Between the Sheets (22 page)

All good things in Casey’s book.

He crept down the steps, avoiding the creaks and the rug, which bunched up on the second stair. From the
fridge he grabbed some cheese and leftover potato salad. He had no idea if dogs liked potato salad, but he figured it couldn’t hurt.

As quietly as he could manage, he slipped out the back door, making sure the storm door didn’t bang shut and scare away the dog. But as soon as he stepped past the grill and onto the grass, the dog must have smelled him or something, because it looked up, one of the ribs sticking out of its mouth.

Casey stopped, one foot on the cement pad, one foot in the wet grass. Behind the dog was the field of tall weeds that he wondered if Ty was ever going to tell him to mow. That seemed like the kind of thing dads were supposed to do. Make their kids mow the lawn.

But so far, all Ty really made him do was go to his room.

The dog watched him for a long moment and Casey stood very still, he barely breathed, and finally the dog went back to eating, but its ears were up and it kept one eye on Casey.

Very slowly, Casey just sat down on the lip of the cement. The dog lurched as if to run, but when Casey didn’t move anymore, it seemed to relax again.

It was hard to say what kind of dog it used to be, because now it was just a sack of bones. But it was big and its fur was short and one of its ears was torn and it was covered in bloody, crusty cuts, as though it had gotten through some barbed wire.

The dog was back at the leftover ribs like it was in a race to gulp them down.

“What’s your name?” Casey whispered. The dog must not have heard him because it didn’t even lift an ear. Casey tried to remember some dog names. “Snoopy? Rover? Jones?”

The dog picked up another bone between its teeth and began tearing the meat off.

Not Snoopy. Definitely not Snoopy.

He refused to call the dog anything but its name. He’d spent the last six months being called
Buddy
by various cops and social workers, counselors and intake personnel. All people who didn’t know his real name, so they used the generic catchall, “Buddy.”

As if they were friends. As if they knew what his life was all about.

He hated it.

He really hated it when Ty called him that.

“Scuzz?” He kind of hoped the dog’s name was Scuzz. Scuzz was a good name for a tough, ugly dog. That would be awesome. “Is that it? Are you Scuzz?”

But no sign of recognition from the dog.

Casey took a piece of cheese and threw it into the grass between them. The dog looked up, its super snout twitching, but it ignored the cheese.

“You don’t like cheese?” Casey whispered and opened the container of potato salad. He could hold out the open container and hope the dog came to him, but in the book he read about a guy who got a hurt wolf to let him help it, the guy made a trail of food, luring the animal closer until he could pet it.

He needed a trail. A lure.

He wondered how to do this, and then he just scooped up some potato salad with his finger and flung it toward the dog.

It splattered against the garbage cans, hitting the dog on the ear. The dog jumped and ran away.

Great
, Casey thought, watching the dog disappear into the tall grass behind the house.
Just great
.

In the moonlight, everything looked super creepy and still. Like those scenes in horror movies just before the evil ax dude came out of the bushes to kill everyone.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw some movement and he turned, hoping it was the dog coming back, but
it wasn’t. It was farther out in the field … something moving out there in the grass. Something white. Something tall.

Holy shit, it’s a ghost!

He stood up, dropping the potato salad and the cheese.

Honest to God, it was floating. There was something white floating out there in the grass.

He peed. A little bit he peed in his sweatpants.

Slowly, he backed up toward the house, his mouth open to scream for help, but only a sucking whisper sound came out.

The ghost thing turned, walking closer.

“Ty!” the sound was a high-pitched whine in the back of his throat. “Ty!”

But then … the ghost started to look like a woman. Which was still super weird and scary. And then he realized it was Ms. Monroe’s mom. Walking through the grass in her nightgown in the middle of the night.

He didn’t even think about it, he just took off past the overturned garbage cans into the tall grass.

“Mrs. Monroe?” he called out when he got closer, and the woman stopped. Her hair was down around her shoulders and it was silver in the moonlight.

She looked super old. Like … really old.

