The next morning, before daylight, a cold nose and a whine awoke Sandi from a troubled sleep. She sat up slowly. Her eyes felt scratchy and sore after yesterday’s crying jag. Waffle darted to the doorway and stood wagging his tail and anxiously looking at her. When she didn’t rise immediately, he ran back to her and placed a paw on her knee.
“What is it, boy? What do you want?”
On a canine whine, he started out of the bedroom, stopping once to look back at her. With a groan, she got to her feet and followed him. He beelined to Jake’s room and began to whine and spin in front of the closed door. He typically went to Jake’s bedroom door first thing every morning, but he didn’t usually appear so fretful. Then it dawned on Sandi that he must be able to tell that the parrot wasn’t inside the room.
“He went to a new home, sweetheart.”
She opened the door, instinctively holding her breath. Sometimes the smell when she first opened Jake’s door took her breath. Nick’s words from last evening rushed at her:...Maybe you could be glad the parrot’s gone. Now you don’t have to clean up after him. I’m sure he made a hulluva mess....
A little part of her that she hated acknowledging clapped with glee at seeing the empty room. She shut it down. She had been Jake’s savior. Who could say what would have happened to him if she hadn’t been willing to act as his foster caretaker. “See? He isn’t here,” she said to Waffle.
She had never seen anything that looked as lonely as Jake’s empty room. When she had given the bedroom over to him, she had removed everything that didn’t have a hard surface that she could wash, including the carpet. She had spent money she couldn’t afford to spend on laminate flooring that was easy to mop. This morning, seeing dollar signs with wings made her even gloomier.
The bird’s shoulder-height perch stood in the middle of the room. The square white Formica table where he ate looked bare and cold. The small table where she had tried to teach him to go potty most of the time stood in the corner, its surface clean. The cabinet where she kept his supplies and toys stood open-doored, its shelves empty. She had taken everything of Jake’s to her aunt in Salt Lick. New tears burned her eyes.
Waffle walked in and looked around, sniffed everything, then looked back at her with big questioning eyes, a keening sound coming from his throat.
“Oh, Waffle...”
Stop it, Sandi!
She had no time for this. What was she doing grieving over a damn bird? Having him gone was going to free up hours of her time. When she agreed to take him, the plan had been for her to keep him for a short time while the SPCA found him a new home. She would have stuck with it except that the SPCA appeared to have made little effort to relocate Jake. WLA had found him a place with her, so everyone stopped worrying about him. That was what was annoying about the SPCA and the animal shelter. Half the time, they failed to follow through. That was how she had ended up with a menagerie. And now poor Betty Ann, her employee, was finding herself in the same boat.
Sandi quickly dried her eyes. “We have to hurry, Waffle. Betty Ann and Jessica are already at the shop making raw food. Come on, now, and eat your breakfast.” She grasped the dog’s collar and dragged him toward the kitchen.
In the kitchen, she found that Waffle had already nosed into her bag, opened the Styrofoam box in which the half a hamburger she had brought home from Hogg’s had been stashed and helped himself. She fed him anyway, then threw together a quick breakfast for herself.
While she ate, she watched the local news on the small TV she kept in the kitchen. The news anchor came on with a mug shot of John Wilson and a report that the damning DNA evidence against him had been illegally obtained and might be thrown out of court. Any minute now, she expected to see a picture of Richard grinning at the camera. Disgusted with Richard and his client and the whole situation, she clicked off the TV.
She hurriedly showered and shampooed, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and pulled her long hair back in a ponytail. When she returned to the kitchen, Waffle was lying prone, his chin resting on the floor. “Oh, baby.” She squatted and pulled his head to her chest. “I know you’re sad. We just have to get through it.”
***
At LaBarkery, Sandi went through the motions. While Betty Ann and Jessica ground and mixed the raw food to be sold in bulk, Sandi mixed, molded and baked cookies she labeled “Barkies.” Made of fresh ground turkey, eggs, cooked brown rice, a chopped broccoli-carrots-cauliflower mix, a smidgen of dried rosemary and tiny chunks of peeled apple for natural sweetness, her customers’ pets loved them.
