“I’m sorry, I do have a reservation. I called last night to cancel only last night.” Adam’s fist tightens around the dog’s leash. “Please check again.”
“Fully canceled. I’m sorry.”
Adam doesn’t interrogate the desk clerk as to how canceling one night has translated into canceling the whole stay that he’d booked at the Holiday Inn. He’d like to, but reason suggests that this pimply kid wasn’t on the desk last night. He should have canceled the one night by computer, but Adam had thought that the best, most efficient way to adjust his plans was over the phone, speaking to a human being. How wrong he was. “Fine. Let’s rebook.”
The desk clerk has the distinct look of a young man about to deliver bad news. “Umm, sorry? We’re full? There’s a conference?” Since when did young men affect uptalking? What is this country coming to?
“Okay. So, you’ve probably had those rooms reserved for some time; conferences don’t happen overnight. And my room, which was reserved for me for two nights, minus the one I canceled a mere twelve hours ago, is booked out from under me?”
“Umm. Yes. We have an opening on Friday night.”
The fist clenching the leash flexes. Chance, wearing his red service dog vest, casts a gimlet eye upward, as if to say, Chill out, man. Adam practices his centering breath. Touches the dog’s head. The world is made up of screwups, and he’s learned to accept the fact that he will encounter them and that there is generally nothing he can do about it. He has all the tools he needs to conquer the anger that sometimes still takes him by surprise. The one thing he doesn’t have is a hotel room for tonight. “That will hardly do.”
The desk clerk shrugs. “Is there anything else I can do for you today, sir?”
Five years ago, Adam would have roared his displeasure at this clerk. He would have shaken his fist and made unrequitable demands. He would have viewed the young man as nothing more than an obstacle to his own needs. But that was before his fall, before Adam swept the streets he’d once owned—to paraphrase Coldplay. Master of the Universe, cold, calculating, epitome of the widely disparaged 1 percent, although, he wasn’t quite in that economic category. Running a major company, brooking no dissent. Mistaking buying his daughter and his wife their every desire for showing love. Losing it all in a moment, caving into a long-suppressed loss. His was a life built on anger—at his father, his missing sister, and his childhood spent in foster care. It all collapsed, and Adam knows now that he’s the better man for it.
Because of Chance. Because of Gina.
Back out on the street, Adam stands in the sunshine of a perfect late-September afternoon. The desk clerk gave Adam a small local tourist guide with accommodations listed. Adam almost tossed it in the trash on his way out, then thought better of it. Leaning against his car, thumbing through the booklet, he still feels pissed off. He doesn’t want a B and B; he wants a hotel. He doesn’t want to make chitchat over a fussy breakfast; all he ever wants is coffee and quiet. But there are only three accommodations that are pet-friendly, all of them guesthouses, so he starts calling. One is booked solid and the other two are distinctly out of his budget range.
Chance, leash dragging behind him, wanders halfway down the block.
“Hey, get back here.”
Chance ambles back to Adam. The dog sits, yawns audibly, flops down on the sun-warmed pavement, beats his tail a couple of times, and closes his eyes. His red vest has slipped a little.
The service dog idea had been Gina’s. Ever since Chance’s brush with near death at the hands of a dogfighting ring, Adam had been reluctant to let the dog out of his sight. But it was more than that, it was only in the company of his dog that Adam felt secure, in control of himself. Gina knew that and knew how to ensure that he and the dog were never apart.
Chance and Adam had done the work, gotten the CD for obedience and the Canine Good Citizen award; had worked with a trainer to give Chance the ability not only to recognize Adam’s bubbling anger but to defuse it. They took up therapy dog work in nursing homes and participated in school reading programs where little reluctant readers jockeyed for position next to Chance to get the opportunity to show off their newly acquired reading skills, as if the dog understood what they read to him. Anything to spread the joy of touching a happy dog.
The darkness receded with the light of his life, Gina, and the steadfastness of his dog, Chance.
Then Gina got sick. When they had to accept the unacceptable, Adam felt like the darkness that had once clouded his spirit was growing back as surely as the cancer that had bloomed inside of his wife. But now the darkness has a name: grief. Three months after her passing and he still feels waves of it, prompted sometimes by no more than a song on the radio, or the sight of a woman wearing those silly Birkenstock sandals Gina loved, and it’s then that the dog, Chance, proves his worth, as he is now, head-butting Adam and making that little uhhn uhhn noise.