“Mrs. Monroe?” he asked again and she turned. She looked worried, and his stomach cramped with its own worry.

But this was a little old lady freaking out in her nightgown in the middle of the night; he couldn’t pull up the bridges.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I lost my keys.”

“Out here?”

“No.” She looked across the field to the houses on the other street.

“In one of those houses?”

“I think so, yes.” She looked at him, her eyes sharp for a moment. “What are you doing up?”

“There was a dog.” She nodded as if that made sense, and maybe it did to her. There were a lot of strays out here. “The gray one, have you seen it?”

“He got caught in barbed wire.”

“I thought so, too. Do you know its name?”

“They don’t have names. None of them do out here. You shouldn’t feed him. He’s probably dangerous.”

Casey didn’t think so, but he kept his mouth shut. “Do you … you need some help?”

“Finding my keys?”

He nodded.

She shook her head and he looked down to see she was wearing rain boots, the big, serious kind. That was good, he thought. As if that one normal thing sort of made all the rest of the crazy parts of this seem okay.
She has shoes, so it’s totally cool that she’s walking around in the middle of the night looking for her keys in a field
.

Maybe he’d just go in and wake up Ty and tell him about this. That seemed the right thing to do. Sometimes adults did weird things, and normally he had a pretty good idea of when it was just an adult being weird and when he should hide in his room, and this felt kind of dangerous.

“I think maybe …” She looked over at the houses behind her. In the tall grass he could see her path, the broken weeds, the dew all wiped away. He realized her nightgown was probably soaked. “I think I’ve made a mistake.”

“No,” he lied. “It’s all cool.”

She smiled at him, but her eyes were sad. “You’re a good boy, Casey.”

“You remember my name?”

“We just met on Sunday. At church.”

“Yeah, but you’re walking around in the middle of the night in your nightgown. Looking for keys.”

She nodded, her hands running down the front of her old-lady nightgown. “I suppose that would seem strange.”

“A little.”

That made her smile, which made him smile, because he was a terrible island.

“Don’t tell my daughter,” she whispered. “Please.”

Oh man. Shit
. Keeping this a secret was a bad idea; he understood that. Was totally aware of that. But she was asking and she looked so embarrassed. And sad. And sometimes life was really awful and you had to do some strange shit just to cope. He had a drawer full of little things that he’d stolen from school and the Art Barn and Cora’s and The Pour House. Little pieces of garbage that most people wouldn’t miss. That was what he told himself, anyway, when he felt bad about that drawer, that he was collecting the inconsequential things, the forgotten things, the stuff people left behind.

The stuff like him.

So, Mrs. Monroe was walking around in her nightgown?

He could totally relate.

“All right,” he said. “I won’t tell. But you have to go home.”

“I know.”

“Do you know where you’re going?”

She laughed, as if that were a totally ridiculous question. Just because she was wandering around other people’s houses looking for keys didn’t mean she was totally crazy. “I’m fine. You should go to bed,” she said. “It’s chilly out. You’ll catch cold.”

She seemed a little obsessive about colds, but maybe
that was just an old-person thing. He didn’t know any old people. Maybe all of this was normal.

Yeah. Let’s go with that
.

It probably was totally normal, he realized, feeling a giant weight roll off his back. This whole forgetful thing she seemed to be doing—Ty did it sometimes; walked into a room and said, “Why did I come in here?”

Casey took a deep breath and let it out. This was not all that scary or weird. It was just different.

“You won’t tell?” she said.

“Nah, Mrs. Monroe, we’re good.”

She nodded at him, as if a deal had been made, and then walked away, the bottom of her white nightgown all muddy and grass-stained. But she wasn’t walking toward home, she was heading out to the highway.

“Wrong way, Mrs. Monroe.”

“I know where my house is.”

He pointed across the field at the farmhouse, dark in the dark night.

She changed direction and he watched, trailing after her until he saw her get into her house, and then he turned around and walked back home only to find the dog eating all the cheese and potato salad he’d dropped.

But when he caught sight of Casey the dog vanished. A gray ghost into the purple shadows, as if it had never really been there at all.

