An Unexpected Grace (12 page)

“How can you be loving when I'm annoyed at you?” Lila was talking as if Grace's illicit behavior were forgotten, though Lila remembered every splinter under the kitchen table.

Grace responded with a tail thump to the tile floor. She got up and rested her head in Lila's lap.

No doubt Grace was trying to hug her again and make up for what she'd done. She was begging Lila to reassure her that she wasn't upset and letting Lila know that she'd never stop pouring love on her. Forgiveness, like adoration, was an expression of Grace's nature. Lila could rail at her, but she'd never hold a grudge.

Betsy would have said to take a lesson from Grace about forgiving, Lila thought as Grace nuzzled her hand with her wet nose and asked Lila to pet her. Though Lila didn't want to, she broke down and obliged. Then she wondered if Grace's lovebug behavior was a ploy to make her feel guilty for wanting her gone. Lila's Crazy Aunt jumped in and cut off the guilt with a quick conk to its gizzard.

She curled her lip and hissed at Lila,
Forget the Good Samaritan act. The Humane Society is just down the freeway!

It's not that simple,
Lila mentally replied.
Grace is needy. She shouldn't be cast away.

Yeah,
sure.
Are you a simpering coward, or
what
?
Lila's Crazy Aunt snarled.
Who comes first? You or Grace? You've got to end her damned starring role in
The Dog Who Came to Dinner
.

You're right,
Lila conceded. She was. Really.

L
ila's mother often told her that necessity gave birth to invention, and she was stirring miso noodle soup at the stove when inspiration for an invention struck. It would be a promotional campaign, like those she'd helped devise at Weatherby to get publicity for products. But her objective would be a home, and the product would be Grace.

If Cristina and Adam wouldn't help Lila, then she would find someone who needed a golden retriever. There was no reason why she shouldn't be proactive. She wouldn't hand Grace over to just anyone; the person would have to be decent and respectable. But Lila would know she'd stopped being exploited and she'd gotten back some power.

Though Lila had sworn she'd never groom Grace, she got out the dog brush and started on her fur, which was sticking out as if it had been starched. Lila took swipes at Grace's head, skipped her neck, which was covered by the bandana, and worked her way down Grace's haunches and back. As Lila brushed, Grace's tongue hung from her mouth like a wet camellia petal. She half closed her eyes with a look of ecstasy, as if she were mentally zooming off to an opium den. When Lila got to her tail, she had to chase the wag. Grace accidentally thwacked her mouth. Repulsed, Lila picked fur off her lips as fervently as she'd picked it off her black jeans, and she added the thwack to Grace's other transgressions, such as the vile tennis ball and demolished brush.

Lila fluffed up the pointed tip of Grace's bandana to give her an extra-bright and fetching look. With her fingers, Lila pushed Grace's fur over the bald patches above her tail and partly hid her skin condition. If Lila squinted just right, Grace looked almost kempt, and her long, wavy fur invited hands to pet her.

“You're not ready for prime time, but you're presentable,” Lila said.

Grace swished her tail fervently enough to blow the turban off the imaginary sultan she fanned on the floor.

Her wag made clear that she did not know that Lila was about to turn into Benedict Arnold with steps two and three of her campaign: taking Grace on a walk, and persuading some unsuspecting but acceptable passerby to adopt her.

 

When Lila herded Grace toward the front door instead of the back, where she usually went out, she looked up and bristled her eyebrows, as if she were confused. They asked,
Why are you altering my routine when it's been working fine? Where are we going?

“We're going for a walk!” Lila lilted her voice with excitement at “walk,” so she sounded like she and Grace were about to romp across a yard where dog biscuits pushed through the grass like tulips.

Grace quickly taught Lila that dogs read minds.

Though Lila had not mentioned her campaign, Grace seemed to sense that something deceitful was going on, and she did not like it. She stared at Lila with a suspicious look in her eyes. When Lila opened the door, Grace refused to step onto the porch. She acted like she'd never been taken on a walk and disdained setting out on one now, especially with someone she'd begun to believe might not be trustworthy.

“Come on! Let's go!”

Lila pushed Grace's haunches over the threshold. Lila had expected her to bound outside and explore the forest, but she pressed against Lila's legs. She couldn't tell if Grace was being insecure or protective, but Lila urged her off the porch and they started up the path toward the street.

The sun filtered through redwood branches and dimly lit the forest. The air smelled of miner's lettuce and acacia. Ahead of Lila and Grace, crows sat like Christmas ornaments in a bay tree but flew away, cawing, as dog and human encroached on their safety zone.

