Why They Run the Way They Do (10 page)

“What will you do down there?” he asked. “Bingo?”

“You really got me all figured out,” I said.

He finished his coffee and set the cup down on some yellowed envelopes. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “You're a rich man with a fenced yard big enough for a half dozen dogs who's afraid to ask a woman to sign a piece of paper.”

He scoffed. “And you're too scared to give me a dog without a guarantee. What do you care? You'll be sunning yourself by the time the dog knows which door he goes out to pee.”

“My dogs,” I said. “My rules.”

It's almost always something tiny that fouls things up, ruins your plans big or small. A couple days later I was at the grocery store and feeling a little woozy. I hadn't been eating very good, had been sick to my stomach if I put much more in there than a few cookies, so sometimes I swayed a bit on my feet and had to find a spot to sit. So I was pulling out a bag of dog food from the bottom shelf and I felt that wave wash over me and stood up and then all the colors came rushing at me at once and that's the last I remember.

“Ma'am,” the nurse said. “Do you know where you are?”

Well, I thought, I'm looking at a gal in a nurse's uniform, so unless it's Halloween I guess I'm at the hospital. But I didn't say this, only nodded.

“You hit your head,” she said. She was a black gal, cute, with the braids in her hair. “Do you remember?”

I nodded again. What I was trying to figure was if they'd already given me the once-over. I was thinking, by the look on her face, that they probably had.

“The doctor will be back shortly,” she said. “Just stay here and rest.”

“The place is only two miles from my house,” my sister said.

In the hospital room there were cards and flowers and bright balloons bobbing in the corners, all the things I'd been hoping I could be spared.

“I can come up every afternoon,” she said. “It's the best care in Boston, which you know means the best care anywhere. There's a lake with ducks. And the big goldfish.”

“I'm sure it's nice,” I said. I was watching the local news, on the television way up high. I'd turned off the sound but I knew well enough what they were saying, and all in all it was better than anything coming out of my sister's mouth.

“A man came today while I was packing,” she said.

I turned away from the news lady. “Did he take a dog?”

“He didn't come for a dog. He came for you. You got a boyfriend you didn't tell me about?”

“Who was it?”

“He didn't say. He brought you this.” She handed me a beach towel. It had a flaky picture of a golden retriever on it. It was one of those towels you might get at Kmart, rough to the touch, ready to fall apart the first time you put it in the washer.

“He said you could take it to Florida with you, to remember your dogs. I said you must be thinking of somebody else. My sister's not going anywhere. I said . . .”

“Don't,” I said. I turned back to the TV. The weather map was bright blue with snow. “I don't want to know what you said.”

“Well, I'm sorry if I talked out of turn. I didn't have a clue in the world who he was and why he was bringing you a present. It didn't occur to me until he was driving off that he might be your—”

“He was just a man who was thinking about a dog,” I said.

“He seemed awfully sorry to hear about your trouble.”

I kept my eyes on the TV. “That what he said?”

“No,” she admitted. “He didn't say anything. He just
seemed
. Then he took his truck and left. But I guess he still wanted you to have this, even after I told him about . . .”

She held the towel out to me.

“Just pack it away with everything else,” I said.

“Why don't I leave it for now?” she said, tucking it beside me. “I'll just leave it in case.”

That night I wrote him a postcard. I still had his address from when I'd gone up to his house. I was thinking twelve dogs was better than thirteen. I was thinking all the guarantees in the world didn't mean anything. I'd had a life full of them now, paperwork stepping-stones from the time I was twenty-four all the way to this hospital bed. And now I could see the path in front of me, down to Boston, and then the end of it.

I had that rough towel across my cold knees.

“Jerry,” I wrote on the card. “Take the black one. I trust you won't bring it back.”

Yesterday my sister came to tell me the dogs had run off.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “When I got there the kennel gate was standing open and they were all gone, every one of them. I'm sorry, honey. I know—”

“It's all right,” I said, patting her hand. “There's nothing you could do.”

“I bet they'll get taken in,” she said. “Some of them, at least. They're good dogs. They'll find homes on their own, honey. They'll find little boys who—”

“Shhhh,” I said, because I could hear something in the distance, gravel crunching under tires, claws scraping on metal, a man cursing me. I smiled. I could see it now, clear as day: the gate hanging open, the dust kicking up, thirteen dogs crowded in the bed of that black truck. Old Jerry was scowling. Where were they all gonna sleep? And what was he supposed to tell that woman? He was going to have to do some fast talking, that was for sure, but he'd work it out. He'd been living in that big empty house for fifty years. Once he was set on something, he wasn't the type to change his mind.

Ginny, the cleaning woman, knows
what I've been up to. How could she not? For almost two years I've been bumping into her after midnight, at least twice a week; she looks up from her vacuuming or polishing, smiles congenially but not warmly, then returns to her work. Sometimes she's on the elevator when I get on, and we ride down eighteen floors in silence to the gaping, vacant lobby. Sometimes she's got a bag of trash that's bigger than she is, and I wonder how she's possibly going to get it to the dumpster. But my purse is heavy and I have wadded underwear in my pocket and I have to be back in this building in six or seven hours, so I don't offer to help. When I feel guilty about this, I remind myself that cleaning is her
job
, that she wouldn't walk past the reception desk at Wrona, Blake, Mulcahey and Kramer Law Assoc. and see me juggling six impatient clients and offer to lend a hand.

“Do you really think she knows?” Donald (he's the Mulcahey) asks me. We are on the foldout in his office and he's shuffling his feet around under the covers trying to locate his socks.

“I don't know,” I say, though of course I know, of course she knows, of course everybody in the office knows, and probably half the people in the damn building, not that they care. But Donald lives under the delusion that we are being discreet, that if we don't leave the premises together at 2:00 a.m. or make extended eye contact during working hours that no one will be the wiser, and I allow him to enjoy this delusion because if he knew all the people who know, it would make him sweat. And he's a big man, and he doesn't need to sweat any more than he does already.

“One of these days he's just going to keel over,” Tommy says, clutching his chest and tipping over onto the couch. “And then what're you gonna do? You'll have to get him off that foldout bed, prop him up at his desk with a pen—”

“Okay,” I say. “Enough.”

“You'll have to
dress
him.” He howls with laughter. “You're going to have to ask that housekeeper to help you. The two of you are going to have to—”

“Okay,” I say. “I get it. You can stop now.”

“Just don't call me,” he says, grabbing a fistful of Cheetos. “I don't want any part of it.”

On nights I do not stay late at the office, Tommy and I sit in my apartment in sweats and slippers and watch television for hours and hours. It is hard to find a friend who loves TV as much as you do, who is not ashamed to admit that he watches television for six to eight hours every single day, that he watches truly indiscriminately, moves seamlessly from
Gilligan's Island
to the History channel, from
Seinfeld
(the seventh or eighth viewing of most episodes) to
Nightline,
talk shows, game shows, reruns of
old
game shows, decorating shows, C-Span, soaps, even the occasional sporting event. We watch without excuses, without pretexts or apologies, without fear of judgment. We just watch. Christ, do we watch.

(Devoted Gay Friend + Adulterous Affair = Simplicity and Contentment.)