA and find a nice dog who needs a home.”

“That’s a good idea, baby,” Kate says, reaching across the table and grazing his arm with her fingers. “We can drive over there tomorrow.”

“One that doesn’t look like Shep,” Paul says.

“But I have school,” Ruby says.

“Maybe after school,” Paul says. He thinks of those dogs in their cages and the idea of saving one of them lifts his spirits for a moment.

“We’ll make a nice home for him,” Kate says.

Home.
Paul looks around the room, at the grain of the plaster on their ceiling, the lingering light in their windows, the pale paint on the walls, the faces before him, Ruby, Kate, and his hands on the table. “I don’t think I ever believed that something like this was even possible,” he says.

“Oh, Paul,” Kate says, her voice catching.

“Uh-oh,” Ruby says.

“What is it, sweetie?” Kate asks.

“There’s a birdy fairy angel on the wall.”

“Oh no, Ruby,” Kate says. “Not this again.”

Ruby doesn’t bother to defend herself. She simply points at the mirror on the wall, and both Kate and Paul obligingly turn around. Colored lights blue and red dance in the beveled glass around the mirror’s border. Amazed, and believing for one moment that an angel really is on its way, Paul says, “Will you look at that?” He stands up and touches the flickering glass, red and blue, red and blue, until the mirror itself fills with the reflection of a squad car rolling up to the house, its emergency lights urgently spinning, though the car itself is moving slowly, in no particular rush.

a cognizant original v5 release october 01 2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A novelist is essentially a lone wolf, and every working hour is spent in solitude. However, experience has taught me when and where to look for help, and now it’s time to thank four people who have given me comfort and aid: my agent, Lynn Nesbit; my editor/publisher, Dan Halpern; Tom McDonough; and Jo Ann Beard.

About the Author

SCOTT SPENCER
is the author of nine previous novels, including
A Ship Made of Paper, Waking the Dead,
and the international bestseller
Endless Love.
He has written for
Rolling Stone,
the
New York Times,
the
New Yorker, GQ,
and
Harper’s,
and has taught writing at Columbia University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Williams College, and the Bard Prison Initiative. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York.

www.harpercollins.com/scottspencer

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ALSO BY SCOTT SPENCER

Willing

A Ship Made of Paper

The Rich Man’s Table

Men in Black

Secret Anniversaries

Waking the Dead

Endless Love

Preservation Hall

Last Night at the Brain Thieves’ Ball

Credits

Jacket design by Allison Saltzman and Chin-Yee Lai

Jacket photograph © Andy and Michelle Kerry/Trevillion

MAN IN THE WOODS
. Copyright © 2010 by Scott Spencer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Tree Photography © iStockphoto.com/Ricardas Jasakas

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

EPub Edition © August 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201054-4

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