Wary, Lila checked blackberry thickets for another Trailside Killer. But, surprisingly, with Grace beside her, fear ruled her less than it had on trips alone to the store. Though another murderer could shoot Lila as easily as Yuri had, Grace's company shored up her confidence and slightly dulled her anxious edge about being on the road.

Knowing that those pluses could never persuade her to adopt Grace herself, though, Lila stopped at the house next door, where Virginia, as fair and big-boned as a Viking, was sweeping her driveway. She was wearing a sari embroidered with tiny gold flowers, and humming something you'd hear plucked on a zither in a coffeehouse.

“Your yard's looking great.” Lila tugged Grace close to Virginia so she could witness the gut-wrenching longing for love that was always in Grace's eyes.

Virginia stopped midsweep but did not notice her. “Blasted redwood fronds. I've got to keep at them, or they clog the drain.” She stooped down and poured her dustpan's contents into a green garbage bag.

“I need to find this dog a home,” Lila said.

Virginia gave Grace an evaluatory glance. “I've seen her at the window. She looks out on the road.”

“She always waits for me to come home.”

“The poor thing.” Virginia came over and patted Grace's head.

Acting increasingly certain that something disadvantageous to her was going on, Grace distrustfully hooded her eyes and flashed Virginia her most hangdog, antisocial expression.

Virginia could not have missed Grace's sullen face and bald spots. “It might be hard to get someone to take her. Makes you sad.”

Lila said good-bye and left without asking Virginia if she'd take Grace herself because she knew what Virginia would say. Grace and Lila headed down the road.

They came to a man in a fleece vest and hiking boots, depositing a Gatorade bottle in his green recycling bin. His Santa Claus beard made him seem like he'd be warm and friendly, the very qualities that Grace would respond to. Lila brought her to a halt, so he wouldn't see her limp, and sat her at an angle, so he wouldn't see her bald spots.

“Hi,” Lila said.

When the man looked over at her and Grace, his lips parted in a smile. “Morning.”

“Interested in adopting a great dog?”

As he peered down at Grace, she glowered even worse than she'd glowered at Agnes Spitzmeier. Nevertheless, he reached out his hand for her to sniff and get acquainted, but she got up and slunk away. Perverse was what she was being.

“Why are you giving her up?” he asked.

“I'm house-sitting for a friend who rescued her. She left Grace with me till we could find her a home.”

“You could keep her.”

“I'm too busy. I don't know much about dogs anyway. I've never had one.”

“You ought to. They're lots of fun.”

“Right!” Lila said to hint that maybe Grace would be great fun for him.

But he didn't take the bait. “I've got a snippy Yorkie. She'd never tolerate another dog in the house.”

Lila's disappointment tasted like unsweetened lemonade sucked through a charcoal straw. “Do you know any nice person who might want Grace?”

“Not offhand.”

Lila gave him one of the index cards she'd written her phone number on, in case he thought of somebody. As she and Grace walked away, Lila said, “She's such a wonderful dog!” She wanted to leave him with a final, positive thought to spur his search for Grace's new home—but Lila wasn't hopeful he'd bother.

Slowly, she and Grace worked their way down the street. Looking sulky, Grace sat at Lila's feet while she talked with an elderly woman planting pansies in her window box, a man with slumped shoulders emptying the trash, and a woman in a pantsuit lifting groceries from the trunk of her burnt-orange Alfa Romeo. Lila stopped a pair of sweaty joggers who ran in place while she asked if they might want Grace, and a UPS delivery-woman who pulled her truck to the curb with a metallic squawk of brakes.

Lila's offer was always the same, delivered with as much enthusiasm as she could rake out of her put-upon heart. But Grace kept acting grumpy and withdrawn, like her only friend was Prozac. And everyone had a polite excuse for not taking on a misanthrope:

“I'm allergic to dogs.”

“I'm a cat person.”

“I'm never home. It wouldn't be fair to a dog.”

“My wife's pregnant. A baby's all we're going to be able to handle.”

Lila's campaign was a bust. By evening, all the index cards she'd handed out would be wadded up next to sour cream containers and wilted spinach leaves at the bottom of everybody's garbage can.