Adam collects himself. “I wonder if I can sweet-talk that woman at the LakeView into letting us stay there another night?” It’s just a space, a bed, a television—a room with a view. But somehow the thought of staying there again is pleasant. He can’t quite put his finger on it, but going back to the LakeView feels right.
Chance shakes himself vigorously and sits in front of Adam. Okay.
Well, he can’t spend any more time on this problem; he’s only got about ten minutes before his meeting at this place, the Artists Collaborative. This is the nonprofit that his neighbor Beth encouraged—her word—him to apply to for the job of fund-raising consultant. Clearly the neighbors have decided that it’s time for him to get back on track.
Adam opens the passenger door and the dog hops in. As Adam pulls away from the curb, he thoughtfully lowers the window so Chance can push his muzzle out, take in the air. He’s not the kind of dog who sticks his head out of a window and barks, but he does like to suck in the passing scents, get a flavor of the scenery, let his floppy dewlaps flutter.
As they sit at a red light, waiting for pedestrians to make their slow way across the street, Chance makes this little rumbling noise in his throat—not a growl, but an alert announcing the approach of one of his own kind. In this case, it really is one of Chance’s kind, a stocky pit bull on the end of a short chain leash, at the other end of which is a tough-looking customer. Except for the fact that he’s clearly a teenager, he looks like he wouldn’t be out of place at the Fort Street Center, the homeless shelter where Adam once performed community service and where he now serves on the board of directors. At nine-thirty on a weekday morning, the boy’s obviously not in school, either truant or expelled. The baggy, low-slung jeans and the hoodie, the studied saunter as the walk light blinks in its final seconds of service, the glint of fake gold around his neck—all mark the boy as one of the tribe of Badass.
The dog wears a plastic cone around his meaty neck. Adam assumes that the cone prevents him from worrying stitches holding together wounds he probably received in a dogfight. This boy looks like one of the boys who stole Chance, stole him and dropped him in a pit with his jaw taped shut, training bait for a fighting dog. Adam’s mouth goes dry with the memory of it.
Chance actually whimpers, a sound he’s not in the habit of making. If Adam were given to anthropomorphizing his dog, he might think that Chance was empathizing, like a compassionate human being at the sight of someone down on his luck. More likely, it’s the sight of the dreaded Elizabethan collar that has elicited the whine. It’s hard not to see that, despite the e-collar, the dog seems happy enough. His rolling sailor’s gait is cheerful and he looks up at his man, not with fear, but with anticipation. As if he’s expecting some sort of treat. Adam signals for his turn, and Chance pulls his head back into the car. “There but for the grace of God go you, don’t you know?” Adam knows he’s making assumptions, showing his prejudices. Just because the kid looks like a street person, just because the dog is a pit bull type.
Chance reaches over and gives Adam a quick lick on the cheek. The boy and dog finally make their arrival on the opposite shore and Adam accelerates moments before the light turns red again.
* * *
She should hitch back down to the Artists Collaborative, get away from here. Go hang out with Mosley and Kieran and mix with cool people. Not that she knows many of the other artists in residence; most of them are only there during the day, when she’s stuck here or in school.
Unfortunately, her mother’s watching her like a hawk, so Cody has no idea when she’ll be able to get back down to North Adams. It was bad enough when she couldn’t get out from under her mother’s thumb much before late afternoon, after the rooms had been cleaned and whatever togetherness plans her mother had hatched for the two of them had been decided. It’s going to be far worse now that she’s taken out Ryan with her knee. Her “punishment,” as handed down by Mrs. Zigler, means that Skye will be picking her up every day after school, after her day is wasted in the in-school suspension room doing homework for which she’s had no classroom instruction. Plus, she’s grounded again, which—again—is meaningless but makes it sound like her mother is taking Mrs. Zigler seriously, doing her bit. It’s the ultimate collaboration between school and home. Imprisonment by any other name. Maybe Black Molly has the right idea. Just run.
Cody smoothes the duvet over the bed, arranges the throw pillows in the pattern that Skye prefers, some variation on shit she sees in the decorating magazines. When she’s feeling particularly disagreeable, Cody calls her mother “Martha,” as in Martha Stewart.
