I unlocked the wrought iron outer door and then the second wooden door, leaning my weight against it until it gave a groan and opened. A swirling cloud of fine white feathers greeted me at the threshold.
“Maddie?” I called, confused by what or who might have caused the explosion of down that I was now wading through. I knew Susan’s son Trevor was not there, given the absence of his ancient Datsun from the gravel parking pad out front. According to plan, Maddie should’ve been crated in the back corner of the kitchen when he left.
In response to my voice, Ash, the new puppy of the house, came charging into the living room. He slid into my feet, Risky Business–style, setting off another flurry of feathers.
“What are you doing in here?” I reached down and rubbed his tummy. Ash was supposed to be sequestered in the backyard, not loose inside the house.
Ash and Maddie were cousins. Or half siblings. Or just siblings. Though Maddie was full-grown and Ash just a pup, both were descended from the wolf mother and German shepherd father who lived in a chain-link partition behind the house across the street, along with an ever-changing assortment of their offspring.
Ash was all white, like his dad. Maddie took more after her mother, the wolf unmistakable in her face and frame and coloring. The wolf mother had a permanent sneer from an old bullet wound—whether it was inflicted there in Oakland or before she was domesticated, I didn’t know. It gave her a sinister look, in contrast to Maddie’s sweet face and gentle, intelligent eyes.
For all of her good-natured playfulness and irresistible lovability, Maddie was not an easy charge by any stretch. The wolf in her introduced all kinds of complications not faced by most other dogs. At least not in such an extreme combination of characteristics. As was common in wolf dogs, she was way too smart for her own good, strong as an ox, and a superior escape artist. She also had a highly sensitive stomach. Her digestive issues were not necessarily endemic to this hybrid but were further compounded by the specific and often divergent dietary needs of a half-wolf, half-canine. All of these challenges were intensified by the recent introduction of Ash, also a wolf dog, into the household.
“All right mess-maker, did you get into a pillow fight?”
Ash padded behind me into the kitchen, the feather storm making us both sneeze. I could only assume that he got ahold of a bolster or a blanket while he was on the loose that morning, and then did what any self-respecting wolf pup might: destroy. Whatever it was he got into, the feather-fall grew thicker the farther into the kitchen we ventured.
In a small dining nook off the back of the kitchen, Maddie was indeed crated. She looked like a canine version of the Abominable Snowman, her mottled dove-gray and cream coat further lightened by a head-to-toe dusting of fine white down. Looking adorably innocent, Maddie dipped her head again to tear at the remains of what was, until recently, a mattress pad or comforter.
“Oh, you’re the mess-maker!” She nuzzled at my fingers through the bars of her crate, licking them with a feather-flecked tongue.
“Did your silly mama give you a feather bed? Those don’t really mix too well with wolves, huh?”
I was quickly trying to calculate the next best step in this mess. Every time Ash moved, he sent another plume of feathers floating even farther afield. I could put him back in the yard and leave Maddie crated while I cleaned up, but I really needed Maddie out of her crate and out of the way so I could bag the remains of the cushion. She and Ash weren’t really supposed to be outside together unsupervised, though.
“All right, kiddos,” I said, resolved to leave the cleaning until later. I unlatched the door of Maddie’s crate, and she tore down the hall to the flight of stairs that led to the bottom floor and backyard. I knew proper procedure would have been for me to make them both sit and stay at the top of the stairs and wait there for me to give them permission to proceed. Sometimes you have to pick your battles.
At the base of the stairs that led to the backyard was Trevor’s room. His door was always shut, leaving the small landing in gloom. Today, however, the door was wide open, and I thought for a moment that Trevor was perhaps home after all.
“Hello?” I ventured, suddenly feeling self-conscious about talking to the dogs so freely. I mentally reviewed what I’d been saying, hoping none of it was too ridiculous. Or openly critical of Trevor or Susan. The dogs were clamoring at the back door and wouldn’t be ignored.
“Okay, okay, out you go,” I said, sneaking a glance over my shoulder into the dimly lit room as I unlocked the back door and released the hounds.
