The Dogs of Christmas (8 page)

Kerri’s face showed noncomprehension.

“Dead,” Josh elaborated. “Amanda’s not dead.”

Kerri blinked. “Oh.” She sat up, considering this, and then regarded him sharply. “So she’s coming back?”

God, what a question. “I mean,” he started, sorting through his thoughts, “It’s more like she’s…” He shrugged.

“You said she was your girlfriend,” Kerri stated, sounding like a prosecutor at trial. “
Is
she your girlfriend?”

“We were together for four years.”

“So you broke up? How long ago?”

“Like, the morning of April tenth.”

Kerri’s laugh was humorless. “The morning of April tenth; do you remember what time?” She held up her hand. “Don’t answer that.”

“Of course I don’t remember the time,” Josh protested.

“You were living together? In your place?”

Josh nodded.

“And she moved out, and you kept this shrine to her? Who does that?”

“A shrine? It’s not a shrine. Look, wouldn’t it be childish to throw all her pictures away, just because we broke up? We’re still friends.”

“She live here?”

“Here in Evergreen? No, she moved to Fort Collins.”

“Which is maybe two hours away, right? How often do you go up for a visit?”

“I haven’t.” Josh looked out onto the golf course, watching without seeing as two men walked by with their clubs.

“She go up there because of a man?” Kerri’s voice had lost its sharp edge.

Josh nodded, swallowing.

“Then, Josh, no, it’s not childish. Your girlfriend and you broke up and now she’s with someone else. You put her pictures in a cardboard box because it’s over, you don’t keep them all over the place, you don’t keep her perfume in your bathroom cabinet, you don’t sleep in the bedroom down the hall instead of the room you shared because you can’t bear it—you move on.”

Josh gazed back at her. For some reason her face was flushed and her eyes wide, as if they were having a fight or something. “You looked in my bathroom cabinet?”

Her hand briefly touched her mouth. “Oh.” She lowered her eyes to her food. “Yeah, sorry. I just … right, look, I seem to have a talent for finding men with substance abuse issues, maybe because my mom made me blind to it. And I met you and I thought finally here’s a normal guy instead of someone all emotionally damaged, or an addict, or both. But I needed to check because usually the first I find out about it is one day I stumble upon all these pills—prescription, of course, all with prescriptions.” Her mouth twisted as a bitter memory came and went. “So I just thought I’d cut to the chase. I get that it was wrong and everything.”

A small smile twitched onto Josh’s lips.
A talent for finding men,
she’d said. He liked the way she’d put that, like he was a man that she had found.

“Sorry. I know it’s not my business,” she apologized.

He felt pretty good about the whole conversation, needing only to clear up one misunderstanding. “And the reason I don’t sleep in my parents’ room is just because I like to sleep in my room, where I grew up,” he explained. “I like opening my eyes and seeing the dent I put in the ceiling with a
Star Wars
saber, and looking out at the same trees.”

This sounded perfectly reasonable to Josh, but she was looking oddly at him. “What?” he finally asked.

“I’m just thinking I can’t imagine having such a wonderful childhood that I’d want to relive any part of it,” Kerri said simply.

Now Josh wanted to reach out and touch
her
hand. Before he could act on the impulse, she pulled it away and looked at her watch. “I need to go.” Kerri signaled to the waitress.

“Um…” Josh just didn’t want this to be over yet. “Want to walk around the lake? It’s such a pretty day. Just, like, for a few minutes?” he suggested desperately.

“Fine,” Kerri agreed, shrugging like it was nothing.

The waitress set the bill in front of Kerri and Josh grabbed it as if snatching a pistol away from a child. “Thanks for lunch,” Kerri said, smiling.

Evergreen Lake would have been called a pond in most other states, but in water-starved Colorado, if you couldn’t empty it with a bucket, it was a lake. Enthusiasts fished and canoed the forty acres of cold water, and only a local ordinance kept people from running power boats on the thing. A barely perceptible breeze was enough to stir the sun’s reflection into dancing sparkles as they walked the path encircling the green water, Josh keeping his pace slow to make the time last as long as possible. They talked about the puppies, which as far as Josh was concerned was better than discussing Amanda but not nearly as interesting as this idea that Kerri had a talent for “finding” the wrong sort of men but that, in Josh, she had
not
.

