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The day before Christmas, Lili and I packed the car for the trip to Lancaster. We had to drive down US 1, the road my father had called “Useless One,” to get to the Turnpike entrance, and it was jammed with every kind of big box store, car dealer and fast food chain. If you couldn’t buy it along that stretch of road, then you probably didn’t need it.
Of course the roads were always under construction—I could even remember my father cursing about it as we drove to one of his favorite seafood restaurants, a hole in the wall called Under the Pier that surprisingly still existed.
“Oh, I almost forgot to tell you,” Lili said, with a kind of studied falseness in her voice that I twigged to right away. “I hope you don’t mind but I emailed Van after I read his story yesterday. He’s in Lancaster, and he has no plans for Christmas, so I invited him to join us.”
Lili had assured me many times that she had no interest in Van Dryver besides maintaining a professional friendship, so I knew I had nothing to be jealous of. But he was still a good-looking, globe-trotting investigative reporter, and I had to tamp down my own insecurity when it came to him. Though I thought he was a pompous twit, I had to be nice to him for Lili’s sake.
So I said, “Sure, no problem. The holidays are all about sharing.”
I had a feeling Lili knew I was being just as false as she’d been. But that’s life with someone else. You smile and smooth things over and move on, right?
It was a relief to leave behind the snarls of traffic and endless red lights for the faded greens and browns of the highway verges. Traffic flowed smoothly past bland sound-buffering walls that protected the neighboring areas from too much highway noise. We were isolated from any connection to the surrounding area, as if we’d driven into some kind of bubble that would eventually deliver us to our destination.
We got off the turnpike at the exit for Route 222, then followed a series of signs showing the silhouette of a horse and buggy and the words “Share the Road.” We ended up behind a square black Amish buggy with a red-and-orange hazard triangle on the back and a bumper sticker that read “I’d rather be plowing.”
The buggy was being pulled by a proud-stepping roan horse with a black mane, and when they finally turned off onto a side road I saw the driver was a young-looking Amish guy with a long beard, and there were a half-dozen boys with round-brimmed straw hats packed in with him.
The dog-friendly inn Mark had found was called the Distelfink, named after a kind of stylized bird popular in Pennsylvania Dutch folk art. It was a low-slung roadside motel with a picture of a schnauzer on the sign, with the words “pet-friendly.”
I saw Joey’s truck in the parking lot. “The boys are already here,” I said. “Keep an eye on Rochester in case he wants to go find his friend before we check in.”
“Better yet, I’ll check us in and you can manage the dog.”
I leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Works for me.”
My golden just woofed from the back seat. As soon as I let him out, holding tight to his leash, he sniffed around a stand of maples at the edge of the parking lot and I imagined he was looking for Brody’s scent.
Rochester had a nose for detection; in several cases he had led me to clues that I had been able to pass on to my friend Rick, a homicide detective in our hometown of Stewart’s Crossing, nestled against the banks of the Delaware River, about forty-five minutes northeast of Philadelphia. I enjoyed the snooping; I was trying to channel my curiosity away from hacking and into more legal endeavors.
Rochester lifted his leg and peed copiously then romped around me, trying to wind his leash around my legs. Lili came back out of the office with our keys, and we walked down to our first-floor room. It was generic, but it had a king-sized bed for Lili and me and a big cushion on the floor for Rochester. Add in a working bathroom and a television with HBO and cable, and that was about all we needed.
Joey knocked on our door as we were getting settled. He was a good-looking guy in his early thirties, a couple of inches over six feet with broad shoulders. I thought he and Mark made a good pair, partly because they were both so tall.
“Our room is a couple of doors down. Can we bring Brody in to say hello?”
“Of course,” I said, and Joey leaned out the door and whistled.
The dogs reunited and we all said our hellos. Brody and Rochester both had the square head and sleek body characteristic of the breed, but Brody’s fur was white with a few streaks of gold. At seventy pounds, he was a real handful. He had just celebrated his first birthday and reached sexual maturity, which meant that he’d begun lifting his leg to pee and straining toward every female dog he saw.
He was a couple of inches shorter than Rochester and about ten pounds lighter. Apparently the cream line had a smaller stature, which helped them avoid congenital problems like hip dysplasia.
I loved watching the two of them play. Brody liked to grab Rochester’s collar and tow him along. They’d take turns trying to mount each other, or Brody would sprawl on his back with Rochester above him, a symphony in gold and white.