His room was spartan, almost alarmingly so. Mattress on the floor, thin blanket thrown aside, guitar leaning against the wall, plain curtains closed. And no Trevor in sight. I relaxed a little.
Interesting that their dog got the feather bed and he had a bare mattress on the floor. Maybe his squatter aesthetic was by choice.
His open door had distracted me from noticing the window to the right of the back door, and Ash’s only point of entry from the yard into the house. The window was broken—and had been for a while—so Susan or Trevor had propped two brooms in an X over the opening. Ash clearly figured out that he could knock these aside in order to climb through the window. I scoffed under my breath at the notion that broomsticks were sincerely intended to keep a wolf pup outside.
This client—Susan and her son—were not clients of my own, but one of the many jobs I took on in a subcontracting capacity. Thus, I didn’t have a direct dialogue with them but deferred to the authority of the colleagues I was working for. I know, however, due to my coworkers and my near-constant communication about these dogs’ well-being, that they’d requested many times that Susan fix the window. Word was that Trevor was supposed to take care of it.
I peeked my head through the window to check on the dogs and saw that there was also a chair adjacent to the open window, further enabling Ash’s access from the patio. My deep and heartfelt eye-rolling was interrupted by Ash starting to take the trademark squat. I caught on just as Maddie did, and I could see her anticipating the treats he was about to drop for her to gobble up.
Even in my short career of dog walking and animal nannying, I’d already encountered many dogs with strange and sometimes dangerous eating habits. There was the American bulldog who ate his owners’ gym socks at every opportunity. Or the corgi who preferred his dry food with a helping of raw broccoli and cauliflower on top. I pet-sat one weekend for a Rottweiler that I dubbed the Mulcher. She had a penchant for eating the dried leaves that littered the back patio, where she spent her days. Then she’d come inside and leave a loose, detritus-filled dump on the carpet. This I cleaned up with the industrial-grade Hoover the owners helpfully left out for this very reason. In all of these instances, the owners warned me in advance of their pets’ unusual predilections, which helped enormously in both preventing a problem but also in understanding what the hell I was looking at when I showed up to take care of said pet and clean up his or her messes.
In the instance of Penny, a newly adopted Lab-terrier mix puppy, I hadn’t gotten the benefit of full disclosure. I was running blind when, on one of our neighborhood walks, Penny started to drag her butt on the grass. Worms? I didn’t think so. I knew from her paperwork she’d been spayed and vaccinated and microchipped prior to adoption. Along with all of those procedures, deworming was standard. Yet another detail I’d gathered during my glory days at the pet store, since I was the one who administered the thick yellow tonic to the incoming animals, and then got to flush the worms down the industrial disposal when they came out the other end.
Farther along on our walk, Penny started dragging again, and I noticed that something bright red was crowning beneath her perky tail. Blood? Intestines? I was freaking out. I got down on my hands and knees for a better look, as more and more red bloomed from her bottom.
Upon closer inspection, I could see that this was something inorganic. It had a little white tag on it, the tiny lettering hard to make out. I then did what one should never, ever do in this situation. Chalk it up to inexperience, but I bagged my hand, and I pulled. Lucky for me, the object had not become entangled in Penny’s innards, and it came out cleanly (a relative term) in my hand.
JLo Intimates, the tag read. I was holding the owner’s undigested thong in my hand.
I knew from my days at the pet store that there’s a technical term for Maddie’s own dietary anomaly. We had many an appalled dog-owner coming into the store to complain about this unattractive habit some dogs have of eating shit, a condition called coprophagia. We’d direct the customer to aisle two, top shelf, where they’d find tablets for this affliction. I can’t say how helpful the pills were in deterring their dogs, but they certainly didn’t work on our darling wolf mix. Bless her, this disgusting habit absolutely tore her already-sensitive stomach apart. Whether it was her own, or anyone else’s, she was indiscriminate in her partiality to poop. And if I didn’t move quickly, she was about to make a snack of Ash’s.
“No!” I shouted, leaping through the open door to place myself between Ash and Maddie. I didn’t have time to grab the shovel in my mad dash, so I collared Maddie and took her with me to collect the pooper-scooper. But first, I sat down on the patio chair and looked into her precious face.
