Leftovers (3 page)

I spear a cherry tomato with my fork and accidentally elbow Johanna. “Sorry,” I mumble. Serves her right for sitting left of a leftie.

Johanna, the drama queen, rubs her arm and—give me a break—inspects it for bruising. “Can we call you Sully?” she asks Sullivan.

“Sully?” Brant guffaws, his mouth full of potato salad.

“Beats a nickname like Bran Flake,” I mumble.

Heads swivel toward me. Did I really say that? Out loud?

Sullivan laughs. Loudly. He thinks I've made a joke.

A long summer just got longer.

Every day after lunch, the dogs nap in the shade. There's free time for the “volunteers” until 3:00
PM
.

“Enjoy!” Dr. Fred exclaims, opening his arms wide as if to convey that Moose Island is some lush expanse of wilderness. A Canine Club Med. There are no actual moose on Moose Island; it was named for old Richard Moose, a rich, dog-loving bachelor who left the island to Dr. Fred on the condition that it be maintained as a “Pooch Paradise.”

Get real.

Here's what Camp DGF
really
looks like:

Imagine a postcard-perfect tropical island in the South Pacific. You know the kind: tall palms swaying gently in the breeze, long stretches of soft sand, a clear green ocean teeming with iridescent fish, fresh air scented with pineapple and coconut, exotic birds soaring and singing across azure skies. In simpler terms: Paradise. Pooch or otherwise.

Then bomb it.

Reduce “Paradise” to a few large boulders and a bucket of rubble. Transport it to eastern Ontario and drop it into the St. Lawrence River, one of the busiest shipping lanes in North America. Plant a few willows and evergreens. Sell it to old Mr. Moose, who hooks up some basic water and electricity and builds a stone lodge, five tiny clapboard guest cabins and a boat launch. Then along comes Dr. Fred, who adds the big modern dog barn.

Look away from the billows of smoke from the factories downstream and the rubbernecking Thousand Islands boat tourists and their expensive video cameras. Don't breathe too deeply, unless you enjoy the stench of fuel and sulfur. Avoid the dead fish that wash up on the briny shore in the wake of the freighters chugging to and from the Atlantic. Swimming? Can you spell
c-o-n-j-u-n-c-t-i-v-i-t-i-s
? And then there are the dogs. Dogs everywhere: big dogs, little dogs, old dogs, three-legged dogs, blind dogs, deaf dogs, confused dogs, nervous, barky, jumpy dogs. (Only the really sick dogs and chronic biters have to stay behind at Dr. Fred's clinic/shelter on the mainland.) So obviously you have to watch where you step.

Things can only get better, right?

That same day, after supper (Victoria made a meatloaf, with more enthusiasm than meat, if you ask me), Dr. Fred pushes back his chair, stands and clears his throat. “A new participant is joining us this evening. It's quite unusual for
us to take on a dog once the summer session has started, but, well, this is a special case. You'll see what I mean when—”

“Watch this.” Sullivan sticks his fingers between his teeth and lets out a head-splitting whistle.

A rumble in the hall. The cups on the table begin to rattle. Frenzied pounding on the linoleum.
THUD!
Something the weight of a small truck skids into a wall in the rec room next door. The impact causes a framed picture to fly off its nail and crash onto the floor in a mess of glass shards. Victoria runs with the broom and dustpan to clean it up.

Careening around the corner, then galloping through the kitchen doorway toward us, is a slobbering, four-legged black beast. It reeks of dirty feet and tuna salad left too long in the sun. The creature halts three feet from the table and shakes, showering everyone with dirt and dander and sticky white spittle.

“What
is
that?” I whisper, turning around in my seat to get a better look.

Bad move.

The monster cocks its enormous head toward me. Its shiny black eyes glisten. Its gigantic tongue drips saliva like a broken faucet. Its entire body wags with something dangerously close to glee.

Then
WHOMP
!—my chair is upended. I'm on my back. Pinned to the floor. Slimed by the beast.

Screaming, I elbow my way out from under the hulking, stinking, hairy animal mass. I scramble to the sink as the
beast emits a single ear-splitting
WOOF!
and bounds out the open kitchen door into the yard. Giggles fill the kitchen as I splash and spit and wipe and gargle.

When I finally turn to face the room, Dr. Fred wipes tears of laugher from his eyes. “That was Judy. She's half St. Bernard, half Newfie.”

“And a few crumbs short of a Milkbone.” Nicholas guffaws.

“She's only eighteen months old. Still a pup,” Dr. Fred explains.

“And Sarah's new best friend,” Taylor says.

“Better hers than mine,” Johanna mumbles.

I shrug. “I'll survive.”

I've survived a hell of a lot worse.

Ah, crap. For real.

Sunday morning, I get Poo Patrol.

You'd think that since all the dogs here eat the same brand of dog food, what comes out the back end would basically be the same too, right?

Ha.

Obviously small dogs create smaller poo mounds, and Judy, well...think Mount Everest. But it's the wide array of colors and textures and stenches that baffle me. Dr. Fred says that as long as I don't notice blood or worms or foreign objects in the stools, then all is well. Just shovel it all into the “poo pail” and dump—
”Dump
,
get it?”
Nicholas always says—the whole mess into the special composter out behind the barn. All in a day's community service, folks. Ask anyone here; it can be a shitty business.

