Dog Bless You (14 page)

Rochester had rolled over and gone back to sleep.
“Looks like Frankie and Jamarcus are getting along.” He reached out to shake my
hand. “Thanks, Steve. I appreciate the help.”

I shook his hand, then collected Rochester. I waved
goodbye to Shenetta and Jamarcus, and then called Lili. “Hey, the mutt and I
are in Leighville. You busy?”

“Just playing around with Photoshop,” she said. “Come
on over. Though don’t let Rochester hear you call him a mutt. I understand he’s
very proud of his pedigree.”

I hung up and looked at my dog. “Have you been having
private conversations with Lili, boy?”

He just looked at me, and kept his secrets.

I had my Kindle with me, and so Lili and I spent the
afternoon lying around together—her on a big easy chair with her feet curled
underneath her, me stretched out on the sofa, both of us reading. Rochester was
on the floor between us.

Lili finished the first book of
The Hunger Games
trilogy just before we had to get ready for dinner. Like me, she wanted to keep
right on reading—but she was a traditionalist when it came to books. “I have to
have the physical object,” she said, when I suggested we could just share my
Kindle. “I like to hold a book in my hands. If we get moving we can stop at the
campus bookstore on our way to New Hope for dinner.”

I didn’t want to leave Rochester alone in Lili’s
apartment, so we had to leave early in order to drive down to Stewart’s Crossing
and feed and walk him. Before we left Leighville, though, we detoured past the
college bookstore, which takes up half a block on Main Street, just below the
wrought-iron entrance gates to the college.

It was just a few minutes before closing, and Rochester
and I waited in the car while Lili darted in and bought the next two volumes in
the series. Then we drove down to River Bend and saw to the bossy golden’s
every need. I ushered him into his crate, which he wasn’t happy about—but I
remembered that black glove he’d chewed up and I resisted the sad look on his
doggy face. Then we drove back up river.

We met Rick and Paula outside Le Canal in New Hope, a
French restaurant with big glass windows that looked out on the Delaware Canal.
“You’re wearing the palacios!” Paula exclaimed as soon as she saw Lili. “Don’t
you just love them?”

“I do,” Lili said. Rick and I both looked down at her
shoes, which looked like nothing special to me—dark brown leather over a cork
sole. But the two of them chatted about the merits of the shoes while I held
the door open and Rick spoke to the hostess.

I didn’t see Lush, but I assumed the teacup Chihuahua
was inside Paula’s big shoulder bag. Once we were seated, though, he poked his
little head out, sniffed the air, then went back inside, like a groundhog who
expects a long winter.

Lili and Paula carried the conversation, talking about
shoes and Paris and Paula’s forthcoming buying trip to Buenos Aires. While Lili
was giving Paula tips about the Recoleta neighborhood, near Eva Peron’s tomb, I
turned to Rick. “I met Tony Rinaldi’s wife today, and his little boy.”

“Tanya? She’s a looker. Where’d you run into them?”

I told him about Tony’s phone call, and how Rochester
and I had met him and Shenetta at the Cafette. “You are such a yenta,” Rick
said.

“You aren’t supposed to know words like that,” I said.
“You’re not even Jewish.”

“You don’t to have to be Jewish to recognize somebody
who can’t help sticking his big nose into other people’s lives,” he said. “And
I don’t mean Rochester, though his nose is pretty big.”

“If DeAndre’s death becomes a big deal, and gets a lot
of unwelcome attention for the college, then that could screw up my new job.” I
explained how Babson still had to get authorization from the Board of Trustees
for the Friar Lake project.

“Well, that sucks,” Rick said.

Paula wanted to know what was going on, so I gave her a
quick recap. “But I don’t understand how one more dead black guy could be a
problem,” she said, when I finished. “I mean, they kill each other all the time.”
She lowered her voice and said, “But that just shows you what kind of people
they are.”

I looked at Lili, and she raised her eyebrows. I said,
“What do you…” and Lili cut me off before I could ask what kind of people she
was talking about.

“I think it’s wonderful that something good can come
out of this whole situation,” she said. “Paula, have I told you about the
photographs I’ve been taking up at Friar Lake? I’m happy with the way some of
them are turning out.”