Josh had met Amanda as a set-up, a
have I got a girl for you
thing that his friends Wayne and Leigh put together. Josh remembered driving over to his friends’ house, full of dread, knowing the night would be the worst on record. Leigh thought that just because she made Wayne happy, Josh only needed a girl and then he’d be happy, too. She’d brushed away Josh’s protests that he already was happy: he didn’t have a girlfriend, so, in Leigh’s mind, he must be miserable.

Leigh seemed to have an endless supply of friends for whom Josh would be perfect (and vice versa), though previous attempts had missed perfection by a considerable measure.

Amanda was standing by the fireplace in the small living room, talking to Wayne in a forced-casual fashion, as if they hadn’t all been waiting tensely for Josh to pull in the driveway. Josh entered the house carrying a bottle of wine and was giving Leigh a glare, trying to frown the manic enthusiasm from her face, when Amanda turned around and Josh’s heart froze in his chest.

That’s how Josh knew how to meet women: Leigh would find them and Wayne would say his wife was driving him crazy and that Josh needed to come over for dinner so Leigh would shut up about it. The girl would be at the fireplace and would hit perfection one hundred percent with a single glance.

What Josh didn’t know how to do was turn this wonderful afternoon into the start of something more. He must have appeared pretty weak to Kerri with his sad tale of being dumped by another woman and having his heart broken by a tree; how was he supposed to repair the damage and get it to the point where they went on a date?

“Now I really, really have to get back to the shelter,” Kerri finally announced. Josh hid his look of disappointment and they reversed direction.
Okay, back at the truck,
Josh decided. He’d open the door for her, so they’d be pretty close, and he’d ask her out to dinner. Or coffee, would dinner be too aggressive? They’d had lunch, but with her giving him all kinds of advice about the puppies, now it felt less like a date and more like a meeting, or something.

“No, don’t bathe them, Lucy is keeping them clean, don’t worry,” Kerri was saying as they approached the vehicle. Why couldn’t Josh think of anything to ask about except dog stuff? “Great day,” he observed, not for the first time that afternoon. There, that was it: dogs and the weather. That’s all he was capable of discussing. He would never have another girlfriend in his life. Why go on a date with Josh Michaels? It was easier just to stay home with your dog and watch the weather channel.

He’d parked a little close to the utility pole, and he fretted now over what that would mean. If he tried to get between her and the pole, he’d be crowding her, but if he stood on the other side of the pole it might block the whole conversation, which was going to be tough enough as it was since he
still had no idea
what he was going to say.

“Hey, the door on your side can be a little tricky, I’ll get it for you,” Josh told her as they crunched across the gravel. He’d meant to make the offer but it was too early, they were still forty feet from the pickup. The part about the door being sticky wasn’t even true—he’d tossed that in at the last second and had no idea why.

“Works for me,” Kerri agreed breezily, oblivious to his inner conflict.

He was silent, waiting for his moment. He pulled out his key and aimed it at his truck as if it were a flashlight guiding them in. Then he lunged ahead, opening the door. She smiled at him. Good.
Now.

He glanced past the utility pole and, when he saw what was there by a park bench, the shock hit him as if one of the wires from overhead had fallen and hit him with a thousand volts. When he realized she might catch him staring, he yanked his eyes away.

“You okay?” Kerri asked curiously.

Not trusting himself to speak, Josh merely nodded. He shut her door and went around the truck and got in, his pulse hammering him.
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

But, of course, it
was.

They didn’t talk much on the drive back to the shelter, though he could feel Kerri appraising him with her warm blue eyes as he concentrated on the road. He worked on keeping his face blank so she wouldn’t see how upset he was. Gone was any consideration of asking Kerri for a date, or doing anything, really, except dropping her off and getting back to his dogs.

He was a little slow to get out to open her door and she managed it herself, sliding out with a quick smile.

“Thanks for lunch!” she repeated brightly, standing with the passenger door open.

Josh nodded a bit numbly, his heart still pounding.

“Right, then,” she said, still smiling, though a flicker of something like doubt crossed through her eyes.