Sunday afternoons, the Camp Dog Gone Fun “volunteers” have the option of being ferried over to the mainland for free time or having visitors ferried over to see us. Dr. Fred does the ferrying. I have no desire to go to the mainland, but when Dr. Fred comes back from his first run, my mother is with him.

“So how are you making out?” Mom asks as I drag two plastic lawn chairs into the shade of an old willow. Once we're seated, Mom passes me one of the two glasses of pink lemonade she's scored from the refreshment table Victoria set up on the porch beside the lodge.

She surveys the camp. The dogs have “relaxation time” on Sunday afternoons. Most are passed out in the shade beside the barn. A few of the younger and more sociable pooches are mingling with the visitors, vying for illicit snacks. Judy is locked in the “time out” kennel behind the lodge. (To make a long canine adventure story short, Judy'd been “mingling” too, until her exuberant leap onto Nicholas's grandmother's lap had collapsed the old woman's lawn chair, trapping Grams in the middle.)

“Making out? I haven't been making out with anyone,” I reply, feigning indifference.

“Brownie would have liked it here,” Mom adds, watching a sixteen-year-old sheltie and a three-legged beagle amble along the riverbank, sniffing for dead fish to roll in.

I have no wise-ass comeback to that. Truth is, I've thought about Brownie at least fifty times a day since
arriving at Moose Island. And at least fifty times a day I've had to swallow my heart—and the bile that always accompanies those thoughts.

Brownie was my dog. A chocolate Lab. My father bought him for me when I was five. The same year I started school. In some families, dogs are pets; in my family, Brownie was a hostage. Don't tell, and the dog gets to live. And live he did, until just five months ago, when he died of cancer at the ripe old age of twelve.

“Don't you think Brownie would have liked it here?” Mom says, raising an eyebrow at my silence. “Christ, Sarah, it's not an algebra equation.”

Trust me, it would be easier for me to answer if it
were
an algebra equation. “Yeah, Mom. Brownie'd have loved it here,” I respond, taking a gulp of my lemonade and changing the subject quickly. Best to get Mom talking about shopping for books or some other stupid harmless topic. “Why were you in Ottawa yesterday?”

My mother hesitates. “Well...I have kind of a surprise. I was hoping to put off telling you now, but...”

Ah, hell. “What?” My heart sinks. I hate surprises. HATE THEM.

“I'm putting the restaurant on the market.”

It's like Harold the concrete fighter pilot is flying at me all over again. “NO!!” I scream.

Heads—both human and canine—swivel in our direction from all over the island. A few of the dogs howl back at me. My mother shushes me and wrings her hands. “I knew you wouldn't like it, Sarah. But it's time. Past time.
It's been a year since your father died. Neither of us has any use for that space right now, and we need the money to pay your university fees next year. You know there wasn't much insurance money left after your father's bills were paid.”

“You can't sell the restaurant!” I gasp. “Not yet!” The edges of the trees and the lodge are blurring, fading, falling into the river. I think I'm going to puke. Closing my eyes, I breathe deeply and will myself not to black out.

Through the fog, I hear Mom's voice, softer now, but with no less conviction. “I know you miss your dad, Sarah, but we have to let the restaurant go. The market is good right now.”

“But—”

But what? What can I possibly say? Certainly not the truth. The ugly, ugly truth. That I'm sure the photos must be at the restaurant. All winter, I spent every evening that my mother was out, and every weekend she was with Tanner, scouring the house for the pictures. I hunted through the corners of the attic and the cellar, dredged the back of every closet, dug through each nook and cranny in the garage, looking for those Polaroids. I even got down on my hands and knees to check for loose floorboards after watching an episode of
CSI.

Nothing.

“There'll be other restaurants, Sarah,” my mother continues, “if you decide to follow in Dad's footsteps.”

“What?”

“Don't you want to become a chef too? God only knows how much time Ian spent with you at that restaurant
teaching you to cook. If you want, I can pick you up a few books at the library about grief and bring them out here next Sunday. Maybe I should have done that right after he died. It's just...you seemed to adjust so well at first.”

My mother is brain-dead. How could she win—hands down—the local bookstore's
Harry Potter
trivia contest three years running and not know the first thing about her own daughter? Does she really think that my freak-out over selling the restaurant has something to do with me clinging to warm father-daughter memories? Does she really think I want the place for myself some day? Let's be clear: I want the place as much as I want an appendectomy without anesthetic. Probably less. Maybe if, just once, my mother had taken her damn nose out of the latest best-seller, she might have noticed what was really going on in my life. God, sometimes I hate her as much as I hated
him
.

I wish this was just another nightmare, but it's worse. It's real. “You won't find a buyer this summer, will you?” I choke out. Maybe there's some way to stall her.

My mother drains her lemonade and tips an ice cube into her hand. She rubs it across her forehead as if I'm giving her a headache.

“No, not likely,” she sighs, as if that were a bad thing. “I really have to get in to clean first, take an inventory of the appliances, sort out details with the lawyers and the insurance people.”

“Did Tanner talk you into this?”

Mom's eyebrows fly up to her hairline in surprise. Her eyeballs practically drop out of her head into her glass.
“That's crazy, Sarah. I haven't even mentioned my plans to Tanner yet. This doesn't concern him.”

“It will if you marry him.”

Now her face turns as red as her toenail polish. “You don't need to worry about
that
any time in the near future.”

“Who said I was worried?” I fire back.