“These poems have cusses and sex in them,” said Ms. Gart.
“So do you and I,” said Tiffany, and Ms. Gart would go back to furiously stamping her due date cards.
The general disrepair of the brick buildings downtown suggested Claypot had known better times, but for Tiffany the town had remained unchanged since her childhood. It was home, equally dear and disappointing.
“Come on, Jackie boy,” she said.
Jacks grumbled and walked at the far end of his outstretched leash.
There was a park bench outside the Sunrise Café. Tiffany’s stomach growled. She usually spent her mornings off in the coffee shop, eating a piece of egg pie with a dill pickle, reading the paper, and pretending she lived somewhere else. Sometimes Burt Akinson would stop by on a feed run and the two would heckle each other, but otherwise Tiffany just stared out the window over a cup of coffee and hoped for something interesting to pass on the road. She once saw a pig trailer overturn on the corner of Walnut and Main—the pigs got free and stood in the road and destroyed some flowerpots—but that was a once-in-a-lifetime thrill. She often dreamed of the kind of café one would find near a college campus, with undergrads reading novellas and talking about big ideas, taking off mittens in winter, having friends. Tiffany already knew at twenty-five that she’d never leave. Lives like that were for other people, lucky people, worthy people. Sometimes she was sad about it. Sometimes she was not. Today was hopeful. She had Sheriff Cal’s dog. She felt hungry. She’d grab a cup of coffee and a bagel to go.
She set the food and bowls on the sidewalk bench and stooped to tie Jacks’ leash to it with three tight knots. She tested the leash with a tug. Jacks grumbled and diverted his blue and brown eyes. Tiffany set the chew toy at his feet and made him look at her.
“Don’t mess this up for me, okay? I’ll be gone just a sec.” She smiled at him, at the sunshine surrounding her body. “I’m in love with your papa.”
Jacks sighed and lay down with his chin on his toy cat.
Tiffany smiled and turned to go inside. “When I come back we’ll go home and watch movies. I’ll scratch your belly.”
Tiffany was inside for less than five minutes. When she came out, her coffee hit the pavement and her eyes searched the streets. Tied securely to the bench was exactly half of a leash, chewed clean through in the middle. The food and bowls remained. The chew toy was gone.
Tiffany wrung her fists. “And he took his cat,” she hissed.
“What’s that, Tiff?” Burt Akinson stood on the sidewalk beside her. His big red truck was parked a few spots away, with one tire up on the curb.
“Oh, hey, Burt.”
“Dropped your coffee there, Tiff?”
“Burt, you seen a dog?” Tiffany paced as she spoke, peeked down the gravel alley by the coffee shop, looked down Main Street toward the fields.
“You looking for a dog, Tiff?”
She bit her lip. “That’s what I said, Burt.”
“You dropped your coffee there.”
“Forget the coffee, Burt!”
“Say, come inside and I’ll buy you another so your face don’t scrunch like that.”
Tiffany ignored him now, and Burt didn’t know what to do with that. Normally he’d say something about her sour face, or her dyed hair, and she’d question the status of his driver’s license, and then they’d drink coffee together if Burt had time. Sometimes he’d grow serious and fatherly and ask her why she didn’t have a man yet. He said she needed one. Told her she was too pretty and smart to be running around without a man, unless of course she was one of them new women he’d seen on the talk shows who don’t want men in their lives.
“I seen a dog,” he said, sensing she was in no mood to banter, “running just out of town, back that way.”
She stopped in her tracks, turned, and grabbed Burt by the shoulders. “What’d it look like?”
“How should I know,” he said. “I’m half blind.”
“Burt, I’m begging you.”
“Looked smallish, I guess, cattle dog maybe? Had something dangling from its mouth, caught a tabby cat or something.”
Tiffany squeezed his shoulders and kissed his cheek. She grabbed the bag of dog food and bowls and ran back toward her car where it was parked in front of Briar’s. Burt blushed, rubbed the lenses of his glasses on his shirt.
“See you, Tiff,” he called out.
Gravel spun into the wheel wells as Tiffany sped down the road between the marsh and the cornfields. Her eyes were narrowed, scouring the shoulders and ditch grass for any sign of Jacks. Once or twice she thought she saw the dog in the plowed field, but it turned out to be a clod of dirt.
“Think think think,” she said, drumming the wheel with her thumb. She’d screwed it up. Here was her chance to really know the sheriff, to get a dinner out of it, a firing range date—she could care less what it was—and she’d lost his dog within four hours. “Where are you, Jacks?” Tiffany bit her lip, made a decision, and then punched the accelerator. It was her only real hope, she thought, as she turned down a side road and headed for the driveway of the Branson farm. Cal said he’d spent the early hours at Teddy Branson’s before he dropped the dog off. The dog tried to bolt. And where did it want to go? It wanted to go back to Teddy’s place, to find Cal.
“Jacks?” she hollered out of the window as she pulled in beneath a maple tree. “Jacks?”
The Branson farm was a nice place with old but clean barns. The paint was fresh. The hay bales were neatly stacked. The order was amazing when she thought about it—the old man and his little grandson running the place by themselves. Whenever Tiffany
