“Knock knock,” says a voice coming down the driveway, a voice so recognizable that Betti has wondered aloud on occasion why she doesn’t yet have a voice-over career. “What are you kids doing back here? I saw the truck.”
Betti’s shoes are very pointy in the toes and high in the heels, so she can’t step onto the grass to take a closer look at the construction site. “Where the heck do you get the chickens from?” she asks.
“I have no idea.” I sink into a stackable chair left over from our last cookout. “Though I imagine Amy already has somebody working on it.”
I say it so dryly that I surprise myself.
“You be nice!” Betti says, aiming a tapered red fingernail at me. “I finally got a meeting with her. Next Monday, and I’m a fucking nervous wreck, and I couldn’t have done it without you.”
She dips her hand wrist-deep into her purse and delicately shifts things around until her hand reappears, flourishing a business card. “I’m giving you a session with my acupuncturist. He’s going to seriously help you. He says no more cold drinks. No ice cream.” She passes me the card and heads for my back door. “You got to keep everything nice and warm in there. Okay? Like a greenhouse. Don’t move; I’m getting you a cup of hot water.”
To her credit, Betti opens the door only a crack and inches herself through sideways, but Hank is fast and unfathomable, and after all that weird stillness and silence at the back door he now squirms past her and comes hurtling out into the yard. Manuel and I freeze. The last time this happened it was bad. Manuel said afterward that it was okay, it was just the edge of his shirt, an old shirt, but I’m not so sure I believe him. I was straddling Hank and gripping his choke collar and both the dog and I were panting. I don’t think Manuel told me everything in that moment, and I failed to ask him about it again. But today Hank goes right past him, past the cedar planks, past the paloverde tree and the big bank of native grasses, straight down to the fence, where he begins to sniff about with a frantic sort of urgency.
“I was nervous there for a second,” I say, half laughing, ashamed. “My fault!” Betti calls from behind us. “Everyone all right?” Without comment, Manuel stands formally and adjusts his position so that he can keep his eye on the dog as he works.
I watch Hank patrol the fence, his nose to the ground, snuffling in and around the wood chips. When we first had the plantings installed, we thought Hank was chewing on the leaves and making himself sick. While walking across our new yard, Amy and I would find large puddles of vomit sitting neatly on top of the mulch. We decided we had to keep Hank shut inside, we had to live with his miserable yelping and barking and door-scratching, me more than Amy because I’m the one who’s at home with him, and still we continued to wake up and find the foamy yellow pools scattered among the plantings. This led to escalating passive-aggressive insinuations about who was breaking the rules, and when that got us nowhere, to the reconciliatory writing of an angry letter to the neighbor (not Betti, who’s allergic) about her failure to contain her nauseous cat. Thank God Manuel stopped us before we slipped the letter under her door. “It’s alive,” he told us, and sure enough, there it was on the internet, even yellower than ours, with a name that was gross, funny, sublimely exact: dog vomit slime mold. Truly! It pops up overnight, like magic, spreading spore and discord. But now with the drought we don’t see it anymore.
Betti returns, carrying two steaming cups, and drags over another chair. “Salud,” she says. She taps her mug to mine. “Don’t get excited. I’m way too old. I’m just keeping you company.”
It feels strange to be drinking something hot that doesn’t have any flavor. I wonder if I should offer some to Manuel. I always offer him sodas or lemonade or filtered ice water, and he almost always refuses. He says he keeps a cooler in his truck.
Betti’s talking earnestly again about her show. “The Caregiver. Too heavy, right? And I kind of liked The Giver, but then my manager told me that’s the name of a book the kids all have to read in school.”
“The Sitter?” I ask.
“I like that, I thought of that too. My manager says it sounds like a horror movie franchise. Then I had a dream and the name Sitter City came to me in the dream and I figured that was a sign, that was it, but after a day of loving this name I ultimately realized that it sounds like there are lots of sitters on the show, an entire city of sitters, when in fact it’s only me. I’m the sitter.”
“Sitter in the City—”
“And that was my major breakthrough: me! Why not embrace it? There’s a great tradition.”
She takes a long, careful sip of her water and looks at me expectantly over the rim of her cup.
I hesitate. “You want to
