The dog woman came out from the back office trailing the dog on a sturdy brown-leather lead. No cheap and functional nylon for Thomas Stern. But Hal had to admit he took to the animal right away. She walked gamely, hopping with her hindquarters; she wore an attentive expression and wagged her tail.
He glanced at Susan: her eyes were filling with tears.
“Let me,” he said softly, and reached out to hold the leash.
Susan knelt down and petted the dog, put her arms around it.
It was all Stern’s fault. Stern had been an imposition on the family from start to finish. First he was an imposition on Susan, demanding her full-time loyalty as the caretaker of all the most trivial details of his gainful enterprise; into their quiet home had come long discussions of his youth and conscientiousness, even his overpriced wardrobe and alleged charisma. The latter of which was a myth Hal saw no reason to believe.
As a husband he had been forced to endure this intruder in his house constantly—not his physical presence but the daily, dull news of him. Many times he had wished that Susan was employed in an office with more personnel, for the sake of a little variation in her bulletins from the workplace. He himself was stationed in an office whose very size kept him from getting on oppressively intimate terms with any of his colleagues.
Then he had imposed himself on Casey—who knew how, Hal did not open his mind to the permutations, but he and Casey had been close, briefly—and now, missing, possibly even deceased, he was imposing on all of them.
• • • • •
The mutt sat in the back seat of the car, her ears forward, watching and listening. Hal drove.
“If she sheds a lot we can spread out a blanket back there,” he said.
Susan gazed out the windshield.
“Casey might want her,” she offered after a few minutes.
“Maybe she could have the dog some days but not all the time. That would be easier.”
But strangers might laugh at them. Someone might laugh to see the girl in the wheelchair, walking a tripod dog.
He did not say this, of course.
They lapsed into silence until he turned into the grocery-store parking lot. They had to buy dishes and dog food.
“I’ll stay with her,” said Susan, so he rolled down the windows, crossed the lake of pavement and went into the store alone.
In the dry-goods aisle, where he gazed at brands of dog food, hypnotized and vacant, he felt himself floating back. It was the chief pitfall of any time he spent alone, anywhere from minutes to long hours. At work he did not drift so easily, because work occupied him. It commandeered his attention in a way that offered relief.
Casey had picked out a white kitten at the Humane Society and that was the last time he remembered being in a pet food aisle—although he must have bought cat food in the succeeding years, of course, after the kitten had grown into a cat, but he did not recall this. The cat had finally died shortly before the accident, of a kidney infection. But the first day of the kitten, with his six-year-old Casey in her blond ponytail, he had walked up and down an aisle indistinguishable from this one—it might even have been this one; they might have walked here together—holding her small hand.
He looked down at his own hand, which had flexed suddenly as though feeling the imprint.
Casey had gazed up at him and asked him why kittens didn’t eat people food. His thoughts flicking briefly over slaughterhouse by-products and rendering and bone meal and carbolic acid and what “gourmet lamb entree” was code for, he told her smiling that kittens just liked cat food better.
Such was the duty of fatherhood, he had thought to himself, neatly satisfied at a simple task well accomplished, and reached for a bag of Purina.
Standing in front of the bags again, red backgrounds with head shots of golden retrievers, cocker spaniels, he wished it had all been so easy, even if it was a lie and a facile one too. What he would give now to be able to hand her such a lie in place of the life she had. Anything. He would have no qualms at all, not one. He would lie through his teeth if it would do any good. If only lies would suffice.
• • • • •
There was a libertarian in his office. It happened fairly often.
This one believed carmakers should pay for all roads. He was a hefty man in his thirties and his face was red with anger as he sat in the seat across from Hal’s desk; understandably, in a way, since his house had been seized by a revenue officer.
The case was closed, but he had hammered on the bulletproof glass door.
Hal made a gentle case for public roads—a gentle and inoffensive case, he felt—but still the libertarian looked at him through narrowed eyes as though he were a damnable liar.
“The way I see it, the tax system is what gives us our freedoms. The freedom to move, for starters. I mean, what would happen if every man had to build his own roads? Or if every single mile of road was a toll? You could try looking at it that way.”
The libertarian’s narrowed eyes were already glazing over. Tax protesters liked to talk, often, but once someone else took a turn at talking they felt a nap coming on.
Roads were easy as a soapbox because no citizen could cling to the belief that roads were built for free. On the roads where they drove they felt free, of course—they drew in a sweet breath of independence and let it out again happily. Americans loved to drive, discovered in driving both a splendid isolation and the shimmering mirage of connectedness.
But how did they come