“Hey, you know better! No, ma’am! No poop for you.” It was extremely hard to resist kissing her soft muzzle, but this was not a time for positive reinforcement. I was being as stern with her as I could manage, resisting her charms with all my might. She was a love, but this behavior had to stop.
Maddie was on a very strict diet of boiled chicken and plain white rice, a combination that seemed to meet the three-prong requirements of going gentle on her stomach, providing protein for her wolf half, and satisfying the domesticated dog in her that could process carbs with alacrity. If she weren’t possessed of such a tender tummy, I feel sure she could have taken down all kinds of meat. I’d worked with a woman who regularly fed her German shepherd raw steaks and swore by the benefits for the dog, if not the expense, of such a high-quality regimen.
This rice-and-chicken diet, while mostly successful in keeping Maddie fed and comfortable, her stools healthy and firm, was all-too-often interrupted. If not by the shit-eating she engaged in, then when, for example, she figured a way to get into Ash’s delectable puppy kibble. Or the food of Susan’s many cats, whose dishes sat out on the front patio, tempting Maddie every time she passed by.
I kept a firm grip on Maddie’s collar, and we returned to Ash’s pile. She was way too fast for me, and there was no way I could let her go and clean up after him before she beat me to it. I quickly scooped up the offending mess and only released her collar once I’d dumped it into the trash can left out on the patio for just that purpose.
Susan tried her very best. I knew that. She loved Maddie, and now Ash, fiercely. She closely followed the recommendations given by myself and the colleagues with whom I shared Maddie and Ash’s care. Except when she couldn’t. Susan worked irregular shifts and long hours, and she relied on Trevor to manage the house and the dogs in her frequent absences. This meant the fifty-pound bag of Ash’s food was often left out and open in the kitchen, where Maddie could dip her face right into it like a horse’s feed bag. Or else Ash was fed in plain view of an uncrated Maddie, setting him up to be body slammed aside by his much larger and hunger-motivated housemate.
What seemed at first like carelessness or ineptitude on Trevor’s part was looking more and more like sabotage—of Susan’s intentions, us dog walkers’ efforts, and Maddie’s overall health and wellness.
All I really knew of him was that he went to community college, which explained his unpredictable schedule. He rarely spoke to me, and he made eye contact even less than that. When I would make an effort at conversation, or ask him questions about the dogs, I rarely got more than a mumbled reply.
The backyard was basically a grassless wasteland of dust and rocks, enclosed by a ten-foot fence. In the corner, there was a stand of bamboo that Maddie loved to hide in. She’d carved out tunnels in the thicket that we couldn’t get to, and she would go to the bathroom there, where we couldn’t swoop and scoop right behind her. It was very frustrating. Try as we might, my fellow dog walkers and I had not yet succeeded in getting Susan to chop it all down. Susan had agreed that it needed to happen, of course. On multiple occasions. She said Trevor would do it.
And so there we were, bamboo forest intact.
I threw a filthy, fuzzless tennis ball for the dogs a few times to get some of their energy out and refreshed their water from the hose coiled at the side of the house. They each took a long drink before we headed out on our walk. Both dogs were enthusiastic pullers, still learning how to heel on command—though with enough practice, they’d eventually do it without me even having to ask. They wore pronged collars to which I attached their heavy-duty canvas leashes.
Ash was still at prime learning age, while Maddie should have mastered the simple command long ago. My hunch, based on her extreme intelligence, was that she fully understood; she just didn’t care to comply. Maddie was, more than any other dog I cared for, that most devilish combination of cute and headstrong.
They went on-leash by the back door. Then, we practiced heeling at the base of the stairs, again at the landing where the stairs turned, and at the top of the flight. It didn’t go well, both dogs sneezing heavily at the feathers drifting down the stairs like snow, and otherwise generally disregarding my instructions in their enthusiasm to hit the road.
At the front door, I had to be extra focused and firm with the dogs. The walkway leading up to the street was lined with cat dishes, scattered in and among the broken flower pots, a rotting bench, cobwebbed watering cans, and a dusty hose, its nozzle sitting in a dirty bowl of water left out for the cats.
