Leftovers (14 page)

But I just shrug and tell her, “I wish,” as I fantasize about flying out the window on a broomstick.

Victoria's face freezes mid-giggle. She stares at me like I've given her some great unexpected gift.

Damn, fuck, shit. I've said too much.

Victoria slumps down on the floor and rests her back against the cool drywall. She pats the floor beside her. “Let's sit.” Not a suggestion, I realize, so I sit across from her, leaning against the bed frame.

Victoria takes a long breath. “I have to ask you something, Sarah.” She pauses for what seems like a year. The flies in the overhead light fixture create a deafening buzz in my ears. “How much does this picture-taking issue of yours have to do with you being sentenced to Camp Dog Gone Fun this summer?”

I roll my eyes around, pretending not to understand the question.

Victoria persists. “I'll tell you why I asked, Sarah. See, I understand why the others ended up here, but you—”

“Doesn't my file say? I took my mother's boyfriend's car and—”

“Oh, I know what you did, Sarah. I just can't figure out why you did it.”

Great. Here we are back at “Why, Sarah?” I thought I'd left all that behind in Riverwood.

“See, everyone else's why is easy to figure out...,” Victoria adds, picking at her pink nail polish.

True enough. Taylor scratches her reasons in a notebook. Her Uncle Joe isn't just a perv; he's a devout Catholic perv and the father of the baby he paid Taylor two grand to abort. Nicholas steals junk food from corner stores because he has a compulsive eating disorder and his retired grandmother, with whom he lives, can't afford to give him the fat allowance he needs to feed it. Johanna's parents run a business that often takes them out of the country for weeks at a time. Bottom line: she has a big house, lots of friends and too much unsupervised time on her hands. Brant is just an asshole who can't resist a dare.

“...but you, Sarah,” Victoria continues, “you've been here over a month. Your work is excellent. You have terrific rapport with the dogs. Your cooking is fabulous— congrats on the dog-biscuit contract, by the way. And Sullivan...adores you.” She blushes. “My point is: I can't for the life of me figure out why you landed four hundred hours of community service.”

Hey, God. How about a flash flood right about now?

“Do you need to know why?” I ask finally.

“No...but it might prevent a recurrence of—”

“Victoria, I've learned my lesson. I won't be stealing any more cars or driving like a maniac.”

“But what—pardon the pun—drove you to do it in the first place?”

I stare straight ahead at a knot in the wood trim around the door frame, my elbows on my knees, my hands clenched under my chin.

“See,” Victoria adds, “your impulsive actions last spring aren't the real issue, Sarah. They were just your response to an issue. And unless you deal with the issue, you may spend your life repeating—”

“I told you! I won't do it again!”

Victoria scootches across the room on her hands and butt until she is sitting next to me, her toes wiggling in her flip-flops. “I believe you, Sarah. But you might do something else just as—or more—destructive next time.”

I wonder how much this interrogation has to do with Victoria wanting to help me and how much it has to do with her worrying that her precious Sullivan has a psycho girlfriend.

“Sarah, how much does having your photo taken— or not, as the case may be—have to do with why you are here?” Victoria prods.

I tilt my eyes up to the rafters and try to catch my breath. I can't do this.

Yes you can,
the voice inside me says.

“Sarah?”

I snap my head up and glare at Victoria. She blinks in surprise, obviously never expecting to see such fire in my eyes. “Everything, okay! Everything!” My voice cracks. “Happy now?”

Victoria stays blessedly silent for a few seconds; then she says, “Sarah, I have to ask you something.”

Hasn't she already asked enough?

“Are you being abused at home?”

“Nope.” I track an ant crawling across the linoleum like it's the most fascinating thing on earth.

“Were you abused in the past?”

“Nope.” I reach over my shoulder and scratch the back of my neck. Really dig my nails in. “Can I go now?” I ask, attempting to rise from the floor. “I need to exercise Judy before I can start lunch.”

Victoria pulls me back down gently by the sleeve. “Just one more question.”

I groan.

“Don't stress over it. I'm not asking as the camp social worker now. I'm asking as the mother of the guy who is gaga for you.”

“Gaga?”

Victoria chuckles. “It's a compliment.”

I bite my lips shut. If she starts lecturing me on birth control or something, I'm going to die. Kill myself. Sorry, Judy, you're on your own.

“Sullivan's birthday is in three days. Did he tell you?” Victoria asks.

I shake my head.

“Well...anyway...your cake for Trixie was such a hit. Would you make a cake for him too?”

I allow myself a small grin. “Does Sullivan want Eukanuba frosting too?”

Victoria considers this. “Maybe chocolate would be better.”

“No problem.” I try to rise again.

Again, Victoria puts her hand out to stop me. Victoria, who doesn't know when to shut up or, as we say here at Camp Dog Gone Fun, let sleeping dogs lie.

“You looked so relieved that all I asked for was a cake,” she comments.

“No. It's just...”

“I know you think I'm probably too overprotective of Sullivan, and too strict—”

“Sullivan never said—”

“Oh, come on, sure he did. You know he was sick as a kid?”

I nod. “Leukemia. But he says he's cancer-free now, right?”

“But what he probably didn't tell you is that the chemo and other treatments blew out one of his kidneys and messed up his growth hormones so that he might always have what he calls Great Dane feet attached to a greyhound body. And”—Victoria sighs—”he has the liver function of a forty-year-old alcoholic.”

“He has a good heart,” I blurt out. He'd have to, to put up with me the way he does. And to put up with a mother who just spilled all his secrets. And for what? So I'd spill mine? Try again, Victoria.

Victoria takes a deep breath. Lets it out slowly. “So do you, Sarah,” she replies, her eyes welling up.

Obviously, Victoria is no mind reader.