Taking Casey to work with him on Tuesday morning did not start well.

“Let me use the saw.”

“No way, Casey. You’ve got to earn using power tools.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Not really.”

Casey muttered under his breath and slunk back to his job measuring lumber.

Was he supposed to say he did trust the kid and then watch when he cut off his hand because he wasn’t paying attention?

Fatherhood was not easy.

“I didn’t know you could do this stuff,” Casey said, pulling the lip of the retractable tape measure over the edge of the board and then making a mark with his pencil on the wood. “You worked in that motorcycle shop when I found you.”

“It’s good to be able to do lots of things,” Ty said and lowered the arm of the chop saw, the whirr of the blade through the wood a quick whine and then over.

“What do you think you’re going to do when you get older?” he asked. Casey didn’t answer right away and Ty looked over his shoulder to see him, sitting back, fiddling with the tape measure, pulling out a foot and letting it skitter back.

“You really want to know?”

“Of course,” Ty said, surprised.

“You won’t make fun of me?”

“Oh my God, Case—no.”

“Mom sometimes made fun of me. She said it was stupid and—”

Ty held up his hand. “I am not Mom.” Internally he braced for something someone like Vanessa would find laughable. She had a pretty narrow view of the world—men were men, women were women, and anything outside of that was an object of derision. A dancer, maybe. The circus?

“An animal trainer for movies.”

“A … what?”

“You know in movies, when there’s a dog and it does tricks and stuff.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“I want to do that.”

Oh Christ, would this kid ever stop wrecking him? “We should get you a dog.”

Casey blinked wide eyes at him. “Really?”

“Yeah. You should have a dog. You can start by training him.”

For a second Ty didn’t understand what was happening on Casey’s face. There was grief and excitement and confusion and worry.

“Case—”

“That would be awesome. Mom always said we moved around too much to get a dog.”

“Well, we’re sticking around, at least for a while.” Casey’s face fell into panic. “We’re moving?”

“No!” How the hell did he construe that? “I’m just saying, even if we move it’s okay to have a dog.”

“I don’t want to move.”

“We’re not. Seriously, Casey. Forget I said anything.” Ty sighed. “We’ll head down to the shelter in Masonville, see what they got.”

“That would be awesome.” Casey pushed his hair out of his eyes and smiled at Ty’s chin, not quite looking at him. But also not looking at a spot three feet away from him either, so progress.

A car door slammed behind them and they both turned to see Brody climbing out of his truck.

“Who is that guy?” Casey breathed.

“My boss.”

“He’s a scary dude.”

“Not really. Well, not once you get to know him.”

In a glance Brody took in Ty and Casey, but whatever reaction he had to seeing Casey on the work site on a Tuesday morning was hidden behind his glasses.

“Are you going to be in trouble?” Casey asked.

“No.” Though it seemed unlikely Brody would be entirely
cool with an eleven-year-old here slowing things down on the arbor to nearly a crawl.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Go get Brody and me some coffee.”

“Can I get a fritter?”

“No.”

“Ty,” he whined.

“Get.”

Casey left and Ty turned to Brody, who was putting on his tool belt.

“I take it that’s your son?” Brody asked.

“Yeah.”

“He looks like you.”

That took Ty aback. “You think? I keep seeing his mom. The red hair, I guess.”

“Nah, he’s you. You can tell. There’s no school today?”

Ty rubbed his hand over the back of his head. Ty had enough in savings that if Brody fired him he’d be all right for a while. But then he got that old fire up his spine, that if Casey was suspended and Ty got fired, maybe this was the signal to ditch Bishop and find a fresh start somewhere else. Casey wanted to stay, but they could find a house and a school he liked somewhere else. Maybe Florida. Living by a beach would probably make Casey happy.

“Casey got suspended.” Brody just watched him and Ty found himself babbling in the silence. “It was a fight. The wrong thing for the right reason.”

“I know those kinds of fights,” Brody said. “My brother used to run his mouth off and I was the one to back it up.”