Pug Hill (35 page)

Betsy barks, right at him, and he turns around. And then he smiles, a really big white toothy smile, and Betsy barks again and he walks toward us.

And all I can think for a second is, No way.

He looks exactly the same as I remember him but I can’t, looking at him, make out whether he looks really young now or if he must have looked older than the rest of us back then. I’m sure though that he looks no different; his eyes are the same, the way they were always a little bit sad, only now they don’t seem sad as much as they seem wise. Maybe that’s what they always were, wise, and I was just way too young to know what wise was.

“Hope McNeill?” he says, grinning as he walks over.

“Benji Brown,” I say as he stops, right in front of me. Betsy barks again and Benji Brown bends down to pat her. She flips over to display her belly. As he rubs it, he looks up at me and smiles again and I notice that the sad/wise eyes are actually different from how they used to be, because now they’re a little bit sparkly, too.
Benji Brown,
I think,
the only man to ever make me mix tapes. Benji Brown, The Only One That Got Away.

“Wow, Hope McNeill,” he says again, and then hesitates. “Is it still McNeill?”

“It is,” I say, and I’m really happy to be able to say that. “You still have that pretty red hair,” he says, and smiles, and then he laughs.

“Yeah,” I say, “I do,” and then, as I say that, the church bells start to ring. No, really, it’s nine A.M. on a Sunday morning; they’re actual church bells ringing.

“Wow,” he says, “it’s great to see you.”

“Wow,” I say back to him, because, really,
Wow!
“Benji, it’s so great to see you, too.”

“Um, actually, it’s just Ben, now,” he says and smiles back, a little embarrassed, and I don’t think he should be embarrassed. Benji, in its day, was a very cool name. In spite of myself, in spite of everything I’ve learned in these past few months about the complete unimportance of footwear, I steal a glance at his feet. He’s barefoot.

“Ben,” I say. “How have you been?”

“I’ve been great, really good, how have you been?”

“Great, great,” I say and right at this moment, I feel like all along, it’s been the truth.

“Do your parents still live here?” he asks.

“Yeah, they do. Yours?” I ask, and for the life of me, I cannot stop smiling.

“Yeah,” he says, “just came out for the weekend.” He’s smiling a lot, too. “You work at the Met, right?” he asks, and I think it’s nice that he knows, and it’s nice, too, that after all these years I still really like the way it sounds when someone says, “you work at the Met,” even with all the things lately that have been distracting me.

“Yeah, five years,” I say and then, “What are you doing these days?” I remember years ago someone telling me that Benji Brown graduated at the top of his class at Duke Law School.

“I work for the DNC,” he says.

“The DNC?” I say, and believe you me when I tell you, I can hardly get the words out.

“The Democratic National Committee?” he says.

“Oh, I know,” I say quickly, not wanting him to think I don’t know what the DNC is, or worse, that I’m not all for the DNC, or worse yet, that I’m (I’m whispering now) a Republican. “It’s just,” and I pause as it occurs to me just in the nick of time that to tell him all about my theory, how what I really need, even more than Patrick Dempsey, Jason Bateman, Ed Helms, Stephen Colbert, Adrien Grenier, Joaquin Phoenix, and David Duchovny, is a Democrat, might be a bit weird. I nod my head instead. I smile some more. He smiles, too.

“That’s really interesting,” I say, “that’s terrific.” And yes, I know, I probably could have said something better, something smarter perhaps, but really I think this was okay because he’s smiling back at me, and saying, “I really love working there.”

And then we just smile some more at each other for a minute. It’s not at all a bored sort of okay-we’re-all-caught-up-here-time-to-move-it-on-out sort of smiling, as there is something so sweetly goofy about it.

“What are you up to while you’re out here?” I ask after a while.

“Oh, not much, just hanging out,” he says, and pauses for a second, as if he’s considering something.

“My dad just put his boat in the water and I was going to take it out for a sail.” He turns his head a little bit as he says this, and I think,
Oh, good, he’s going to invite me.
A second goes by and then I think that, also, maybe he isn’t.

I’m just about to say, “Have a great time,” or some approximation of that and then I think how once I say that, I’ll go back to the house with Betsy, and spend a little more time with Annabelle, and Captain. I’ll say good-bye again to everyone and head back to the city, back to the Rothko and to the pugs at Pug Hill. Everything will be like it always was, which isn’t a bad thing. But things, I think, could also stand to be different. I’ve learned these past few months about standing up straight, and enunciating and taking deep, calming breaths, and speaking clearly, and taking a room, one person at a time. But more than that, what I’ve learned is that, maybe, it really isn’t even about all of that. In the end, I’ve learned, it’s about being able to take a risk. I take a calming breath, because that helps, too.

“Would you like some company?” I ask.

“I would love some company,” he says, all the emphasis on love. And then, as soon as he says it; I realize that I might not be hearing church bells after all. What I might be hearing— actually, what I am most vertainly hearing, loud and clear and unmistakable—is Erasure. Track number eleven from the
Pop!
album: the song that starts with the guy screaming,
We’ll be together again!