“Don't you see?” she continues. “Both of you are able to see beyond the surface warts to what matters most in each other.”

For the record, I do not have warts.

Victoria jumps up into a standing position, reaches out a hand and pulls me up. She puts her hand on the cabin door, as if to leave, then turns back. “And Sarah? I suspect that whatever it is you're dealing with right now, it can't be easy.”

Suspect all you like, Victoria. Try torturing the truth out of me. Won't work.

“You know what the best thing is about going through tough times?” she blathers on.

Haven't a clue.

“It's coming out the other side.”

Just keep telling yourself that, Victoria. If she really believes that “tough times” don't trail you as doggedly as gas after a bean feast, why does she worry so much about Sullivan?

The day before Sullivan's birthday, he leaves for town with Dr. Fred just after breakfast. He's meeting his dad for an early birthday visit and won't be back at Camp Dog Gone Fun until dinner the next evening.

Two hours later, Dr. Fred returns to Moose Island toting six grocery bags stuffed with all the ingredients I need to prepare Sullivan's birthday dinner. Victoria is paying, so the Camp Dog Gone Fun food budget took a backseat to the thirty-seven–ingredient lasagna I've been itching to make all summer. (My father used to charge twenty bucks a slice. It's that good.)

By midafternoon, after Judy duties and lunch duties and putting my huge lasagna into the fridge to set overnight, I go to work on the serious mother of all Black Forest cakes.

Judy and several of her three- and four-legged buddies are locked out on the porch, away from the dark chocolate, their wet noses pushed up against the door screen. Since I've started making a fresh batch of dog biscuits every morning,
I've become very popular with the canine crowd. They follow me around like I'm the Pied Piper of Moose Island.

When the cake is baked and cooled and iced and decorated, I hide it away in the back of the fridge behind a mountain of broccoli to protect it from Nicholas's prying fingers.

Now what? I wonder, slamming the fridge door and slipping out of the kitchen in search of Victoria. I need to discuss the birthday gift I've planned for Sullivan. It's a surprise that will absolutely demand that I stay up after— way after—lights-out tonight.

I find her filing paperwork in Dr. Fred's office and quickly tell her what I'm planning.

“Well, I bet he'll like that a lot better than what I got him,” she laughs, opening a desk drawer and pulling out a bulky, wilted-celery-green sweater. “It's organic wool,” she says, like that makes it all better. “Good for back-to-school, don't you think?”

Ick.

“So I can break curfew tonight?” I ask.

Victoria reaches out and squeezes my arm. “Stay up as long as you need to.”

Midmorning on Sullivan's birthday, Tiara, a fourteen-year-old boxer, curls up in the breezy shade beside the boathouse for her usual morning nap.

And dies there a half hour later, peaceful and content.

Dr. Fred puts on a tie, gathers everyone together on the dock and reads a few short stories from
Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul
. Then he wraps the old girl up in a flannel blanket and sets out in the motorboat to the mainland, to his clinic, to do whatever needs to be done. Nobody asks what that is, and Dr. Fred doesn't say. Moose Island is too rocky to bury a rawhide, let alone a dog. Stupid Brant would make
Pet Semetary
jokes anyway. Tiara deserves better.

My dog, Brownie, never had a funeral. My mother and I took him to the vet in Riverwood to be put down the day he became too weak to eat. Leaving the clinic clutching Brownie's smelly leather collar in my fist, I felt only a heavy, heavy sadness and a ton of guilt. Brownie had
been the best dog he knew how to be. It wasn't his fault he had been dragged into the drama of my life. But just as fiercely as I'd loved him, I'd also resented having to protect him from my father. Or had it really been my
father
I was protecting? Why? Did the part of me that loved my father hold out faint hope that one day he'd stop taking photographs of me? That my mother would take her head out of her latest novel? That we could be a normal family?

Sullivan arrives back at Camp Dog Gone Fun just in time for his birthday dinner, wearing a new pair of high-tops— black with yellow happy faces.

The lasagna and the Black Forest cake are wild successes. Even skinny Johanna ends up wearing smudges of tomato sauce and chocolate-cream filling on her face.

Victoria gives Sullivan her gift—the ugly sweater. Sullivan, being the good son that he is, tries not to gag. “That's...nice, Mom. Very...practical.”

Dr. Fred reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a one-hundred-dollar Future Shop gift certificate.

“Hey! Thanks!” Sullivan exclaims.

“Maybe you should stock up on back-to-school supplies,” Victoria suggests.

“Maybe you should pick out some music and
DVDS
,” Dr. Fred says, winking as Sullivan reaches across the table to give his hand a boisterous shake.

Nicholas passes over a homemade greeting card from all the “volunteers” that he made with scraps of craft materials he scrounged up in the rec room. Taylor took a break from writing her usual dark poetry to pen a jaunty birthday limerick inside.

Johanna bats her eyelashes at Sullivan and generously offers to give him what she calls a
man-
icure, which Sullivan politely declines.

Brant slugs him on the shoulder, reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a strip of multicolored condoms. “Go crazy, kid,” he adds, tossing them into Sullivan's lap as Victoria chokes on her Diet Coke. Slowly, I start to slide under the table. Sullivan's face turns red as the sunset as the others hoot with laughter.

“Well...,” Dr. Fred says, glancing at his watch. “I guess it's time to see to the dogs.”

“No...wait. I have something for Sullivan too,” I pipe up.

“I'll just bet you do!” Nicholas guffaws, leering at the condoms Sullivan has removed from his lap and set on the table beside his can of 7-Up.

“Fuck off, Nicky!” I explode.

“Five bucks, Sarah,” Victoria responds wearily.

“Nicholas should pay the fine,” Taylor says, taking my side. “He's the one who can never keep his fat trap shut. And you're a jerk!” she says, turning to Brant and pounding him on the arm.