“Seriously?” She glared at him. “Cal, please? Kitchen?” I dropped Shadow’s wire brush and slipped by my mom where she sat on the steps, grabbing a bunch of paper towels and wetting them carelessly in the sink, bringing her a sopping bundle to wipe up the blood.
“Thanks,” she said, distracted, then, “Bruce—you gonna come look? See if I’m dying?” She waved the streaky red paper towels in the air like a flag. “Losing a little bit of blood here.”
“Skin’s thin on your fingers and toes,” he said. “How many times do you think I’ve sliced my hand open on the job? Surface cut’s gonna bleed like crazy even though it’s not bad. Go inside and put your foot up. Can’t just walk away from the grill here.” She didn’t respond, but she stood up and made her way inside, unsteadily. I could tell it hurt. I went in after her, feeling like a traitor for not going right away, and Shadow followed.
She was on the couch already, clean paper towels stuffed around her toes, leg up on a pillow. “God, he is such an ass sometimes,” she said. I didn’t know what to say so I just held the paper towels in place for her. “Grab my drink for me, Cal?” she said. “I left it on the table.”
I ran back outside. “How is she?” Bruce asked, then looked at the drink in my hand. “Tell her she shouldn’t be drinking if she’s bleeding as much as she says she is. I’ll bring in the burgers in a minute.”
“I don’t think she’s bleeding that bad,” I said, knowing it was the wrong thing to say, not knowing if there was a right thing.
One night when everything was still good, Bruce sat on the edge of my bed before I went to sleep and told me the story of how he’d found Shadow. “And that was it. She sat on my lap on the drive home, whimpering, and I set her up on a towel in the kitchen with a soup bowl for a water dish.” Shadow was eight or nine when he told me the story, and I tried really hard to imagine her as a puppy. She was older than me. “C’mere, girl,” Bruce said, and patted the side of the bed, and she ambled in, licking his hand. He ruffled the fur on the top of her head. Then my mom came and stood in the doorway, and the light in the hall shadowed one side of her face and made her hair glow. “All my girls in one room,” Bruce said. “I’m a lucky guy.”
When Bruce left us a few months later, he took Shadow with him. He didn’t even say goodbye to me unless you count that phone call he made a week later from his new house. I could hear a football game on the television in the background, and a woman—my mom said her name was JoAnn—saying she was going to the kitchen and did he want another Bud. Shadow barked and my breath caught in my throat and I couldn’t talk. I didn’t know what his new living room looked like, so I couldn’t picture him on the other end of the line. I wondered if the woman’s couch was full of crumbs and coins nestled in the cracks like his old one. I wanted him to describe it to me, but all he said was, “I’m sorry, Cal. You know this has nothing to do with you. You’re a good kid.” I felt like he was looking at the television when he said it.
I missed Bruce a little bit, but I missed Shadow more. Shadow hadn’t left my mom and me. My mom hadn’t caught Shadow in the kitchen late at night, whispering I miss you too baby into the phone. All I wanted to do was call her name and hear the click of her paws on the linoleum, on her way to me. We got to stay in the house until Bruce’s lease was up, which wasn’t for another couple months. We had the backyard and the real kitchen and I had my own bedroom but now I didn’t even feel like sleeping alone. It was hard to sleep without Shadow. At night, I missed the heat from her body. She used to sleep on the inside of the bed, between me and the wall, curled up next to my hip, and I could feel her shift and settle throughout the night, still there when I woke up.
After Bruce left, I heard a lot of things my mom said on the phone when she thought I was asleep. “I don’t know, Deb,” she whispered, curled up on the couch. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do when we have to move out.” I tiptoed out into the kitchen and she sat up and angled her body in front of the bottle on the side table. “Cal, I didn’t know you were still up. Debbie, I’ll call you back later.” Or the hissing voicemails she left for Bruce. “How’s your pretty little JoAnn, you fucking bastard?” Even I knew leaving a message like that wouldn’t make me want to come back, if I were Bruce. I wondered if JoAnn drank a lot, if she was nice, if she liked dogs.
I came home from school a couple weeks after Bruce left, expecting an empty house. But my mom was home, drinking a beer in front of the TV. “Bruce is being a shithead,” she said. “We’re going to get that damn dog back.” She looked like she had an idea but not a plan, which made me nervous.
I didn’t say anything on the car ride over. I sat in the backseat, chipping glitter polish off my nails. There was an open can of beer in the cup holder and my mom wanted to steal a dog and I was pretty sure both of those things were against the law. It was August and the AC in the car was broken but I was shivering. This wasn’t something adults did. Bruce had broken a lot of rules but they were adult ones, ones that got broken all the time, on television and in real life.
My mom drove straight past their house and then circled around again. “Checking for cars,” she said. She parked at the end of the block, and we walked down the street like we always did this. Just a mother and daughter walking home from school on a Wednesday afternoon.
My mom knocked on the front door. “They’re not home,” I said. “Remember, we just checked for cars?”
“I know,” she said, in a voice like she thought I was stupid. “I’m just knocking in case the neighbors see.” She tried the front door. It was locked, and for a moment I relaxed. But then she walked around the side of the house. There was just a chain link fence, and then there was Shadow, curled up underneath a tree, then running straight toward us. “You’re going over first,” she said, and held out both of her hands for me to step on. I fell over onto the other side, and Shadow tackled me to the ground, licking my face all over. My mom climbed over next.
“This is disgusting,” my mom said, pointing at a pile of dog poop. “Absolutely disgusting. He doesn’t deserve this dog if this is how they’re going to treat her. Dog shit everywhere.” I’d just started using that word, but not out loud, and not to my mom. “Shit,” I would whisper to myself when I stubbed my toe, or spilled out the last powdery crumbs of cereal on the kitchen counter. “Shit, shit, shit.”
There was a bowl of water by the back door, and another one beside it with a couple crumbs of kibble inside. The grass was nice, like the grass used to be in Bruce’s backyard before he left. There were even a couple of trees with patches of shade beneath them. It looked like she was okay. But then I looked down at her pacing back and forth in front of us. It almost looked like she was smiling. “Yeah,” I said. “Disgusting.” I didn’t see any other poop in the yard.
We walked through the back door and right out the front, leaving it unlocked. It was that easy.
Shadow was quiet in the car, and she settled into my lap even though she was too big for it. I moved my fingers through her fur. She seemed fine, but I would still give her a bath when we got back. I couldn’t stop smiling, even though I knew we’d done something bad. “Can she sleep in my room again?” I asked.
My mom slowed to a stop at a red light and turned to face me. “Well, that’s the problem,” she said. “Bruce knows where we live, remember? So she can’t actually live with us, not for a little while.” I hadn’t thought about that, and it made sense, but then I didn’t get why we’d taken her in the first place.
“Well, yeah,” I said, “but then where is she going to live? And why did we take her?”
“God, Cal, I’m figuring things out, okay! She’ll be fine. We took her because that shithead didn’t deserve her, that’s why. We’ll find her somewhere to live. We just have to drive around for a little bit while I think.” She shook her head, like I’d said something wrong. Shadow leaned against me, and pressed