“You’ve been up there since we went the first time?” I
asked. I hadn’t realized that, and wondered if it was a secret Lili was keeping
from me, or just a symptom of how little time we’d been spending together.

Lili nodded. “Just a couple of quick visits, trying to
see the place in different light. I was up there for a while yesterday
afternoon and saw Manuel from the maintenance department installing a new lock
on the chapel door.”

“You know the maintenance people by name?” Paula asked.

“Lili speaks fluent Spanish,” I said. “You should hear
her. I’m amazed.”

“It’s America,” Paula said. “You shouldn’t have to
speak a foreign language just to live here. I can’t tell you how many times
people come into the store and they can barely speak English. We have to use
hand gestures and hold up fingers.”

I looked over at Rick. He was a pretty easy-going,
liberal guy and I wondered how long he’d put up with Paula’s attitudes before
the sex stopped being worth it.

We kept chatting through the meal, and every now and
then Lili and I would exchange glances at something Paula said, and we’d
attempt to steer the conversation onto safer ground. Rick said nothing, but I
could tell he was relieved not to have to manage the conversation.

Paula ordered a steak, and proceeded to feed most of it
to Lush, in little tiny pieces that he nipped from her fingers. She was a real
chatterbox, and by the time we left them in the parking lot, I was exhausted.

“How can he stand that woman!” I said to Lili as we
drove back to Stewart’s Crossing. “She’s awful.”

“No, she’s not,” Lili said. “I’ve run across a lot of
awful people in this world, and as long as she’s not killing small children
with a machete, I’m willing to cut her some slack. She has some narrow
opinions, but it’s nothing she can’t grow out of. Rick could be a good
influence on her.”

Every now and then Lili said something that reminded me
of the life she’d had before coming to Eastern, and made me admire her even
more. “If you say so. The first thing she needs to grow out of is needing to
carry that little dog around with her everywhere, like he’s some kind of
child’s teddy bear.”

“You’re one to talk. If you could fit Rochester into a
shoulder bag you would.” She jabbed me lightly in the shoulder.

“I only take him with me to work because he gets so
upset when I leave him alone,” I said defensively, though I knew she was right.
“Like tonight—you watch, he’ll go crazy when we get home.”

“Only because you enable him. I’ll bet he’s sleeping
peacefully right now.”

I turned into the long access road to River Bend, I
said, “All right, let’s test out your hypothesis. We’ll see if Rochester is
sleeping or worrying.”

I pulled into a guest parking space down the street
from my townhouse. “If he’s sleeping, and he hears the car pull up, he’ll get
up and start barking,” I said. “If you’re right and he’s fine on his own, I
don’t want to disturb him.”

We walked down Sarajevo Court and then quietly up the
driveway. I didn’t hear any barking. Lili and I stepped up together and peered
over the courtyard gate.

He was lying on his side in the crate, asleep, his head
toward the doors. “Busted!” I said, banging the gate. It was comical to watch
him come to life, scrambling up and sticking his head against the metal. He
began barking and yelping.

“You’re mean,” Lili said, laughing.

“Well, you were right,” I said, unlocking the front
door. “He was sleeping.”

I let him out of the crate and he raced around the
downstairs, skidding on the tile floor and barking non-stop. I grabbed him and
hooked up his leash, and as we walked down the street, Lili got to observe
first-hand his new trick of putting his paws up on tree trunks. “It’s too bad
the light is so low,” she said. There was only a crescent moon, and low clouds
blocked most of the stars. “He’s just so adorable.”

“He’ll do it for you in daylight, too,” I said. “If you
want, we can take him over to the towpath tomorrow morning.”

“I’d love that. I’ll bet there are tons of flowers in
bloom, too.”

That reminded me of my encounter with Mark Figueroa and
Owen Keely, and I described it to her. “It just got me wondering if they were
doing something more back there than just looking for plants,” I said.

“They’re both consenting adults,” she said. “Though if
I were them I’d watch out for poison ivy.”

She spent the night at my house. In addition to being a
kind, compassionate person she was also lots of fun, and we laughed almost as
much as we did other things.

