Around the Bend (28 page)

I bent under shrubbery and crawled behind the Dumpsters of the Grand Resort Hotel, ignoring the stench of yesterday’s dinner remains, searching for a dog my husband had dumped on me in the afterlife and who had become a weird part of me, of my family. As I did, I could practically hear Patsy Cline singing in my ear, ramping up her chorus.

I was crazy; this whole thing was crazy.

But damn it all, I still loved the man. He’d loved the dog, and other than Susan and Annie, Harvey was the last living tie to Dave. I had no intention of keeping Susan or making a living memorial out of Annie.

But Harvey…

Despite everything, the silly terrier had wormed his way into my heart and suddenly, I wanted him back, wanted to tell him I was proud of him. To thank him for helping me find another side of myself, a side I hadn’t even known existed. I wasn’t about to run off to Hollywood for a new career, but I was going to live differently when I got home.

And most of all, I wanted to tell Harvey that Dave, if bigamists made it into heaven, was proud, too.

I slithered out from behind a rhododendron, then stopped in the middle of the full, busy parking lot, shaded my eyes and scanned the surrounding area. Congested with shops and hotels, cars and people, it made finding Harvey impossible.

I worried that someone would kidnap him. My heart sank in my chest, tight with panic. Harvey was nowhere to be found.

“Dave,” I said to the blue expanse of sky, “why couldn’t you have gotten a German shepherd? A malamute?
Anything
bigger than a bread box.”

All I got for an answer was a horn beeping at my butt. I wheeled around and faced an elderly woman with a white-knuckled grip on her Mazda’s steering wheel, glaring at me and muttering things I was sure I didn’t want to hear out of a grandmother’s mouth.

I stepped to the side and Grandma zipped by me with a whoosh of smoggy air. I choked and coughed, my eyes watering.

Matt’s words came back to me, the story of how Harvey had happened into Dave’s life. Had the dog been triggered to run away the first time because his owner had died? Or because his first owner had been the dysfunctional kind who forgot to feed Harvey and saw him more as ornamentation than pet?

Or had Harvey run away that time, and this time, because he’d been paired with a completely inept dog-show stand-in?

I’d been able to run through Harvey’s routine, get him to do his tricks, but clearly, I had yet to find a way to connect with him. To make him want to come when I called, not just do it for the Beggin’ Strips.

Susan hurried across the parking lot toward me in a little
skip step, the kind made possible by three-inch heels. “Did you find him?”

“No. He’s so small. He could be anywhere.” Guilt washed over me. “What if someone took him?”

“You know Harvey. He’s smart. He’d never leave with someone else. Besides, I think he’s looking for Dave.” Susan drew up beside me, crossing her arms over her ample chest. “What do we do now?”

I wheeled around and faced her. “I don’t know, Susan,” I said, frustrated more with myself and my inability to find the dog than with her. “I don’t know how a dog thinks. I thought I did, but I was wrong.” Right then, I was through with being in charge, with trying to reassemble a jigsaw puzzle that got messier by the minute. “You make the plan, Susan. Apparently, you knew my husband better than I did.”

I stalked off, anger exploding in my chest like a cheap fireworks display. I blew past Matt, ignoring the question in his eyes, kept walking beyond Vinny, the gathered crowd of speculating attendees, ignoring them all. I headed into the hotel and straight for the bar, the only solution I could think of right now.

“A rum and Coke. Don’t bother with the Coke.”

The bartender arched a brow but didn’t say anything. He did as I asked, pouring some Captain Morgan into a squat tumbler of ice, then floating a twist of lime on the top.

I took a gulp, squinted against the burn of alcohol. I took another drink, squinted a little less. A third, and no squint at all.

I sank onto a stool and sipped at the remaining rum. A sense of peace stole over me, yet, even as it did, I knew it was temporary, brought on by the artificial blanket of alcohol.

That’s what I got for leaving my afghan at home.

“There you are.” Susan slipped onto the stool beside me and ordered the Coke that was missing from my drink.

I sighed. “Sorry for taking all that out on you. We both lost in this deal.”

Susan waved a hand. “Forget it. You’re entitled to a little meltdown.”