I knew Maddie—and Ash, too, for that matter—would love nothing more than to clear each and every plate, tantalizingly crusted with kibble and dried Fancy Feast or some other cheap brand of wet food. Poor thing, Maddie was so desperate for anything other than boiled chicken and rice. Like a hungry girl on Weight Watchers, she had very keen radar for the presence and location of any and every morsel she was not allowed to have.
Keeping both dogs tightly reined in, one on each side of me, we made it up to street level without incident, assorted cats fleeing in our path. Dave, Maddie and Ash’s former owner and current caregiver to their parents, lurked at his mailbox.
“Hey, girl!” he called. “When are you gonna come walk my dogs?” He’d been asking me this for weeks, and I hadn’t yet mastered an effective deferral. I tried not to look uncomfortable.
“Pretty busy, Dave. Sorry.” I tried to soften my answer with a laugh, which came out sounding like a strangled cough.
I didn’t consider myself above anyone’s business; I wasn’t so flush as to turn away clients. In almost every case, if they’d pay, I’d walk. Or spend the night, or give the dog or cat a bath, or take them in for their vaccinations. I was indiscriminate in my willingness to earn money helping in whatever way I could for whomever needed it.
This went somewhat against the unspoken credo within the professional sphere of animal caregivers. Based on my training at the hands of my mentors, the first (always free) meeting with a potential customer was just as much me interviewing them as the opposite. I absolutely understood why this had to be so. Entering their house often and alone to care for one or some of their most beloved companions, countless things can—and do—go wrong, even under the best circumstances. Good communication and mutual trust are absolutely essential and are a baseline requirement for a functional relationship between pet-care provider and pet owner. This was Dog Walking 101. Also, it was far preferable if you and the animal’s owner were on the same page about what was best for their pet’s health and happiness. And while it seems like this would always be the case with any reasonable person who loved—or even liked—their pet, such easy agreement was not always a given.
While it was obviously better to be extra discerning about my clientele, work was work, and I was having an increasingly hard time turning anything away. My business model of in-home pet-sitting and individual neighborhood walks, versus the five-dogs-at-a-time (at five times the take-home pay) group walks, was the most time-consuming and least lucrative approach in the industry. Plus, I was getting paid the reduced subcontractor rate for the majority of my appointments. Subcontracting was great because I was taking care of a client list that I didn’t have to build or cultivate myself. But it meant a lot less money.
This was yet another rookie error, building such a flawed business model. The upshot was that I needed to pull a much larger income than I was. Thus, I was more willing than most to overlook some of the potentially annoying, worrying, or irresponsible aspects of a paying patron. Even considering my hyper-permissiveness when it came to high-maintenance or otherwise unappealing clients, I could recognize that Dave took all of these yellow-flag-flying attributes to a new level. He was solidly red flag in my book.
Just last week, the German shepherd dad was savagely attacked by one of his adolescent pups, presumably in an effort to usurp the dominance of the paterfamilias. According to Susan, it did not end well for the dad. Dog fights aside, the wolf mama was constantly pregnant with a new litter, and Dave’s driveway was always host to a revolving cast of cars. Whether their owners were there about dogs or drugs or something else altogether, I didn’t know. And I didn’t care to. The relationship between the neighbors and Dave was tense at the best of times, no one owning up to the frequent calls to animal control and the SPCA about the escapes by (and the growing number of) the wolf dogs, the conditions the dogs lived in, the constant barking and howling, and so on and so on. Every time a siren passed within ear shot (which, in this East Oakland neighborhood with its rate of crime and proximity to the freeway, was frequent enough), the family howled in concert, their collective call astonishingly loud and primal.
Susan certainly didn’t adopt Ash as a matter of convenience or ease, but because she couldn’t stand to watch the wolf/canine/human drama unfolding across the street without doing something, however small. Ash was like a refugee, spared the horrors of his family situation by the savior Susan. I respected the hell out of her for intervening in whatever way she could. Even if it was abundantly clear that these wolf dogs were more than she could currently manage.
