Truth is, I’m not watching this damn dog because of Reginald. I’m watching it because of his sister, Reyna.
“She loves this dog, man,” Reg tells me. “She’ll probably come over to visit, if that’s okay.”
“Fine by me.”
“She’s prepping for a shoot in LA next week, or else she’d watch Lady for me.”
“Really, it’s fine.”
Reginald and I were tight in high school, but then he got a scholarship to play soccer at UC Riverside. Which everyone knows is the worst UC school, but don’t tell that to Reg. Now he works as an accountant for H&R Block, and you can tell he thinks he’s hot shit. His apartment is in the ritzy part of Oxnard, near all the hotels, right by the ocean.
I pour a bowl of Reg’s fancy cereal and milk. The guy shops at Whole Foods. I try to give him shit about it, but he just waves me off and never takes the bait. We used to pick fights with each other all the time. We became friends because he punched me after soccer practice one day in high school, accusing me of holding his jersey. Which I was, but he was holding mine, too. Parties weren’t parties without us getting in some drunken argument and trying to push each other down the stairs. But that was back in high school. Doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but to Reg it does.
Reyna stops by in the afternoon. She has this shiny hair that goes down to her hips, and these huge round eyes that make her look innocent, which is sexy as hell because you know she’s not. The dog runs towards her, tail swishing all over the place. Reyna crouches and coos, “Oh, my baby, oh, what a good girl.”
I clear my throat. “Hey, Reyna, you want something to drink or something?”
She keeps talking to the dog as if she doesn’t hear me. Then she says, “Wanna take Lady to the dog park? It’s just a few blocks away.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“She loves the dog park. Don’t you love the dog park? Yes you do. Yes you do.” She hands me the leash.
“Wait,” I say. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I’ll meet you there. I need to shower first. Reggie lets me shower here because my landlord is an asshole and won’t fix the shitty water pressure. I can’t even get the shampoo out of my hair.”
“I can wait if you—”
“Oh no, no, look at Lady. She’s all excited. I’ll meet you there. Just walk down this street four blocks until you get to Rosita, then make a left and you’ll see it. You can’t miss it, really.”
“Rosita, left. Got it.” I clip the leash to the dog’s collar, which isn’t as easy as it sounds because the little fucker is bouncing all over the place.
“Have a good shower,” I murmur, which comes out creepy. Reyna gives me a smile that doesn’t look like a real smile, more like she just doesn’t know what else to do with her face. She waves and disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door tight behind her. Shit.
Meanwhile, the dog’s whining and scratching at the front door, as if it’s being kept hostage. I pick up the leash, open the front door, and we’re off.
•••••••
The dog park does not impress me. It’s just some fenced-in grass and a crappy wooden ramp for dogs to walk up and down on, and a bench where owners can sit and watch. There’s only one other dog here—a huge, bulldog-looking thing, galloping around in circles like a fucking horse. Its owner is a girl around my age, with light-brown hair that reminds me of those soft toffee candies my grandma used to keep in a yellow dish on her kitchen table. I sit next to her, not too close, and pretend I’m busy focusing on Reg’s dog. I unclip the leash and pat it on the back.
“Go on. Go play.” I watch the dog trot away, sniffing hesitantly at the grass. It takes a few little steps, stops, sniffs, then takes a few more steps. Tedious to watch dogs run around a worn patch of grass.
I lean against the bench, twisting my body ever so slightly toward the girl with the toffee hair. She’s making a big show of watching her dog, pretending like she hasn’t noticed me beside her.
I want to hear what her voice sounds like.
“That your dog?” I say, pointing. “That’s a nice-looking dog.”
“Oh, thanks, but it’s not mine. I’m watching him for a friend.”
“Now, that’s what I call a dog. No one will mess with you if you’ve got a dog like that.”
She scratches her ankle. “Well, I think your dog’s pretty cute.”
“Oh, that’s not my dog. I’m watching it for a friend, too.”
She looks at me warily, like she thinks I’m making fun of her.
“Seriously!” I say. “That’s my friend’s dog. Reginald. He’s out of town, so I’m house-sitting for him. If I had a dog, I’d never pick out one like this. Now, your dog—that’s a masculine fucker.”
The girl smiles, her hair still half covering her eyes, like she’s playing at shy.