She liked them herself, even ate a few. These days, instead of buying lunch or bringing it from home, she often grazed on her homemade pet food. The recipe fit into the healthier lifestyle she had adopted after her divorce and with no flour, the baked items were gluten-free.
In the beginning, she had baked a couple dozen Barkies a day and had an empty showcase at the end of the day. Responding to demand, her production had now grown to fifteen dozen a day. Thus, every morning, she found herself in the kitchen in the back of her store baking Barkies. Sometimes she was there before daylight.
At this pace, soon she would need more space for a bigger kitchen and even another employee. She was in the process of copyrighting her recipes and looking into packaging the various items she baked for mail order. If she started marketing on her website, she could definitely need more hired people and space.
“Are you upset about something?” Betty Ann asked.
“A little. I took Jake to his new home yesterday.”
Jessica chimed in. “Aww. I’m sorry. I know you’re going to miss him. I’m going to miss hearing stories about him.”
Sandi nodded as she used an ice cream scooper to place another Barkie on a cookie sheet. “But he had to go. My home is only a temporary stopover for most of my animals. Finding them a new place is what I’m supposed to do.” Tears welled behind her eyes again. She shook her head. “I can’t talk about it. It makes me sad and I’ve got too much to do to let it distract me.”
“Okay, we won’t mention it again,” Betty Ann said.
“But who knows what might have happened to him if it hadn’t been for you,” Jessica said. “He went to live with your aunt, right?”
Sandi made a mental huff of frustration. “Girls, come on now. We aren’t going to talk about it, okay?”
She had just pulled the first sheet of cookies from the oven when the phone rang and she picked up. Richard. He didn’t even say hello. Instead, his first words were, “Well, did you get rid of him?”
She burst into tears and hung up. “Why do I tolerate Richard and his attitude about my animals?” she asked the air. “He has no soul. He only cares about criminals.”
Betty Ann and Jessica exchanged knowing looks.
Seconds later, the phone rang again. Neither Betty Ann nor Jessica, up to their elbows in raw meat, was in a position to answer the phone, so Sandi picked up again.
“I’m sorry, Sandi,” Richard said. “I didn’t mean to sound mean. I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”
“Oh, really? Well, I heard on this morning’s news that the court might throw out the DNA evidence on John Wilson, so that should make you happy.”
“Oh, baby, it does. I’m waiting to see if my man goes free.”
“But you know he’s guilty. He’s already confessed.”
“A coerced confession. Not worth the paper it’s written on. I’ve never asked him if he’s guilty and he’s never told me.”
Sandi’s eyes rolled involuntarily. How many times had she heard Richard say he never asked his clients if they were guilty? “That is nonsense. You know he confessed. You’re being dishonest, Richard, and endangering the citizens of Midland.”
“Whoa! What is this? I’m trying to get the guy a fair shake. You’re beating me up over what?”
“You know what. We’ve talked about this a dozen times. I’m in no mood to deal with it today. I’m too upset.”
“About what? A friggin’ bird? Is it too much to expect a little support from the woman who’s supposed to be my girlfriend?” After a long pause, a huge sigh came over the line. “We need to talk about those animals, Sandi. I’ll be honest. I’ve been wondering how your menagerie is going to mesh with our future. One loud-mouthed bird was only part of the problem.”
“You know what, Richard? Maybe I’ve got a few problems myself. Maybe I’m not worried about meshing with our future. Maybe I don’t want a...a heartless, soulless...lout in my life!”
“Lout? Did you say lout? Sandi, you don’t mean that. Just a minute—”
“Do not “just-a-minute” me. You think you’d have a hard time living with me and my animals? I don’t have enough pens and papers to write down all of the things about you that get on my nerves, Richard.” She hung up with a loud Clack!
Waffle looked up at her anxiously, as he always did when she raised her voice. She had never had a dog that was so intuitive. “That’s that, boy,” she said to him. “The next thing he’d be telling me is he doesn’t want me to have you.”