That’s why she hired dog walkers. It was our job to lessen her load and make the dogs’ lives more comfortable. If only we could figure out how to peacefully, respectfully manage the loose cannon that was Trevor.
I exaggerated the effort it was taking me to manage Maddie and Ash in order to avoid engaging in further conversation with Dave. Around the bend and out of his line of sight, I unclenched a bit and let the leashes out to allow the dogs a sniff and a pee. As the male in the group, Ash was naturally more inclined to mark every telephone pole, pinecone, and piece of garbage.
We practiced heeling some more, to little effect. Part of the problem was the lack of incentive for Maddie. Short of carrying around chunks of boiled chicken in my pocket, I didn’t really have any tummy-friendly treats to offer her. My verbal praise, however effusive, could hardly be considered reward enough to change her behavior of pulling at the leash. Without a snack to offer Maddie for good behavior and well-executed heels, I could hardly give Ash a snack right in front of her. That would be too mean.
Despite the uneven economic status of its residents, the neighborhood we walked through made for a very pleasant thirty- to forty-minute walk with the dogs. It was hilly, which gave the dogs—and me—a good workout; heavily wooded with evergreens, blocking out the sounds of the nearby highway; and virtually traffic free in the middle of the day, most of the residents either out at work or at home on the couch watching TV.
We walked the usual two-mile loop, unimpeded by the large intersections or construction sites or broken glass and other debris that littered some of my other routes, enjoying instead the dappled winter sunlight that filtered through the soaring trees.
The streets were laid out like concentric circles, turning back around on themselves in ever-widening loops until the outermost ring abutted the access road that led eventually to the on-ramp. The humble single-story homes were mostly set back from the street, many of them behind fences or gates, given the more-than-occasional crime in the area. Despite the bucolic quiet during daylight hours, these streets were no strangers to after-hours activity. Proximity to the highway was no doubt a contributing factor, providing an easy getaway by car. Thankfully, theft and vandalism remained the primary problem, unlike some of the other parts of town I frequented, where actual assault, occasionally armed, was the bigger concern.
No matter the neighborhood, I was always happier to perform my dog-walking duties during daylight hours. Here especially, on Maddie and Ash’s turf, where the relatively peaceful and rubbish-free thoroughfares lent a tranquil tone to our walks and banished the notion of any immediate threat. So long as Dave wasn’t lingering, asking questions, and watching me walk.
As it happened, I spent a good portion of each week beating this particular path around this neighborhood. In addition to Ash and Maddie, the colleagues I contracted with had two other local clients that I visited frequently. Given that I repeated this route so many times, day after day, I was especially grateful that it was comparatively safe and easy to navigate.
Down one side street lived Ralph, a jaunty little corgi, and his elderly owner Edie, whom I loved like my own grandmother. Of course, it wasn’t professional or appropriate for me to feel this way, much less make that apparent to her. When I came to care for Ralph, I was always happy to stay a little longer, chatting with her from the comfort of the plush rose-colored Barcalounger. Sometimes I helped her fix the remote, or retrieve something that had rolled beneath the couch. If she offered a cup of tea, I always accepted, time allowing.
Further along Maddie’s street lived Gabby—a terrier mix who loved barking perhaps more than anything else—and her geriatric companion, Stuart. He was a slow-moving, fluffy black mutt of indeterminate provenance who happily went wherever Gabby did, but ten feet or so behind. It was Gabby who escaped on that unfortunate afternoon when I became lodged beneath the neighbor’s garden gate, a memory that returned every time I walked by the scene of the crime.
Of course, Maddie and Ash have never met Ralph or Gabby or Stuart. Neither had Gabby and Stuart met Ralph, or any other variation therein. Gabby barked her heart out anytime I passed her house with one of my other charges, her dog radar going crazy, so she perhaps was the only one who would be any wiser about my fraternization with other animals in the neighborhood. I always tried to make the dog I was caring for feel like my favorite and sole focus for that thirty minutes or hour. I had no other children, only them. And whomever I happened to be with at that moment, I loved them best of all.