The next morning I took the dog for his early walk
while she made us scrambled eggs and bacon. When Rochester and I returned, he
went wild at the smell of the fresh bacon frying, nearly tearing my arm off in
his eagerness to get to the kitchen.

“Let me get your leash off, dog!” I said, stumbling
behind him. He didn’t stop until he was right next to Lili at the stove, where
he planted his butt and looked up at her with those adoring puppy eyes.

“You can have the burnt piece,” she said, dropping it
into his open mouth. He chewed noisily, then followed us to the table, going
back and forth from Lili to me hoping desperately for more bacon.

“I only have my little digital with me,” she said. “I
brought it to dinner in case I wanted to get a shot of the four of us. If
Rochester’s a good model, we’ll have to schedule something else when I have all
my cameras.”

“So you thought about taking pictures last night, but
you didn’t,” I said. “So does that mean you think Paula’s not long for Rick?”

“Paula is very high-maintenance,” she said. “And Rick
is a low-maintenance kind of guy.”

“They say opposites attract,” I said, as I stood up to
clear the table. I was still wearing my typical dog-walking clothes—a pair of
nylon shorts, a T-shirt (in this case a relic from a long ago trip to Oxford,
England, with a skyline of colleges and the legend ‘the dreaming spires’) and running
shoes.

“Does that include you and me?” Lili asked, gathering
the rest of the dishes and following me. “I think we’re in sync most of the
time.”

“I think the differences between us are more
low-lying,” I said. “You have a sense of adventure and wanderlust, and I’m more
a homebody. You look at the world as an artist and consider what you can make
of it.”

I began rinsing the dishes and stacking them in the
dishwasher while Lili put away the butter, orange juice and so on. “I like to
confront the world head-on and then find ways to sneak around and bend
situations to my advantage.”

“Have you been in therapy?” she asked. “You sure talk
like you have.”

“In prison. Mandatory counseling sessions. I talked a
lot about Mary and why our marriage had failed, and how that was tied into my
self-image.”

“You said that your marriage was over after her second
miscarriage,” Lili said, stepping over Rochester in order to get back out to
the breakfast nook.

“It was. The prison term was just icing on the cake.
But the miscarriages weren’t the underlying reason we broke up.”

I closed the dishwasher and followed Lili out to the
breakfast nook. “Mary thought my personality was something she could drill out
of me by pushing me to dress better, to get a better job, and all that.
Eventually we both realized that wasn’t going to happen. If we’d had kids, we
probably would have stuck it out for a while longer, but the end result would
be the same.

“Well, I think your personality is just fine the way it
is,” she said, leaning over to kiss my cheek.

“And I’m very glad you do,” I said.

Lili was barefoot, wearing a pair of my running shorts
and another of my T-shirts. This one had a picture of a dog sitting up in a
canoe, holding an oar in his paws. The legend underneath read “Dog Paddle.”

“Let me put my shoes on and we can go out to the
towpath,” she said. “Remember, we have that College Connection welcome
reception this afternoon.”

I played ball toss with Rochester while Lili went
upstairs. When she returned she was wearing those yellow shoes she’d bought
from Paula Madden again. “Why do you think Rick’s marriage broke up?” she
asked, picking up her camera from the table.

“When he was serious and sober he said that Vanessa was
an adrenaline junkie, that she loved driving fast and bungee jumping and stuff
like that. That she got off on him being a cop because there was always a
chance that he’d get killed on the job. Once he got promoted to detective she
decided the thrill was gone, and she took up with a fire jumper and moved to
Colorado.”

“She does sound pretty awful,” Lili said. “Did you ever
meet her?”

I shook my head. “He and I weren’t friends in high
school—just knew each other because we had a couple of classes together. He got
married while I was in New York, I think, and then divorced while I was in
California. By the time I moved back here and met up with him again, and we got
to be friends, Vanessa was long gone.”

I hooked Rochester’s leash and we walked outside. “Rick
was pretty angry after Vanessa left,” I said. “He used to bitch about her
non-stop for the first couple of months I knew him. He used to say things like
‘my ex-wife moved to Whoragon’ and ‘if a tree falls in a forest and kills your
ex-wife, what do you do with the lumber.’”