13

This morning, after coffee with the guys, Ed Parmalee points the Cutlass toward Aubuchon Hardware. He’s out of 3-in-One oil and could use some shop rags. The towel bar in the bathroom is pulling away from the Sheetrock. Maybe he should pick up molly bolts. Oh, and he should get some poster board, too; start tacking up FOUND DOG posters in the area. It’s starting to sound like a Wal-Mart run, so if he can’t get what he needs at Aubuchon, he’ll keep going. Alice won’t miss him till lunchtime, if then.

He knows that he drives her crazy. Alice never says anything, but it’s there, this annoyance, evident in the angle of her chin when she wipes the counter after he makes a sandwich, or when she has to ask him to move his feet so she can vacuum. It hasn’t always been there, this perpetual annoyance; it’s something that has evolved out of the long period when they didn’t know what to say to each other, or what they might have said would have been too toxic for their marriage to survive.

Ed doesn’t imagine for a minute that Alice would worry about him if he didn’t show up at noon. She’d put his sandwich in the fridge and keep moving. She might scold him about not using the cell phone to say he was going to be late, but she’d never complain that he was. It’s as if she longs for time by herself. Too much time alone, Ed knows, was a problem back then, back in those hard days when she’d become inert, as unmoving as a portrait, just the artist’s imitation of light, illuminating the idea of movement. The stillness eventually gave way to the movement of chores and purpose, but it was always under the surface, always a possibility that someday he’d come home and find her frozen in place again.

His answer to those black days had been to throw himself into work, returning to the double shifts of his youth, expending his energy in walking the floor of the machine shop, monitoring the workers whose job he once did, approving, chiding, goading, joshing the men and women, most of whom spoke little English, feeling like a shark, the reputed need to keep moving the only way for him to stay alive. When Ed realized that Alice wasn’t moving, he stopped working as much. Now he isn’t sure anymore if that helped, or if she just had to move out of that fugue state on her own schedule. He knows of some couples whose troubles have made them closer. Theirs haven’t. They both know it and have no idea what to do about it. So they go on with their day-to-day lives, living in tandem but not in companionship.

Ed squeezes the Cutlass between a Prius and a Volvo. It’s strange, this going to the hardware store on a weekday. Typically, it was the favorite errand of chore-filled Saturdays, scheduled after the dump and before the barbershop; now he just goes whenever he thinks of something he needs. It’s the result of having all this unoccupied time, time he should be putting to better use, but he hasn’t found anything that interests him enough to commit to. He isn’t keen to volunteer at the regional hospital or join the group of retired volunteers that do people’s taxes, or substitute-teach at the high school. Maybe he suffers from his own kind of inertia, which is contradictory to the fact that, in being retired so early, he still has plenty of energy. Ed reads the want ads every week, but nothing ever appears that attracts him. He doesn’t want to end up behind the counter at a McDonald’s, although he knows a couple of guys who have and seem to like it well enough. Management is management, they say. Product is product. Instead, he fills the middle of his days with made-up errands.

Ed wanders the aisles, sliding his readers on and off as he examines the molly bolts; ponders the wisdom of the larger can of 3-in-One. Even so, it takes only minutes to find everything he needs. As he heads between aisles to get to the register, he spots the pet supplies.

There are fluorescent collars, nylon collars in pink, purple, blue, and black; varying widths of collars, choke chains, and something that looks like a tiny halter. They’ve been using a length of clothesline to walk the dog, but maybe they should at least buy him a collar and leash. He’s going to be with them only until his rightful people are found, but still, a proper leash and collar wouldn’t suggest that if they don’t find his people, he’s staying.

Ed stands long enough over the selection of leashes and collars that a salesperson finally takes notice. “Do you need help?” The clerk says this with the same voice she likely uses on her kids when they reach for the cereal. This is probably her job while they’re in school. Mother’s hours. Where are the men? When did hardware stores become a woman’s domain?

“No. I’m good.”

There are collars with gingham patterns, collars with little paw prints. Whatever happened to simple leather collars adorned with metal buttons? Here there are spike collars, thick macho ones.

“Are you looking for a training collar, or just something to hang his tags on?” The clerk, persistent, strums her fingers along the array of collars hanging by plastic hooks. They move like a rainbow-colored curtain.

“We’ve got him only until his owner is found. I guess I won’t be hanging any tags on him, but I’m sure not going to be training him, either. I just need something we can use to walk him.”

The saleswoman taps a finger to her lips, then pulls down a flat red nylon collar. “This’ll do, and it’s cheap. And the chain leashes are a bargain.” With that, she walks away to greet a woman gripping a list.

Ed looks at the collars for another minute, puts the red one back and picks out a black collar with a rolled edge. He finds a matching black nylon leash. The dog, wherever he came from, isn’t a red collar kind of dog. Then Ed pulls a dog brush off the rack. This one says it’s meant for longhaired, double-coated breeds. Alice has been brushing the mats out of the dog’s coat with an old hairbrush of hers. She still wears her hair bundled in a twist, a light fringe of bangs framing her face. In that way of random thoughts, Ed thinks of the nights when Alice pulled the pins out of her hair and let it fall like it did when they courted, curtaining them as they kissed. That stopped happening a long time ago.

As an afterthought, Ed selects a squeaky toy shaped like a hydrant.

His route home takes him along the Moody River, but Ed’ll turn off before coming to the old pistol factory, where a two-hundred-year-old dam holds back the Moody River, at one time forcing it into powering the old factory. Alice’s great-great-grandfather came from England to work in that factory. Just like Ed migrated west from Boston to work in the screw-machine plant 150 years later. This late in the year, a day or so before the autumn equinox, the stream is shallow and hardly looks to be moving. It bifurcates around rocks littering the streambed. In the spring, the river is high with snowmelt and the rushing water can be dangerous even when the fishing is the best. In a moment, Ed sees the ruins of the old factory and signals his turn.

*   *   *

Mack thinks about going, leaving the comfort of this way station; pointing his nose in the direction from which they came and walking home. Justine must be there. He has only two places he can picture her: here and home. But he’s not been given an opportunity to choose to do that. Every moment he’s been with these people, Alice and Ed, he’s been in their charge.

They don’t understand his basic request. All Mack wants is for them to open the door and let Justine in. Each time he goes to the door, they tie a piece of rope around his neck and walk him around the perimeter of the house. Every time Ed leaves the house and Mack whines to follow, the woman calls him back to sit with her. When she’s busy with her tasks, he stares out the sliding door into the empty backyard, glimpses of the local cat prowling the hedges the only entertainment. It isn’t his house, so he doesn’t bother sending up the alarm. He’s not here to protect their territory. He is a guest and he will behave like one. Grateful for the rather tasteless kibble poured into a bowl, happy to be allowed on the couch to sleep beside the woman. She isn’t Justine, but she is generous with the belly rubs.

She talks to him when the man isn’t there. Tells him all sorts of tongue-language things that Mack doesn’t interpret as particularly meaningful. Her language has some of the nuances of Justine’s, although the words are unfamiliar. The pitch is the same as when Justine chats to him, higher and softer than when people talk to other humans. Humans have this need to express themselves through their mouths, and he supposes that this is because they are so poor with their noses.

There was that moment when he followed her into a bedroom that did not hold much human scent in it; an overlay of cleaner like Justine used on her furniture, almost, but not quite, masking a vestigial odor of some other person. Not so much the scent of a human as of the objects belonging to that human, an old scent lingering beneath the chemical. If she’d opened the drawers, he could have gotten a clearer picture of the room’s absent human.

That’s when she said the only meaningful thing, when he followed her in there. She said it clearly and in words he understood: “Get out.”