When we got back to the house, I could hear the shower running in the small bathroom. I couldn’t see that there was any change to the fine coating of feathers over every surface in the upstairs, and I wondered if Trevor intended to ignore it like I had. I flushed at the thought of him showering on the other side of the thin door, and I realized that it had been too, too long since I’d been with someone in a remotely romantic capacity.
My last relationship predated my move from the Southeast to the West Coast and ended disastrously, but predictably. I’d held out hope for us when I moved; he then met someone else and failed to inform me, and we’d had a messy reunion when I was home for Thanksgiving just a few short weeks before. He brought his new love—unannounced and uninvited—to a party at my sister’s house, and we hadn’t spoken since.
I had neither the energy nor the interest to seek out a replacement or even a rebound. My heart was still quite sore from the abrupt rejection, and I didn’t quite trust my judgment. Not to mention that I didn’t have the first idea where I might meet someone. Since moving to California, my days and nights were filled with dogs and cats and birds and fish. The only evidence I’d had that I was even visible to anyone of the opposite sex came in the form of a comment in the snack aisle of the grocery store, when a fellow customer asked me if I found that short men were always attracted to tall women. Without thinking, I said, “No,” looking down at him. “I don’t find that.”
But then, my experience was unfortunately limited to college-age almost-men, and they’d rarely articulated what, or who, they were attracted to. They left us ladies, short and tall alike, to puzzle that out for ourselves.
Heartsick or not, I was keenly—uncomfortably—aware of how hot and bothered I was at the thought of Trevor in the shower. This was Trevor, for god’s sakes. He couldn’t even feed his dogs without screwing something up. I couldn’t deny that he bore a slight resemblance to a young John Lennon. In fact, he was kind of a dead ringer for Sean Lennon. Not unattractive by a mile.
I busied myself with the dogs, unhooking them each in turn from their collars and leashes and giving both a vigorous butt rub, sending them into wiggling circles of ecstasy and garnering many appreciative kisses on my hands and arms. I tried not to think about what might have been in Maddie’s mouth last and was now coating my slobbery wrist.
When Trevor emerged from the bathroom, wrapped at the waist in a white towel, I was elbow deep in the fridge, looking for some Maddie-friendly food. Usually Maddie’s chicken and rice were in Tupperware on the top shelf. Or, if it hadn’t been prepared for the week, the family-sized flat of raw chicken breasts would be hard to miss. But there was nothing resembling anything remotely edible for her. Just a half-empty tray of what looked like enchiladas and a container of something stinky and unidentifiable. I couldn’t tell if it was intentionally green (i.e. guacamole, spinach, seaweed) or had become that way not-so-recently.
I hadn’t bargained on having a conversation with Trevor while he was in nothing more than a piece of terry cloth, and was grateful to be facing the fridge as he passed through the kitchen toward the back stairs.
I focused instead on containing the feather mess, figuring we could discuss Maddie’s food situation when he was fully clothed. Trying to sweep tiny weightless feathers is like digging a hole in wet sand, though, so I gave up after stuffing the shredded remains of the cushion into a trash bag. What I really needed was a vacuum cleaner for this job.
I listened for any indication that Trevor was coming back up the stairs, but I couldn’t hear much over Ash’s whining about his empty dish. And then I heard the faint strains of a guitar being strummed.
Trevor wasn’t coming back up.
As a last-ditch effort, I checked the stove top for a pot of boiled rice, to no avail. The soup pan looked like it held the day-old remains of oatmeal. I sighed, out of ideas. Only then did I see the note stuck to the fridge door, scrawled in Susan’s loopy script: Ran out of chicken. Trevor will make rice before he leaves. M can have some of A’s kibble.
“But she can’t.” Ash’s puppy food, never mind that it was for puppies, gave her the worst kind of bloody, mucous-striated diarrhea. I’d struggled with IBS for as long as I could remember and empathized with Maddie’s poor, sore bottom and churning stomach when she ate the wrong stuff.
I crated Maddie while I gave Ash his snack-bowl of chow, allowing him to eat unmolested. I shut the cabinet holding his food a little too firmly, taking out some of my frustration on the sticky latch. I felt so guilty watching her watch him with cocked ears, eyes alert, as he scarfed down the food.
