Emma's Table (18 page)

She'd assumed that her failure to hold the dog properly would mean a suspension, for the time being anyway, of any further dog-holding privileges.

Pete wasn't her mother, she supposed.

“He's called Russet,” she said, smiling back at him—holding the puppy correctly this time.

“Rusty,” Pete called, in a lively voice, having misheard her, apparently.

But Cassy preferred that name, in fact—less precious, she thought—and the little dog did too, snapping his head up when Pete called it out.

“Look,” he said. “Rusty knows his name.”

“And he's only had it since the morning,” Cassy replied. She was only too happy to join into the fantasy of her dog's prodigious intelligence.

“He's a poodle,” he asked her, “right?”

“I think so,” Cassy replied, nodding her head hopefully. In truth, she hadn't the faintest idea.

Pete gazed back at her, his brow furrowed quizzically.

Cassy felt chastened again.

“Well, of course it's a poodle,” she said, tilting her head and smiling back, as if she'd been making a little joke. Most people would know what kind of dog they have, she supposed.

Pete walked back toward the swivel chair.

Cassy felt a flash of fear.

Was he going to take the dog away from her again, just because she hadn't known its breed? She held its soft body a little tighter.

Pete leaned in and scratched the puppy beneath its furry shoulders. “Hey, little poodle,” he sang, his voice so calm and low.

Rusty responded immediately: stretching his front legs long and sliding them forward on Cassy's thighs, reaching his skinny bottom straight up into the air.

“Look!” she said. “It's Downward Dog!”

Her puppy knew yoga, it turned out.

“Where do you think the name came from?” Pete asked with a grin.

They were like a little family almost, she thought—a doting mommy and daddy, a pretty baby boy. Cassy looked all around the conference room as if to shake herself awake. She marveled at the persistence of such ludicrous fantasies in the face of her own family life, not to mention the three thousand photos of Emma on the wall, a persistent reminder if ever there was one.

 

The conference room they were sitting in was her favorite one, by far: just two walls of glass, with crisp white Sheetrock on either side. It was barely twelve feet square, only room enough for a wooden table and four conference chairs, the obligatory pictures of her mother on the wall—all in matching frames, of course. The room looked onto the executive suite on one side, and the great outdoors on the other, a quiet side street on the Upper East Side.

Her mother's operation took up an entire limestone mansion.

Through the outer pane of glass, Cassy looked down to the street. She admired the pretty town houses across the way.

Still, most people complained about this conference room. Like sitting in a fishbowl, they said, with its wall of windows right onto the hallway. It was the last to be booked generally, but it was always Cassy's very first choice, nestled between her own small office and her mother's Winter Palace, right next door.

That's probably another reason people don't like it, she thought: the proximity to Emma's lair.

Cassy hadn't seen her mother all day. She'd been looking for her too.

Her mother was the reason she'd dressed up that morning. All in dove gray, from head to toe, a chic silk blouse that was just right for her coloring—a sea of pale neutral to set off her shiny brown hair.

She knew her mother would approve.

Cassy wanted to make it up to her for the fracas she'd caused the night before: her rudeness at the table, and the pall she'd cast. She wouldn't skate away scot-free, of course. There'd be consequences to pay for ruining her mother's dinner. So she dressed herself up as nicely as she could, and came into the office not so terribly late, ready to fulfill her duties as head of the Emma Sutton Charitable Foundation.

Cassy heard a knock at the door.

She straightened her collar right away, preparing herself for her mother's gaze, but it was only Ruth again, with a tray in her arms: a pitcher of coffee and a plate of those anise biscuits that Cassy liked so much.

It was another reason she liked this conference room so well: her mother's fawning underlings. Emma might not give her the time of day, but her employees sure as hell did, swarming all around her like a hive full of bees, buzzing in and out, attentive to her every need.

Ruth set the tray on the conference table.

“Everything okay?” she asked. She sounded just as skeptical as before.

