20

Alice and the dog come in from their morning walk. She hangs the leash on one of the back door pegs they use for keys, raincoats, and grocery bags, as if it had always hung there. “He really is a good boy. He never pulls.”

Ed looks up from the eight-and-a-half-by-fourteen-inch poster board that he’s working on. In nearly perfect block lettering, he’s written: FOUND, GRAY-AND-WHITE LONGHAIRED DOG. NO COLLAR. ONE BLUE EYE AND ONE BROWN EYE. He turns the poster so that Alice can see it. “What do you think?”

Alice thinks that she hates him. “I don’t know. I guess it’s all right.” Her good mood of the morning is gone.

“We should try to get a picture of him to put on it.”

“He’s so beautiful—how will we prevent people from just claiming him?”

Ed shrugs. “I doubt that anyone would actually do that, but even so, won’t we be able to tell by the way he reacts when his old owner shows up?”

“Not he if was abused.”

“Alice. Really. Does he strike you as an abused dog?” Ed waves a hand toward the dog, who is daintily licking his forepaws like a cat.

“He got left by the side of the road, hungry and thirsty. That’s abuse enough.” Alice knows that her tone is verging on hostile. She doesn’t mean to be, but it’s an easy tone to take instead of just saying what she wants to say. Instead of just telling Ed that, goddamn it, they’re going to keep the dog because she wants him and she takes care of the house and, like everything else, it will be her responsibility. But she doesn’t. Instead, she wrenches open the refrigerator door and begins shoving GladWare containers around, trying to assemble an idea for supper hours before anyone wants it.

“I’m going to go hang these.” Ed scrapes back the kitchen chair, a sound that makes Alice grind her teeth. There are permanent tracks burned into the tile. As soon as Ed pulls his keys off the pegs, the dog gets to his feet and dances to the back door as if planning on taking the ride with Ed.

“You want to go?”

The dog tap-dances, front paws doing a high step.

“Think I should?”

Alice shuts the refrigerator door, leans back against it, and studies the pair. “He looks like he wants to go. Maybe he likes car rides.”

Ed pats his leg. “Let’s go.”

The dog yips, an easily translatable Yippee sort of sound.

“Leash him.” Alice says that exactly as she might have reminded him to fasten a child’s seat belt. A reflexive maternal remark, unnecessary but vital to say so that the protective charms of ritual are in effect.

Equally reflexive, Ed replies, “Of course.”

And to their mutual amazement, the dog pulls the leash off the peg himself and brings it to Ed, sits in front of him with the black nylon leash dangling from his sharp muzzle, his plumed tail swishing back and forth on the tile.

“Wow. That’s a little scary.”

Alice nods. “He really is smart.”

“A real one of a kind, I’d say.” Ed snaps the leash on the dog’s new collar. “Someone must really miss him.”

“I know.”

“We have to advertise him.”

“I’ve put the ad in the Press.” Alice has missed this week’s deadline, so the ad won’t appear until next Thursday’s edition of the weekly town newspaper. Found, small collielike dog. Gray and white, one blue eye, one brown. Near Old Path Road. Call … Alice wishes she hadn’t been so specific.

Ed retrieves his hat from one of the pegs. “Maybe no one will see it.”

Alice covers her mouth with one hand. She knows, and Edward knows, that doing the right thing might mean a loss; but not to do the right thing—in this case, to properly advertise the dog—isn’t an option. It’s not how either of them was raised. Ed was a Boy Scout. She was a Girl Scout.

*   *   *

Alice Rae Thompson saw Ed Parmalee for the first time when he was standing in line at the Dairy Queen.

*   *   *

She’s behind the counter, serving up soft-serve ice-cream cones, vanilla and chocolate laden with jimmies or a dip that hardens into a chocolate shell. This is her summer job; once she’s back in class at the local community college, she’ll quit. She notices that he’s clean-cut among the young folks hanging around, his hair only a little long against his collar, not sporting the shoulder-length hair of his companions, and for a moment she wonders if he’s a veteran, someone who’s been to Vietnam. Before he even reaches her window, Alice decides that, no, he can’t be in the service, or recently out. His face is open and cheerful, not like the faces of those older brothers of her friends who have chosen the service instead of college, or had it chosen for them. They’ve come back, most of them, looking thirty, not twenty. Not smiling.

Edward Parmalee, dark-haired and blue-eyed, topping six three, slender as the basketball player he was in high school, looks at Alice Thompson framed in the Dairy Queen window and smiles at her. For the first time she can ever remember, Alice full out blushes, the warmth in her cheeks migrating straight to the roots of her hair. She can even feel the heat prickle along the center part that separates her hair into two long sheets of honey blond.

Ed’s smile opens a seam in her soul, a place that has been untouched, unmined. She can barely stammer out the right words to take his order.

“Chocolate, rainbow sprinkles, and your telephone number.” Ed has the good grace to blush himself, and she knows that he’s never done that before, that this is a new boldness.

When he calls later that evening, they laugh, realizing that neither one has asked the other’s name. “Is this you?”

“Yes. I’m Alice.”

“I’m Ed Parmalee. I work at the plant.”

*   *   *

Alice stands in the middle of her kitchen, a room she used to imagine remodeling, with a widened doorway to the dining room, an island counter, and a Mexican tile floor. Some time ago, she stopped thinking about changing anything in her house. Somehow it was better to leave things as they were, do nothing more than clean it and freshen up the paint now and then. A house that seemed too small for years now feels rambling, empty. The clutter and mess of a third inhabitant is relegated to a small bedroom that she dusts once a month. Nothing in that room moves out of place. The bed never needs changing.

Alice fills the teakettle, sets it on the stove, and lights the burner. She busies herself with choosing a cup, pulling a tea bag out of the box, refilling the sugar bowl. The dishwasher needs emptying. The trash is full. Homely tasks she’ll take care of after a cuppa. Ed will come back with the dog, then take the bagged trash to the barrel. Ed said maybe no one will see it, the lost-and-found ad. Maybe Ed is also hoping that the dog will stay. But because he’s already said no to having the dog, he will have to find an acceptable way to make it his idea. Alice pours the water into her cup, bounces the tea bag up and down a few times. She smiles a little. Edward will come around; she just knows it.