The two dogs were racing around the room. “I hope they can behave while we’re out in public,” I said.
“I told Brody he’d better be good, or I’d send him to one of those Amish puppy mills,” Joey said.
“You know about them?”
“Sure. When I was researching breeders I read all these horror stories. Made me that much more determined to get a dog raised by someone responsible.”
I hoped Rochester had had a good upbringing. He’d been a rescue dog when he came to live with my next-door neighbor, Caroline Kelly, and after her death he had moved in with me. Since then we’d become bonded at the hip – almost literally, because the dog followed me everywhere, even when I just got up from my chair for a minute. I called him my Velcro dog. But that’s a golden’s nature, and Brody was the same way with Joey.
In fact, as soon as Brody got tired he rushed back to his daddy’s feet and collapsed there. A minute later, though, he was up and running around again.
Lili told the boys she’d invited another guest to join us for dinner the next day, and though Mark raised an eyebrow toward me, they both said that was fine with them.
“What are we going to do for dinner tonight, though?” Joey asked. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave both the dogs here until they’ve had a chance to get accustomed to being away from home.”
“Why don’t we get take-out?” Mark asked. “Steve told me that Jews like to eat Chinese at Christmas, and we passed a place nearby that delivers.”
He found the website for House of Ho, and we all looked at the menu together online. Their specials appeared to a melding of Amish and Chinese cuisine – and not in a good way.
“Egg foo young with minced Lebanon Bologna?” I read. “Ho No. That sounds awful.”
“What about Scrapple Chow Mein?” Mark asked. “What is that?”
“Scrapple is a mush of pork trimmings with cornmeal and flour, molded into a gelatinous mass, then sliced and pan-fried,” I said. “My dad called it a heart attack on a plate. I wouldn’t eat it as a kid and I’m not about to start as an adult.”
“Hold on,” Lili said. “They have ordinary Chinese food, too.”
We’d brought food for the dogs, and we fed them, and Mark and I took them for a walk while we waited for the delivery
“I’m really glad you guys could come with us,” Mark said. “This is Joey’s and my first trip together and it’s easier having friends around.”
“Come to think of it, this is my first vacation with Lili, too.” I looked at Mark. “How are things going with you guys?”
“It’s a little rough sometimes,” Mark admitted. “I’ve lived on my own for years and I’m kind of set in my ways. And you know Joey with Brody – that dog can do no wrong.” He smiled. “But I really do love the guy, and Brody too. So we make things work.”
“It’s the same with Lili and me,” I said. “This is her third time around the block, and my second, and we both have a lot of baggage.”
“She was married twice before?” Mark asked.
“Yeah, and she had other boyfriends along the way,” I said. “One of whom will be joining us for dinner tomorrow.”
“That reporter guy? Won’t that be weird for you?”
I shrugged. “It is what it is. Don’t you and Joey have exes who show up now and then?”
“Not on your life,” Mark said. “They’re exes for a reason. If one of Joey’s showed up I’d probably claw his eyes out.” He laughed. “Or at least urge Brody to pee on him.”
“Let’s hope we don’t come to that tomorrow with Van,” I said.
We ate at a big round table in Mark and Joey’s room. After dinner, Lili and I went back to our room with Rochester. Since we expected most places would be closed on Christmas Day, we thought we’d relax in the morning, and to that end we’d brought a lot of reading material with us. Lili had a couple of months of photography magazines to catch up on, and I had several mystery novels loaded on my Kindle.
We read for a while, then I took Rochester for his before-bed walk. It was a completely different atmosphere from River Bend, our gated community. Traffic whizzed by on the main road beside us, semi-trailers applying their hydraulic brakes and motorcycles revving their engines. We stayed on the grassy verge, navigating past fast-food wrappers and shreds of newspaper as Rochester looked for something natural to pee on.
On the way back home he grabbed a piece of paper in his mouth, and I didn’t see it until we’d gotten back into the parking lot, under the halogen streetlight. I tugged it from his mouth, where he’d already chewed half of it away. It looked like a flyer for a farm that sold puppies. “Not happening, buddy,” I said. “You can play with Brody but you’re not getting a puppy of your own.”
I crumpled the flyer and tossed in the trash, and we went inside. We had brought food with us for breakfast, and the room had a coffee maker that could boil water for tea and hot chocolate, so we were set. The boys ended up at a McDonald’s getting drive-through.