 

On the way home, Lila wrestled with discouragement, made blacker by knowing she could have spent the afternoon painting or searching the Internet for more going-postal cases. And Grace's sudden attitude reversal added to the frustration. Instead of acting like a crank, she apparently concluded that Lila had given up the search for an adopter and Grace was safe. She hobbled along, acting beatific, flashing Lila worshipful glances, and turning up the ends of her mouth in what looked like a smile. Was it possible dogs
smiled
?

In her head, Lila replayed her failed sales pitches. She wished she'd bowled everybody over with red-letter zeal. “I'm trying to find a home for this gorgeous, fabulous, friendly golden retriever !” Lila could have said in the beginning. When someone asked why Grace needed a home, Lila could have stretched the truth to something compelling, such as, “Her owner fell off a ladder in his backyard and had to go to a nursing home, the poor, poor man. He's beside himself that he can't keep his beloved dog.”

When anyone resisted, Lila could have iced more drama on her duplicitous cake with a Grace-as-hero tale. “Grace went absolutely wild when her owner fell off the ladder,” she might have said. “She yowled till a neighbor came over to see what the commotion was about, and he called an ambulance. This smart, sensitive, loyal dog saved her owner's life. Isn't that amazing? She's sure golden in more ways than one.”

Cristina and Lila used to have lying contests when they were bored studying for finals. For instance, they once described to each other trips to places they had never gone. Lila quickly mentioned a bus ride in Kazakhstan and a campout in Mali, but Cristina went on and on when it was her turn. She related chilling images of the yak who almost gored her on a trek in Nepal—his ferocious horns, the iron muscles in his legs, his breath that could wilt cactus. When Cristina described the sunburn that had turned her skin cranberry red on the Costa Brava—and the hotel owner's wife who rubbed vinegar on her back and arms to soothe the pain—Lila's own skin hurt. That was how good Cristina was at lying.

“If you want someone to believe a lie, you have to throw in feeling and detail,” Cristina said. For fun, she embellished Lila's Mali campout with bandits who had yellow teeth and spears with poisoned metal tips—so Lila never wanted to travel there for real.

Maybe today Lila could have given a pitch as emotional as Cristina's lies, but, then, just as effective as a lie for finding Grace a home might have been the sympathy-yanking truth: She was desperate for someone on whom to shower her devotion. If she loved you, she glommed onto you like she had a barnacle in her genetic heritage. It wasn't fair for even a brush-chewing delinquent like her to be sad when she had so much love to give.

Still, those weren't reasons for Lila to keep her.

B
ecause Lila believed that Adam Spencer was avoiding her on purpose, she was hesitant to contact him again. Yet even if he didn't want to talk with her, he was responsible for Grace still living with her, and he owed her his help. One last time Lila swallowed her pride and phoned him, though she did not expect him to answer. Like whistling for a dog, she called her determination.

She told herself that if Adam had cared enough to rescue Grace, he'd want to make sure she found a good home. Lila would appeal to his concern for Grace and count on her Pleaser to make her cordial and her Crazy Aunt to help her stand her ground. Since she was miffed that Adam was taking advantage of her, however, she'd sprinkle into the conversation a few references to virtues Adam clearly lacked, such as reliability, trustworthiness, and compassion. He probably wouldn't get the hint, but she'd give it anyway just to enhance her self-respect and get back her power.

As Lila picked up the phone in the den, Grace leaned against her ankle and panted, like she was talking to herself. Lila called Adam's home number. He didn't answer, wouldn't you know? She hung up, imagining him slinking around in Timbuktu so she couldn't find him to ask for help. She tried his cell.

“Hello?” he said.

After all the failed attempts to reach him, she was shocked to hear his voice. Noise in the background told her that he was in a public place; she quickly wished it were a meeting hall whose floor joists were sagging under the weight of dog adopters.

“Errr . . .” She was off to a robust start. She identified herself. “I've left you six messages.”
Since you like dogs better than people, maybe I'd have heard back from you if I were a dachshund.

“Sorry. I haven't called my voice mail. I've been at a conference in Chicago. I'm at O'Hare, about to fly home,” he said.

What sounded like a CNN newscaster mumbled stock quotes in the background. Grace's damp breath warmed Lila's foot.

“I'm sure you'll be glad to get back. The weather's great here,” Lila's Pleaser made her say.

“Nothing's wrong with Grace, is there?” Adam asked.

“As a matter of fact . . .” Lila cleared her throat. “I need you to come and get her. I've had her over a month.”

“We've been through this before.” He sounded irritable and tired. “Can't you hold on a little longer?”