I gave her a weak smile. “A little Dog-Gone-Good frustration.”

She smiled back. “Yeah.”

“To Dave,” I said, raising the glass and clinking it against hers. “And to the mess he left behind.”

“Yeah.” She knocked back some Coke, slid it over to the bartender and asked him to add some rum. “Seems like a good idea right now.”

We drank, neither of us saying anything for a while. “We need to find Harvey,” Susan said.

“I agree.” A sigh slipped past my lips. “But unless you have dog ESP, I can’t even begin to think of where he went.”

Susan shrugged. “Why not think like a dog?”

I rolled my eyes. “Now you’re starting to sound like my sister.”

“I’m serious. If you were Harvey, where would you go?”

“I don’t know, Susan,” I said, draining the last of the rum from the glass, and signaling to the bartender to get me another. “The pound? A PetSmart store? I have no idea. I’ve never owned a dog, I’m not a dog, I can’t think like one.”

“So you’re just going to give up?”

I spun on the stool to face her. “Right now, Susan, I am not up to handling this. Why can’t
you
crawl around in the shrubbery and find him?”

“Because…I just can’t. I’m not like you, Penny.” She ran
a finger along the rim of her glass, not meeting my eyes. “I can’t just go out there and take over.”

“Why not? I did it. You think I really wanted to leave my couch and trek halfway down the Eastern seaboard with my dead husband’s secret wife and his stage dog? I did it because I knew if I didn’t, I’d never know the truth. A truth which, quite frankly, sucks.”

“You can handle things like that. I can’t.”

“But you’re sitting right beside me. You went on this trip with me. If I can do this, then so can you,” I said, softer now.

“Yeah, but I did it
with you
. Those are the operative words.” She took a sip of her drink, toyed with the lime twist. “I’m not the kind of woman who takes the bull by the horns. Heck, I don’t even come anywhere near the bull.”

“Are you kidding me?” I looked at her, still all neat and pretty in a knee-length black cotton dress, despite the long day. She looked as if she had just stepped off the cover of
Vogue
, not as if she’d been arguing with her husband’s primary wife. “You seem so…well-adjusted to this whole thing. Here I am, a blubbering mess half the time and you’re all sunny-side up.”

Susan shrugged and stirred her drink, watching the lime bob among the ice. “It’s an act.”

“Well then you deserve an Oscar.” I took a big sip of my second drink. It went down smooth and easy, too easy.

Susan sipped, silent for a long while. She sighed, then ran her hand across the surface of the bar before she spoke again. “It’s all fake.”

“What is? The bar? Heck, I’m no carpenter, but even I can tell it’s not real wood.”

“No, I meant me.”

I glanced at her. A beautiful, perfect-featured blonde who could have easily modeled or been Miss USA. The kind of woman other women hated on principle because she’d been gifted with all the things everyone else spent a lifetime Sweatin’ to the Oldies to achieve. “Looks pretty real to me.”

Susan let out a little laugh, the sound jerking from her with a bitter note. She reached into her purse and pulled out a picture. “That’s me, six years ago.”

I glanced at the photo, a worn wallet-size picture of a couple. The denim-clad guy was bearded and scruffy, a bandanna wrapped around his temples. Thankfully, he was not my husband.

If Susan hadn’t told me she was the woman in the picture, I never would have believed it. Three hundred pounds hung off her frame, made worse by a shapeless denim dress and a pair of Birkenstocks. Glasses hid her blue eyes, and dark brown curly hair obscured most of her face. She wore no makeup and lacked her usual perky smile.

“This is
you?”

“Yeah.” Susan took the photo back and tucked it into her wallet, hiding it behind a Visa. “Before I had my procedure.”

“Procedure?”

“Stomach stapling.” Susan brightened. “It changed my life.”

My own stomach turned over at the thought of someone messing with my internal organs with office supplies. “That’s how you lost all the weight?”

“With that, and with a little help from my neighborhood plastic surgeon.” She leaned closer and gave her chest a pat. “Like I said, it’s all fake.”

I couldn’t help but look at her perky fauxness. “Did Dave know?”

Susan swallowed and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “He paid for it.”