“I’m so sorry, baby, I don’t have anything for you yet. Trevor never made your rice.” I glanced at my watch, stressing the minutes that were rapidly running by and making me late for my next walks.
Before thinking it through too clearly, I marched downstairs and knocked on Trevor’s now-closed door. The guitar stopped, and I heard shuffling before the door opened a crack.
“Uh, hi, Trevor.” The opening widened. He was blessedly back into jeans and a T-shirt.
He looked down and just left of my knees.
“Do y’all have a vacuum cleaner? Sweeping the feathers isn’t exactly working.”
“Oh, I’ll look,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him.
I moved aside, assuming Trevor was going to go look for this mythical beast that was the vacuum cleaner, but he made no move to leave his room.
“Your mom left a note about Maddie’s rice? I couldn’t find any that had been cooked . . .” My voice trailed off, and I cursed the way I was meeting passivity with passivity.
A pause. Maybe he was thinking about it.
“Oh, right,” he said in monotone. “I’ll do that.”
“Okay, cool. Are you getting the chicken for her, or is your mom?”
“Um, I’m not sure.”
I was trying not to scream.
“Can you get some more this afternoon? I think she’s pretty hungry.”
Nothing.
“Okay, thanks. And the vacuum cleaner . . . do you want me to clean up before I go?”
“S’okay. I’ll do it,” he said, the door already starting to close.
“Okay. Thanks!”
As I turned, the door clicked shut behind me, and I saw the stupid ineffectual broomsticks peeking through the window frame. I hadn’t mentioned that to Trevor.
I contemplated conversation part two and decided I—and Maddie and Ash—would be better served if I just mentioned it to Susan directly. All of it. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to the binary nature of my clientele. It seemed like the owners were either wound really tight over the conditions in which their pets lived and the specifications for their care, or else they weren’t paying nearly enough attention. In either case, when negotiating with helicopter and laissez-faire parents alike, tact and diplomacy were tantamount to a successful relationship between client and service provider. These were skills I was still honing, though not nearly fast or masterfully enough.
Ash was long-since done with his kibble snack, so I rereleased Maddie from her crate to have free reign of the house along with him. I double-checked that anything edible and verboten was out of reach. With Trevor home, they didn’t have to be separated, though I had less and less faith that there was much difference between his supervision and none at all.
If I didn’t have a packed afternoon of walks scheduled—and if I’d had more than three dollars and change in my checking account—I’d have driven to the store and bought the chicken myself, so little confidence did I have in Trevor’s assurances. Or motivation. Or memory. But I was supposed to be up the hill at Edie and Ralph’s, and my tardiness had already eliminated any possibility of a cup of tea or even a chat.
Instead, I took Susan’s note down from the fridge and flipped it over, summarizing the feather bed’s sad demise, adding some high notes from our walk, and trying to tactfully underscore Maddie’s hunger, gently reiterating how hard the puppy chow was on her system. I also tacked on, at the very end, a question about the unrepaired window. It felt futile.
I would, of course, also be notifying my colleagues immediately of the day’s events. Hopefully I’d be able to steal a few moments during my walk with Ralph to bring them up to speed. There was always strength in numbers, and I knew we were very much on the same side of this battle for the dogs’ well-being. I also knew their conversation with Susan would be far more pointed, more forceful, than my polite note. As the primary service providers, they wielded more power and persuasion than I did as the subcontractor. Were this a construction job, they’d be the foremen to my plumber.
I posted my note in the same spot on the fridge, kissed the pups goodbye, and locked both doors behind me. A few feathers escaped the clanging outer door, gusting across the dirty patio toward a mammoth sleeping marmalade cat, his blocky head resting on giant paws.
I took a deep breath, trying to put the events of the last hour out of my mind so that I could focus on the rest of the day and the dogs on my schedule, and not stew about Maddie and the chicken and the brooms and the feathers. At least Dave was nowhere to be seen; I didn’t trust myself to be civil at that moment. I could only hope the afternoon ahead had few surprises in store. And that, when I arrived here tomorrow around this time, everything was in far better order for the little wolf pack of two.