Josh waited until Kerri was back inside the shelter before turning the truck around and heading back to the parking lot. It was like scratching an itch you knew you shouldn’t—he needed another look. He drove past slowly, gazing with sick despair. There. Standing by the bench, talking agitatedly with another man. Blond hair, scraggly beard.

Ryan.

Josh kept driving, past the clubhouse, up into the canyon, finally turning around when he realized there was no point continuing in the wrong direction. Ryan and the other man had left by the time Josh’s truck cruised past again.

He was sick to his stomach as he drove home. “Hey, dogs!” he sang out with false gaiety when he walked in the front door. He could hear the puppies squeaking as he walked down the hallway to check on them, and Lucy thumped her tail, though they were feeding so she didn’t get up.

“How you doing, Lucy? You okay?” Josh knelt next to her and ran his hand over her head and she gave him the smallest lick. The fur under her ears was so soft, he loved to stroke her there. “Such a good mommy, such a good, good dog, Lucy. Lucy, the good, good dog,” Josh crooned. He felt better, holding her.

He watched her feed her little blind puppies for a few minutes, and it was as if he could feel that connection between mother and young, the flow of milk, of love, of life.

Why hadn’t anyone ever told him about this, about having a dog? That it made every moment more important, that it somehow brought the best stuff to the surface of the day?

Josh sighed and stood. He went into his living room and looked through his window out at the thermometer, he went to the freezer to pull out a dinner, he emptied the trash—anything to avoid contemplating this new development.

Ryan was back. From France.

Now what?

NINE

The puppies’ eyes weren’t even open yet. They were helpless, virtually immobile, completely dependent on Lucy for sustenance. They needed their mommy. If Ryan came and got Lucy, the little puppies would die. From what little Josh knew of him, that sounded exactly like what Ryan would do, take Lucy away without thought of what it would mean to the babies.

That night the lights were on in the place next door—Josh could see them through the trees. In his own house, he turned off everything and sat with only the firelight, just like Lucy’s first night.

I’m not home.

He waited all the next day for Ryan’s knock on his door. Lucy picked up on his anxiety and followed him closely as he paced, practically stepping on his heels.

“Lucy,” Josh murmured. “I don’t know what to do.”

After a second day of feeling under house arrest, Josh waited until dark and then slipped out the back door, shutting it in Lucy’s face. He carefully walked through the woods, hating how much noise he was making in the silent trees, wincing every time he broke a twig underfoot.

His stealthy reconnaissance gleaned nothing of value. Ryan’s SUV wasn’t in the driveway, but the garage door was closed. Some lights were on and a half-empty bottle of bourbon was on the counter. Ryan didn’t step into view.

The next night Josh was back in the woods, and again, he didn’t see Ryan. The suspense was like sleeping next to a rattlesnake, except Josh wasn’t sleeping much.

“Should I go over there, Lucy? Get this over with?”

Lucy regarded him with nothing but support in her eyes.

“Okay, I’ll go,” Josh decided. “Just not today.”

When Josh finally did go, he took a deep breath before he knocked on the front door. Ryan didn’t answer. Peering in the window, Josh saw no sign of life. The bottle of bourbon was gone.

That night the lights were on, but still, no response when Josh rapped his knuckles on the door. Emboldened, he was there first thing in the morning, and again, no answer. Somehow Ryan’s continued absence made him seem less of a threat. The knot in Josh’s gut unclenched a little.

When the puppies opened their eyes, Josh felt as if he had a good excuse to call Kerri. But was it good enough?
The dogs have opened their eyes,
he would say.
Oh, and they all have blue eyes,
which must be pretty unusual, right? But then what? What if she waited for him to say more—there was nothing more to say!
They’re squirming a lot more
.
How about that weather?

You have the prettiest smile I have ever seen.
Probably everyone told her that. Every guy, anyway.

That afternoon he brought Lucy with him to see if Ryan was there. It felt good to have a dog by his side until Lucy realized where they were going, and then she hung back, an unsure look in her eyes. She lowered her head and sat at the end of the driveway, refusing to accompany Josh any farther. “You’re right, Lucy. We won’t come here again,” Josh told her.
Let Ryan come to us,
Josh decided. He was tired of living with the tension.