“Have I seen you somewhere?” I ask, even though I’ve never seen her before in my life. “You live around here?”
“No, not really.” She pauses a few seconds, and I figure that’s the end of it, she’s giving me the brushoff, but then she offers, “I work at Starbucks though?” Like it’s a question. It kills me when girls act all shy like that.
“Naw, I wouldn’t have seen you there,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t like coffee. I never go to those places. But maybe you’ve been to Red Lobster, over on Seaward? I used to be a waiter there.”
“I don’t like seafood,” she says, smiling wider this time, brushing the hair from her face. I smile too, feeling good, like I’m getting somewhere, when suddenly the big-ass dog runs up and jumps on her, his huge muddy paws in her lap, licking her face like there’s no tomorrow.
“Bic! Down!” she says, but it’s not making any difference. I grab the dog around its chest and try to pull it off her. Torso’s like a block of cement. It’s panting in that crazy way dogs do, its tongue hanging sideways out of its mouth.
“Thanks,” the girl says, standing to brush off her jeans. “He’s a handful, as you can see.” She leans and clips the leash to its collar.
“You leaving already?”
“Yeah,” she says. “We were here a while before you came.”
“See you here tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” she says, smiling once more. And then she’s gone, dragged away by that enormous dog.
I wait another twenty minutes, watching Reg’s dog trot and stop, sniff and piss. Reyna never shows.
•••••••
Walking home, I start thinking about Jewell, wondering if I’ll be able to get her to eat anything tomorrow. She’s been one of my residents since I first started working at Seaside Manor, right after my grandma died, which was three years ago this October. My grandma lived with us in her final months, and I took care of her when Mom was at work. It wasn’t a big deal, really. I’d warm up leftovers for her, soft food my mom made—vegetable soup, mashed potatoes, creamed corn. I’d help her walk to the bathroom when she needed to. I’d rub her legs to help her circulation. Easy stuff, but it made me feel good, like someone needed me. And Grandma was grateful. Sometimes she’d just reach over and squeeze my hand. She thought I was a genius because I knew how to use Wikipedia. I started looking up weird facts online so I could tell them to her. A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to seven miles away. About 300 million cells die in your body every minute. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. I could probably have told my grandma anything and she would have believed me. But I didn’t ever try to bullshit her—I didn’t want to. The stranger, the better, but I only told her facts.
After she died, I dreamed about her for three straight weeks. I was nervous as hell, walking into Seaside Manor to ask if they had any jobs—wondering if they would laugh in my face when I told them I’d never been to college, didn’t even have my AA degree. But Martha, the manager, seemed to like me. I had a long story prepared about how I wanted experience working in the assisted-living industry. Reginald told me to use that word, industry, but when I started talking, what came out was all this shit about my grandma. I had to stop talking a couple times and look at the floor because I didn’t want to lose it. Martha just listened until I was done and then said, “I think we can find a place for you here.”
•••••••
My first day of work, I met Jewell, room 319. It’s my job to give residents their morning medications and make sure they actually take all the pills and don’t dump them in the trash or hide them in tissues. When I walked into her room that first day, Jewell was watching The Wizard of Oz on her small TV. Her apartment was crammed with old-lady stuff—those pillows with Bible verses on them, fake flowers in glass vases, figurines of little kids in old-style clothing. A tiny lady, the size of an elementary schooler, she loves sitting in this big armchair in front of her TV, like a throne. That day, she looked at me, her eyes sharp behind her glasses, and said, “Come watch this,” pointing at the screen.
I stepped closer to the TV. The witch with the bright-green skin cackled and disappeared in a puff of smoke. “Did you know,” Jewell said, “that the Wicked Witch’s green makeup was made out of copper, which is very flammable, and she caught on fire while filming this scene?”
“Yeah?” I said, placing her pills one by one on the tray beside her chair.
“An extra stepped in to film the second take,” Jewell continued, “and then she caught on fire, too! Both of them were severely burned. Being an actor was dangerous in those days.” She stared at the TV screen, acting like she didn’t see her medication, though I knew she did. She had a sly way of glancing at me out of the corner of her eye, and then at her pills, and then at me, the same way Reg used to look at me in high school when he’d try to steal Cheetos from my lunch.