“I've held on for too long. It's not right. I just walked Grace around the neighborhood and asked people if they wanted her, and . . .”

“You did
what
?”

Lila's hackles rose. “I took her around the neighborhood . . .”

“That was absolutely irresponsible.”

“I hate to say this, but I think you're the irresponsible one here. Since you wouldn't help, I had to do something. Somebody has to find Grace a home.”

“You might have handed her over to a dog torturer,” Adam said. “I told you Marshall doesn't live that far away. If he found out you had her, it would be a nightmare.”

“Okay, so do you want me to put an ad in the paper? Free dog to good home?”

“That would be worse.” When Adam exhaled, his breath contained scorn. “Crazy people search the ads for dogs every day. You wouldn't know how to screen callers.”

Lila rankled at the put-down. “I can tell a sicko if I talk with one.” But, then, she hadn't recognized how disturbed Yuri Makov was.

“You have to protect Grace. She's already gone through more than any dog should. It would be criminal if something bad happened to her again.” Without pausing long enough to blink, Adam launched the same kind of emotional appeal that Lila had wished she'd used on the neighbors for Grace: Marshall bragged he'd locked Grace for months in a dark garage as a pup to teach her that he was her master, Adam said. One night as he watched from his bedroom window, Marshall dragged Grace to an oak tree in his backyard and wrapped one end of a ten-foot chain around its trunk and the other around her neck. In a week she wore a small circle of dirt around the tree, which on freezing winter nights showered acorns on her, and she curled into a ball to protect herself or stood for hours to keep her body off the icy, muddy ground. And Marshall practically starved her. She'd have died if Adam hadn't thrown food over the fence to her when Marshall was at work. He beat Grace too, and that's when Adam broke into Marshall's yard and stole her.

“Imagine a wonderful dog like her living such a horrible life. Sometimes she cried all afternoon because she was so lonely. Look at how loving she is despite that jerk,” Adam said. “Grace didn't deserve any of it. Through no fault of her own, she got put in the hands of a sadist. She's like you. You both suffered from a random act of fate.”

“Well, I . . .” Till then, Lila hadn't been sure that Yuri's shooting her had penetrated Adam's mind. “I didn't know about Grace's life. It's terrible. But it's not fair you haven't come to get her. You said you would.”

“You ought to understand better than anybody that Grace needs to be protected. Can you imagine how bad it would be if some cruel person got hold of her again? Is that what you want?”

“Of course not. It would be awful . . .”

“United Flight 197 is now boarding at Gate 9.” On the intercom, the woman's voice sounded scratchy.

“I have to go,” Adam said. “If you'll just be patient for another month, I'll take Grace myself.”

“I can't keep Grace another month!”

At hearing her name, though Lila's voice was shrill, Grace looked up at her expectantly and said with her eyes,
I love you!

“A month is not long,” Adam argued.

“It's twenty-nine days too long. I have to get back my life. Grace is siphoning my energy. I need to get well . . .”

“Just listen, okay?” Adam interrupted. “I bought a house. It's in escrow. I'll be moving in soon. The house doesn't have a fenced yard, so it might take me a while to get ready for Grace, but I'll do it as fast as I can.”

As Lila was about to cave and agree to keep Grace longer, her Crazy Aunt, who'd just dyed her hair green, stomped into Lila's mind.
Keep your trap shut,
she snarled at Lila.
That oaf may have made you pity that dog, but he's steamrollering you. You're not the only dog sitter in the world. Don't let him push you around.

“If you'll wait for me to come and get Grace, you'll never have to see her again,” Adam pressed. “I'm counting on you to keep her for me just a little longer. I'm asking you to have some heart.”

As far as Lila was concerned, he'd fed his own heart to his wolfhounds for breakfast. Her heart was fine. She'd shown plenty of it taking care of a dog who'd been pushed on her by an insensitive man as untrustworthy as Reed.

When Adam hung up, he hadn't seemed to notice that she'd not agreed to anything. The fence was just another of his ploys to stall—and she'd never hear from him. If he ever did contact her, he'd say that he'd gotten a consulting job in Antarctica, and after the work was finished, he had to visit his consumptive cousin for a few months on the Yangtze River. And by the way, he'd ask, couldn't Lila keep Grace just a tiny bit longer, like another year? By then he'd be back in town, happy to take her off Lila's hands.

Grace rested her chin on her paws and sighed with contentment. Apparently sensing no potential change in her living arrangements, she closed her eyes and began to snore.