“Sounds good,” I tell him, and I think it’s probably best that he has no idea I’m talking about a song lyric.

“Great,” he says smiling, and looks down at his watch. “Want to say, two o’clock? I’ll sail over and pick you up at the dock?”

“Two o’clock,” I say, a little loudly, and it’s all I can do to not ask him if he hears Erasure, too, because I’m pretty sure he must. Betsy starts barking again and not just one bark, like usual, but barking, continuously until Ben, looks down at her and says, right to her, “You can come, too,” and she stops barking and looks up at him, quite taken. “Does she like sailing?” he asks me.

And of course, as you know, Betsy likes almost nothing so much as she likes the wind, and I tell him she does. Betsy’s still looking up at him, silent and perfectly still. I don’t think she can quite believe how completely he gets it.

“See you at two,” we both say, at exactly the same time. I think, but don’t say,
Jinx.
That’s something, I think, the not saying it.

I pull very lightly on Betsy’s leash, just to test the waters, so to speak, and surprisingly, she gets right up and runs ahead of me, back over the hill to the field. Betsy and I walk across the field together, and then turn around and head toward home. The whole time, the whole way back to the house, the Erasure song is still playing, really loudly, in the background.

Before I know it, Betsy and I are back at the beach, and we’re a little early, because let’s face it, we’re a little excited about the boat ride. We walk the small stretch of beach together, down toward the edge of the dock and then, as we’ve got a while to wait, we both sit together in the sand. I reach over with the life preserver I’ve been carrying and help Betsy put one front leg in, and then the other. Heaven help you and your eardrums if you ever tried to put Betsy in a sweater, but because I think she so surely associates the life preserver with the wind, she gives me no problem at all as I click the straps together.

“Ready?” I ask her, and Betsy looks right up at me, and our eyes lock. I feel the way I’ve always felt in the presence of a dog: loved. As Betsy stands up and moves the entire back portion of her body to wag her tail, I can hear the gurgling in the back of her throat, and I know a conversation is going to start.

I look at the water and feel the salt on my skin and watch Betsy point her nose up to feel the breeze over her head. I think how I feel lighter than I’ve felt for as long as I can remember. There is, at this moment, a very big part of me that wants to lie on my back and kick my feet in the air with delight.

Betsy barks out a non-barking syllable and I can’t help but think that she wants to point out here that this feeling isn’t all because of Ben. And I have to say, I do agree with her. I think that however this day turns out, there isn’t any way it could turn out badly. I look at Betsy and think that, yes, of course, there is the thought of sailing off into the sunset with the man of your dreams. There’s that, but there are so many other things, too. There’s walking along a small stretch of beach with your best friend, for starters.

I look up and see a sailboat approaching; the sails aren’t up yet and it’s just motoring over. I shield my eyes from the sun to get a better look and at that moment, Ben reaches up to wave at me. As he pulls up to the dock, Betsy barks again. I get up and we walk the length of the dock together, out to meet Ben’s boat. Ben is gazelle-like up there: jumping from the sailboat to the dock, tying a rope to the dock, jumping back on.

When we get to the boat, I reach down to pick up Betsy, and Ben reaches down to us. He takes Betsy from me and puts her in the captain’s seat, and you’d think she’d be happy about that, you’d think she’d really like that seat, but she doesn’t seem to like it all. She’s looking intently into a basket next to the steering console, and looking back at me a little frantically with what I’d really have to say is quite a lot of jealousy.

“It’s okay, Betsy,” I say, and she looks at me like she doesn’t believe me. She takes another look into the basket and reaches her nose to the sky and starts a round of high-pitched shrills.

Ben takes my hand and pulls me up from the dock and into the boat. As he lets go of my hand, as Betsy goes from shrilling to screeching in the background, he says to me, smiling, “I want to introduce you to a friend.”

And I have to be honest, my heart kind of sinks for just a moment, because for a horrible second I am absolutely convinced that some poised and beautiful girl who has perfectly matched her foundation to her skin tone is going to emerge from the cabin, smile at me toothily, and introduce herself as Ben’s fiancée.

But instead, Ben turns to the basket that upon closer inspection is actually a dog bed. He lifts out a little black bundle wrapped in its own tiny yellow life preserver. I look closer and I swear I never would have believed it, not in a million years, if I weren’t looking into its soft, angelic eyes. Inside the yellow life preserver, looking up at me sleepily is a little black pug puppy.

“This is Max,” he says, and somehow I stop smiling just long enough to say, “Hi, Max.”

In the background Betsy’s screeching has lost its sense of urgency and has become much more conversational in tone; also it’s gotten to that point where it’s so high-pitched that you can barely hear it. In fact, if you don’t focus on trying to hear it or not hear it, the only sound you can hear is the sound of water splashing against the side of the boat.

“Ready?” Ben asks me.

“Ready,” I say, and I can’t help thinking that maybe this is all a dream. But a girl can dream. And a girl like me, I’m pretty good at that.