“He paid for
plastic surgery?
” The same man who thought we could make our old refrigerator last another year? Who’d told me the only good fences were made out of real wood, not vinyl? Who had insisted we buy organic produce to compensate for his Big Mac addiction?

“He did it for me. So I could feel good about myself,” Susan said, now turning an earnest gaze on me. “You don’t know what I was like back then. I had all the self-confidence of a flea. I dropped out of high school because of my weight, because of the way kids teased me. I never went to college. I never did anything until I met Dave.”

A part of me wondered if my husband had been building the perfect wife, but as I looked into Susan’s eyes and thought of the man I knew, I realized he would have done exactly what she’d said. Handed over the cash for whatever would make her happy.

“He encouraged you to do all this?”

“He gave me the belief that I could do it. Dave fell in love with me when I was still heavy. I couldn’t believe anyone could love me like that, I mean really love me. Fat or skinny, he didn’t care. He saw the real Susan underneath and because of that, it gave me the courage to go for what I’d always wanted. What is it they say on those commercials? To make the outside match my inside. He
did
something for me, Penny. He didn’t just write the check.” Susan reached over and took my hand. “He was a good man.”

I had to look away, to study the dusty velvet image of a bunch of dogs playing poker. I remembered that same picture hanging in our basement when I’d been a kid, dangling from
a wire on a nail. My dad and his buddies played poker down there every Friday night because my mother couldn’t stand the smell of their smoke, the sound of their laughter. Inevitably, she would claim a headache and head off to bed, leaving my father to both police his daughters and his hand.

Until finally, one day, he’d had enough. My father walked out and never looked back. That night, my mother put the poker dogs picture into the trash, as if she were putting him there, too. She never mentioned the man’s name again.

“Did doing all that change you?” I asked, wanting, I guessed, the secret to unlocking the rest of Penny, too.

“It changed how I look. It changed how I acted when I went out in public. I stopped being a wallf lower. Got my GED, signed up for college. It’s just a community college, but it’s something. A goal. I’m still going, working on my degree in psychology, but at least I’m moving forward with my life, instead of just watching it from the sidelines.”

The words stung, sending a flare of jealousy through me. Why hadn’t Dave done that with me?

I raised my glass toward her again. “Then maybe we should toast Dave the saint.” The words were bitter, tinged by the alcohol.

“He wasn’t a saint, Penny. But I do owe him a lot.”

“So go on out there and find his dog,” I said, staring into the murky brown rum. I gulped down the last bit, tossed a bill on the bar, then left.

Let Susan pick up the pieces for a while. I was going to find a good blanket and disappear.

I took a cab back to my hotel room, crawled into the uncomfortable, still unmade bed and slept until the rum wore off. When I awoke, it was late afternoon. The sinking sun sliced a sharp edge of orange through the curtains.

Straight into my hungover, regretful face.

Susan hadn’t returned to the room. Nor had Harvey found me. Apparently no miracles had occurred in the two hours I’d been asleep.

As tempting as it was to close my eyes again, I swung my feet over the side of the bed, took my second shower of the day and got dressed in jeans and comfortable shoes.

Without the alcohol to numb my feelings, guilt crowded onto my shoulders like a flock of birds straining a telephone line. I’d been mean to Susan, and she’d been nothing but nice to me.

Not to mention, I’d lost the dog. I didn’t want to care about a terrier I hadn’t asked for, but damn it all, I did. Somewhere between the Massachusetts state border and the Dog-Gone-Good Show, I’d started seeing him as a part of the Reynolds family.

A part of me. And now he was gone.

Oh, hell.

My car, I realized, was back at the conference site. I took another cab back to the Grand Resort Hotel, stopped inside for a huge cup of coffee, then got in the Mercedes. As I put the car in Reverse, I leaned over the backseat to watch for pedestrians—

And spied Harvey’s little denim personalized backpack. All this time, it had sat there, forgotten and never opened.

I grabbed the strap and hauled it up front with me. The zipper stuck a little, then gave way, spilling an assortment of vinyl toys onto my lap, one fuzzy stuffed bunny that looked well loved by a canine, and finally a silver dog whistle.

Jackpot.

I got out of the car, the stuffed bunny under one arm, the whistle in my other hand. Every few feet, I blew on the silent whistle.