Cassy nodded. She thanked her too.

 

“Want to get down to work?” Pete asked.

Cassy wouldn't have minded a coffee and a few of those anise biscuits first. “Sure,” she said as she watched Pete unzip his silvery backpack and pull all manner of strange equipment out. He looked like a magician with a pair of mourning doves and twelve long feet of fluttering chiffon. There was a brown leather strap with a shiny brass buckle, and a matching leash with a topstitched loop; a tangled web of black nylon straps; and a ziplock bag filled to the gills with what looked—to Cassy anyway—like dried-up pieces of poo, brown and wafery thin.

Rusty perked up at the sight of it.

“What's that?” she asked.

“Beef lung,” Pete told her, very matter-of-fact.

“The lung of an
actual
cow?” she asked.

Cassy had never imagined such a thing.

“Air dried,” he told her—just one of several preparations. “Do you mind?” he asked, extending the bag toward her.

Cassy backed away slightly. She didn't know precisely what he intended to do with those lung bits, but she nodded her head anyway.

Pete broke a small triangle from a larger piece of lung. Then he crouched down to Rusty, who gobbled it fast.

Cassy could hear it crackling in his mouth.

Like potato chips, she thought.

“You're hungry,” Pete said, “aren't you, boy?”—ruffling the top of Rusty's head. The dog stared back at him intently. It was obvious to Cassy that the little thing was desperate for more.

“So what have you been feeding him?” Pete asked.

Cassy felt a flash of panic. She'd shared a slice of toast with him that morning, and a little bit of cheese. She knew that
couldn't be the right answer though, so she settled on vagueness instead. “I didn't have any dog food at the apartment,” she told him. “So I fed him what was in the fridge.”

She looked up at Pete to survey the damage, but she didn't see any on his homely face.

“Was I wrong?” she asked, bracing for the worst.

“Of course not,” Pete said. “Dogs have lived on table scraps for hundreds of years.”

Cassy felt a wave of relief as she watched him break off a much larger piece of lung and hold it out to the dog.

She appreciated his tact.

“There's a great pet store just a block or two away,” he said. “We can get everything you need there.”

Cassy began to get the picture: Pete wasn't going to criticize her for being a lousy pet owner—no matter how lousy she turned out to be.

Not to my face anyway, she thought.

Cassy rarely trusted a generous impulse, especially one directed toward herself. He probably keeps more clients this way, she thought, rolling her eyes as if she'd seen straight through him.

She watched Pete fasten a collar around the dog's skinny neck, and the collar, in turn, to a leather leash. “We should practice walking on lead,” he said, “before we head down to the street.”

She nodded back at him.

He made a show of lacing the leash around his long fingers.

She could tell that she was meant to be studying his method for later use. He has beautiful hands, she thought—at least. She peeked up again at his scarred face.

“Let's go, Rusty,” he called, a little singsong in his voice,
as if they were headed to the candy store. Pete began to walk around the conference table, and the little dog went willingly at first, only balking after a few steps more and looking up at Pete—a little aggrieved, it seemed to her.

The trainer flicked the leash gently, but Rusty refused to take another step. The dog sat decidedly down.

Pete flicked the leash again—to no avail.

“We'll try later,” he said, bending down to unclip the leash from Rusty's collar.

The puppy ran straight to Cassy the moment he was free.

She smiled at the odd little gait, that funny, hopping run—every step nearly as high as it was long. She felt proud of the puppy's return to her too.

“Look,” she said, taking the dog onto her lap again. “Rusty loves me.”

“That's not love,” Pete replied. “That's just running away from the leash.”

Cassy supposed he had a point.

“Believe me,” he told her, with confidence to spare, “after two or three weeks of treating him right, that's when you'll really begin to love Rusty, and that's when he'll be loving you back.”

Cassy felt her stomach lurch. Still, she looked at the trainer as if she weren't impressed, as if she already knew how the whole world worked.