Skye has glommed on to the whole New England kitsch ethic, and it turns Cody’s stomach. Chintz slipcovers and fake antique quilts. Yuck. Baskets in every bathroom, holding rolled-up facecloths, toilet tissue, the cheap toiletries in tiny plastic bottles. Worse, dried weeds hanging off of grapevine wreathes on every door. Double yuck. Fortunately, there’s been virtually no attempt to rehab their little cottage into anything more than a place where they retreat from the hotel, eat a late supper, and adjourn to their separate rooms, so Cody doesn’t have to suffer the home decor atrocities in her own home. However, even with the mildew scrubbed off the walls and fresh paint applied, the whole place still reeks of old. Farther up the Mohawk Trail, places like this have collapsed or been chopped up into firewood. Skye’s grand plan is to renovate all four of the cabins and become some kind of fake mid-century—last century—tourist attraction. She apparently has never heard of water parks or Disney World.
Room number 9 is done, no vestige left of its human or canine occupants. A blast of Febreze and the next guest will be none the wiser as to the presence of that weird-looking dog. Actually, he was cute in an ugly sort of way; a face only a mother could love. To her complete surprise, as if her thoughts have conjured him, when she opens the guest room door, the dog is sitting outside it, his chunky back end planted neatly on the center of the cocoa-fiber doormat. He sees her and that tail starts swinging from side to side as he gets up to greet her, like he’s been waiting just for her. She pushes her housekeeping cart along the wide porch and the dog follows.
Chance snuffles at Cody’s knees, tickling them. “Beat it.” He doesn’t; he trots along beside her, as if she’s invited him along.
“Beat it, I said.” Cody shoves the dog away, fully annoyed with his constant sniffing at her, the sense that he’s trying to read her with his nose. “What is wrong with you?” The dog sits, lifts his front paw as if inviting her to shake it. “You’re a jerk, you know that?” But she doesn’t mean it. She’s never had a dog, never had much in the way of interaction with them. The dog looks a lot like the dogs that some of the tougher street boys owned—burly, intimidating-looking creatures with names like Blaster and Killer. They’d parade their dogs up and down the streets, thick chain collars on them, short leashes held tightly, suggestive of potential violence, danger. Made the boys feel like playas. Gangstas. Most of the dogs, and not a few of the teens, were actually pussycats.
This dog is clearly pussycat, but he’s a pest, blocking her progress down the length of the porch. He bows, rump in the air. Waggles his head. Looks pointedly toward the open lawn. Barks.
“I don’t have anything to throw for you.” Cody hunts around in the trash bag hanging from the housekeeping cart, finds an empty water bottle. “Chase this.” She pitches it off the porch, and the dog bounds after it. Once the bottle is in his mouth, he crunches it over and over, evidently pleased with the annoying noise the plastic makes. “Don’t leave that out there. I’ll get yelled at.”
As if he understands, the dog hops back up onto the porch and drops the crushed water bottle at her feet.
* * *
I kept up my best friendly dog behavior all the way from our room, which had been doused in a foul scent in a feeble attempt to disguise our presence, to the place where my Adam was talking with the girl’s mother. I was interested in what was going on, but the emanations coming from the girl overrode my desire to pay attention to Adam, and I found myself drawn to her. I kept sniffing at her exposed skin, and she kept shoving me away. I took no offense. I have been trained to recognize when Adam is about to lose his temper, to sense that vibration of discord and mollify it with action. Because Adam is my only concern, my only experience of deeply internal human anger, I was shocked to find the very same vibrations coming from this pipsqueak of a girl. Inside her was this absolute core of anger. The thing was, it was very undirected. There didn’t seem to be any particular source of her irritation. With Adam, it’s usually pretty easy to suss out where the source of the trouble is. If we are driving, it’s another driver; if we are with other humans, it’s usually someone’s intransigence or obtuseness. I nudge Adam; he smiles, gives me a pat, and shakes himself (well, not really, but the human equivalent) into a better frame of mind. Because I couldn’t pinpoint this girl’s trouble spot, I could only hope that my antics would still work.
They did, but only mildly. A dark car pulled into the parking lot and I caught a new emanation from the girl, a frisson of fear, pungent and sudden. I felt the girl’s hand on my head and I pushed myself against her. Maybe I helped because when two ladies got out of the car, the emanation of fear quickly dissipated.