“And did you know,” I said to her, keeping my voice real slow and steady, “that the copper makeup was so heavy that the Wicked Witch couldn’t move her face to chew, and she had to eat out of a straw for twelve days?”
Jewell looked at me sharply. I smiled and handed her a glass of water.
“No, I didn’t know that,” she said after a moment. “How interesting.” Then she placed a pill onto her tongue and took delicate sips of water until the pills were gone.
As I turned to leave, she called after me. “What’s your name, young man?”
“Phil,” I told her.
“Phil,” she repeated. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Ermelinda Jones.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Ms. Jones.”
“Jewell. I let some people call me Jewell,” she said, “and you’re one of them, all right?”
“All right,” I said. It was a small thing, but it made me feel good.
•••••••
Reyna’s left a note on the kitchen counter. Sorry, got a phone call and had to run. See you later! Kisses to my little Lady!
I wander over to the fridge. One beer left. The dog’s slurping up water, drooling all over the place. I wish I’d gotten that girl’s number. Or even her name.
The next morning, I take Lady out before work. There’s a little breeze, and you can smell the salt from the ocean. My mom always says that even though we live in a shitty house, we have it better than rich people in Arizona because they don’t get to smell the ocean every day. She doesn’t use the word shitty, but I can tell it’s what she’s thinking. And she’s right, too. It isn’t even a house really, more like a condo, two small bedrooms and a bathroom where the toilet always clogs, the neighbors above us and below us always shouting. When I got a bike for my birthday the summer I turned eleven, it was stolen two days later from the bike rack outside. Nothing left but one tire chained to the bike rack. But we have the ocean. All year long, we leave the windows cracked open to feel the ocean breeze.
I pull into the back parking lot of Seaside Manor with three minutes to spare. Martha is a nice lady and doesn’t care if you’re a few minutes late, which is why I don’t like to be late. I don’t want to take advantage. Plus, I’m worried about Jewell. I can feel it worming around in my gut, this worried feeling, no matter how much I try to keep my mind on other things—like that girl from the dog park, how I’ll take Lady back there when I get home tonight, how maybe she’ll be there, waiting.
Since it’s the Fourth of July, people are taking the day off, and I have to work a double shift. I spend the morning setting up for the barbeque they’re having at noon. After I’m done folding napkins, I make my way down the third-floor hallway with my medicine cart. Mrs. Hampton complains to me about her head cold. Mr. Rodriguez and I talk baseball. Mrs. Lacey tells me about her grandchildren, who are visiting her for dinner next week. I can never keep their names straight, but I nod and smile as she chatters away. A lot of these people just want someone to talk to.
When I get to Jewell’s door, I knock twice, but there’s no response. I knock again, then let myself inside. Jewell’s slouched in her huge-ass armchair, eyes closed. My heart pounds. I’m at her side in three long steps, kneeling beside her, touching her arm.
“Jewell?” I say, then louder: “JEWELL?”
When my grandma died, I was the only one home. It had been a normal morning. She’d eaten breakfast, oatmeal with mushed banana mixed in—I was the one who invented that—and I turned on the TV so she could watch her soaps while I did the dishes and took a shower and whatever other shit I used to do in the mornings. When I went in to see if she needed anything, no more than an hour later, she was lying there with her eyes closed, propped up on the pillows like normal—she could have been just sleeping, easy—but my throat tightened. Something about her seemed off. Later Reg asked me to describe it, but I didn’t know what to say. I guess it’s just something you know. When you’re the only life in a room, you can feel it.
Jewell blinks her eyes open, and I step back.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she snaps.
“Sorry,” I say. I start to say more but don’t know what, so instead I focus on setting out a row of pills on her tray.
“Don’t you change on me, Philip,” she says. “You’re the only one around here who treats me like a normal human being.”
I swallow. “Do you know the Beatles?”
“Of course I do,” she says.
“You know that song ‘Yesterday’?”
“Everyone knows that song.” She picks up a pill and holds it between two fingers, looking at me.
“Did you know the original title of that song was ‘Scrambled Eggs’?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t believe you.” She places the pill in her mouth and swallows, then the next pill, and the next.
At lunch, she refuses to eat. “I’m not hungry. That meat looks disgusting.”