 

AFTER THEY LEFT THE FREE CLINIC, TINA BROUGHT
Gracie back to school. She'd planned on a full day off for both of them, but she was too upset by what she'd read in Gracie's file. She needed to address the charge right away.

The two of them walked down the long corridor that led to Gracie's classroom, the girl moving slower with every step.

“Is it lunchtime, do you think?” Gracie asked.

Tina had just given the girl a sandwich.

“Are you hungry again?” she asked, surprised and annoyed in nearly equal measure: It's no wonder she's so big. Tina hadn't eaten a bite herself; and after the morning they'd had, she couldn't imagine ever eating again.

Gracie shook her head.

Her daughter was such a riddle. “Then why did you ask, sweetie?”

“Because recess comes after lunch,” she said, looking down at her pink sneakers as she walked.

Tina could feel her dread mounting with every squeaking step.

“I'm pretty sure recess is over,” she replied.

“Really?” Gracie asked, smiling up at her mother, relief blooming on those chubby cheeks, her eyes half a ton lighter.

Tina nodded back at her. She thought her heart might break.

They were both relieved to find class in session when they reached the classroom door. Tina gave her daughter a hug, and told her she'd be back for her at the end of the day. She wasn't going back to the office herself. She had another errand in mind, walking back down the long corridor, her anger growing with every step: she was going to confront Benjamin Blackman.

Where the hell does he get off? she wondered.

 

Tina had only been hoping for insight when she peeked into Gracie's medical chart—for some additional information.
They'd told her that her daughter's metabolism was “slow-normal,” that she'd always have trouble with her weight—they promised her that much—but Tina could keep it under control, they said, if she'd just stick to the diet she'd been given.

She heard the accusation like a door slamming in her face.

She tried convincing herself that she was being oversensitive. She'd always suspected that people held her accountable for Gracie's weight, but she never imagined anything like what she found in that file—written on a pink message pad, with Benjamin's name on the “from” line, his horrible accusation down below: “Suspects mother of making girl fat—
intentionally
.”

She could see the heavy underlining on that pink paper still.

Tina nearly screamed at the memory of it.

But facts were facts, she knew that too: her nine-year-old daughter, barely four and a half feet tall, had weighed in at one hundred and fourteen pounds that morning, in her stocking feet. She'd gained three pounds more after six weeks of strict dieting. Gracie was literally off the charts; there wasn't even a place for her on the height/weight graph that hung on the treatment room wall.

It was a double mystery to her: How was Gracie gaining weight on so little food, and why would anyone think she wanted it to happen?

Even the nurse there, Benjamin's friend, who'd seemed sympathetic at first, had a hard time keeping her doubts in check. “You're sure you're following the diet properly?” she asked, when Tina pulled out the Xeroxed copy of the program she'd been following.

“Down to the letter,” she swore.

“The portions too?” the nurse asked, her voice rising up at the end—the disbelief audible.

Tina had trouble believing it herself.

 

As luck would have it, she saw Benjamin walking toward her in the hallway—as inevitable as a winter cold. She felt herself growing agitated at the sight of him. “What a coincidence,” he said, when they met, as if he were pleased to see her. “I was just about to—”

“Save it, Blackman,” Tina said brusquely.

She had no patience for small talk, no further use for his charm.

What had they gotten her, after all, the progress meetings and the endless chat? Nothing more than a false accusation in her daughter's records. She was finished with Benjamin—with the phony smile that was plastered onto his face, and the clean white hand that was extended to her still, as if she might actually shake it.

“Excuse me?” he said—polite still, but stunned.

“No,” she replied, shaking her head from side to side. “I can't think of a single excuse
for
you,” she said. Benjamin was a snake in the grass, nothing more, as far as she was concerned—faking concern, but betraying them in the end.

“What are you talking about?” he asked. He sounded surprised.

Benjamin looked all around them in the corridor, as if he were afraid of making a scene. “Can we go to my office?” he asked. It sounded like begging.