In my haste to find Harvey, I completely forgot that I was at a dog show. Before I could say toot-toot, I had become the Pied Piper of Dogdom.

From all corners of the conference site, dogs broke away from their masters, dashing to my side, tails wagging. An Airedale brushed up against me, then a Great Dane, crowded in by two collies and a trio of poodles.

I was surrounded by every breed and type of dog—except the one I wanted.

“What the hell are you doing?” an elderly man charged up, clipping a leather leash onto the Airedale. He wagged a finger at the slim silver piece in my hand. “You can’t just blow that thing around here. It’s dangerous, for God’s sake.”

“Sorry. I’m looking for my dog.”

“You lost
Harvey?
” a woman corralling the poodles said. “How could you?”

“He ran away.” Even as I said the words, I realized how it sounded. Like I’d been a bad parent and Harvey had headed for greener pastures.

The gaping mouths and narrowed eyes around me echoed that sentiment. As a dog owner, I was a failure.

Gee, add that to my wife score and I’d won zero and lost two.

Then, I spied a familiar streak of brown and white slipping under a parked VW Bug. “Harvey!” I broke out of the parking-lot pound and dashed over to the dog, waving the stuffed rabbit, calling his name.

He hesitated for a second, then sprang off his back two paws and galloped toward me. I scooped him up, not realizing until I held his tiny, trembling body against my chest how much I had missed him.

Tears burned behind my eyes. Oh, this silly dog. Who’d have ever thought I’d grow to care about him? Miss him when he left? Stand in a parking lot surrounded by the animal kingdom, blowing on a whistle to find him?

Harvey snuggled against me, working the rabbit out from my grasp. As soon as he had the stuffed toy firmly in his mouth, he sank into my arms, content. I bent down and nuzzled against him.

“You found him.”

I turned around at the sound of Matt’s voice. “Yeah. I don’t think he went that far.” I worked the emotion out of my voice.

“He gets a little stressed by the end of one of these things, which is probably why he went looking for Dave. I’m glad you gave him BooBoo.”

“BooBoo?”

Matt gestured toward the stuffed pink bunny. “That’s his security blanket.”

I felt terrible for never opening the bag, never realizing that the dog was more human and had deeper emotional needs than I’d thought. A security blanket, of all things. But with this dog, it made perfect sense.

“I had no idea.” I stroked a hand over the dog. The bunny wasn’t Dave, but it was all I could give the dog right now. “I understand missing your security blanket. Sorry, Harv.”

Matt cocked his head and grinned. “Am I detecting tender feelings for the dog?”

“Maybe.” I put my face near the terrier’s and received a rough-tongued lick on my cheek. He smelled of shampoo, dog food and in an odd way, Dave, too. “Okay, yeah.”

He chuckled. “Harvey does have a tendency to grow on you.”

I leaned closer to Matt. “He captured my heart when he shot Cee-Cee.”

Matt threw back his head and laughed. “That was good, wasn’t it?”

“I think I’m going to incorporate it into his routine.” The words promised a future, beyond this show. “I meant, with Vinny.”

“Yeah, I get that.” He grinned at me. “You were awesome out there, you know. I never knew you had such theatrical ability.”

“Thank you,” I said, making a half bow. “I’ll be here all day, if you want an encore.”

“I might just take you up on that,” he said. Those words also implied a future. I was glad when he changed the subject and when that intensity left his expression. “Well, now that you’ve taken the dog world by storm and made Harvey king,
once again, of the Dog-Gone-Good Show, what’s next on your agenda?”

I drew in a breath, pushing away the triumph of today. I couldn’t run from the truth forever. And I knew, deep in my heart, I had to hear it all before I could go back home. No matter how much it hurt or how much worse it could get.

Matt was right. I’d survived a hell of a lot already. A lot more than I would have ever thought I could. Surely, after coaxing a terrier to play a piano and then engaging in a gunfight with a wayward poodle, facing the next obstacle would be a walk through the daisies.

“I’m going to go see Annie,” I said, the resolve finally cemented. “But I’m keeping Harvey armed with his little toy pistol. You never know when a dog like Cee-Cee is going to disrupt the whole plan.”