I mush up some ice cream in a glass and bring it to her. “Milkshake,” I say. “Made special for you. If you don’t eat it, you’ll hurt my feelings.”
She slides the glass toward her on the table and places her lips on the thick pink straw, then pulls away. “I’m the Wicked Witch,” she says, grinning, and there is a spark of something in her eyes—a bit of Reyna, of the toffee-haired girl, of my grandma?—as she wraps her lips around the straw and begins to drink.
•••••••
When I get back to Reg’s place, it’s almost five thirty. He’ll be back early tomorrow morning. Lady’s excited to see me, wiggling and hopping around like she’s dancing. She won’t even hold still long enough for me to pet her head. “That’s a good girl,” I say, clipping the leash onto her collar. Gonna miss coming home to her. Never thought I was a dog person, but maybe I am.
There’s a woman at the dog park, around my mom’s age, throwing a Frisbee for a golden retriever. That’s it. No toffee-haired girl, no huge horse-dog. I unclip Lady’s leash and sit on the bench, looking around in a sly way that seems like I’m not looking. And that’s when I see her, running toward me across the grass. She yells something, but I can’t hear the words.
“What?” I say, standing.
“Have you seen him?” She runs up to me, breathing hard. Red cheeks, wide eyes. Panicky.
“Seen who?” I ask.
“Bic, my dog. The dog I’m watching, that I had with me the other day. You remember?”
“Sure I do. That is one huge fucking dog.” I smile, but she doesn’t smile back. She’s looking behind me, her eyes jumping around. “No, I haven’t seen him,” I say. “Did he run off?”
“We were on our way here when some asshole let off a firecracker, and Bic got completely spooked. All of a sudden, he took off running. I wasn’t holding the leash tight enough, and it flew out of my hand. I tried chasing after him, but he’s way faster than me, and I lost sight of him. I don’t know where he went.” Looks like she’s about to cry. “Julie’s gonna kill me if I lost her dog. She loves that dumb dog more than anything.”
“It’s okay, we’ll find him. I’ll help you. Lady!” I whistle. Lady’s ears perk up. “Lady, c’mere!” She trots over, and I clip on her leash. The toffee-haired girl is walking fast, headed towards the street, shouting Bic’s name. Lady runs along beside me, but her legs are so short she can’t go fast enough. I pick her up and carry her, and she doesn’t squirm at all.
I catch up to the girl at a stoplight right outside the dog park. “We should split up,” she says. “Cover more ground faster.” She turns to cross the street, but I touch her arm.
“What’s your number?” I ask. “So I can call you if I find him.”
She types it into my cell phone and rushes across the street. She’s almost to the other side before I realize she didn’t fill in her name. I still don’t know it. I call after her, but she doesn’t hear me.
I set off in the other direction down Rosita Street, walking farther away from the dog park, closer to the ocean. The breeze smells of salt and faint smoke. Barbeques, fireworks. Another bang goes off nearby. Lady barks. She’s shaking in my arms. I never knew fireworks made dogs so scared.
Up ahead is another row of houses; then the street opens onto the beach. I’m half running now, shouting Bic’s name. I’m feeling good. Feeling right. If I were a dog off my leash, I’d head straight to the beach.
Later, I’ll tell Jewell this story. How, in the middle of a gigantic family barbecue on the beach, I find that dog Bic going to town on a plate of pulled chicken. How I manage to grab his collar and yank him away, his jowls covered in barbecue sauce, Lady yapping at us from the sand. How the toffee-haired girl legit cries on the phone when I call and tell her. How my fingers cramp holding so tight onto that dog’s collar, waiting for her to arrive. How her face lights up when she runs across the beach toward us, sandals clutched in one hand, sand spewing up behind her bare feet. How she throws her arms around me and Bic in a giant hug, as Lady licks our faces and tries to scramble in too. How I finally learn her name. Sarah.
But I don’t know any of that yet. All I have is this new, small kernel of hope in my chest. Now, I trudge up the sand dunes, my arms aching. Lady weighs a ton for a small dog. From the beach comes laughter and shouting, the roar of the wind. I can imagine that crazy dog here, prancing around on the sand, splashing through the waves with his cement-block chest. Yes. I can picture him so clearly. Lady barks, ears pricked up. We crest the dune and gaze out onto the beach, searching for something familiar.