Interstitial #4
“Hey, babe!” says Austin. She pictures him in the kitchen, pulling out one of her labeled breakfast casseroles from the refrigerator and following the reheat instructions.
(She’d put up a recent video on batch breakfasts, complete with affiliate links for the color-lock glass food storage bins.) “Buttercup has mastitis. You’ll be happy to know Dr. George is on his way.
” The “happy to know” part is a joke between them—Dr. George is the hot vet, and Austin can joke about him because he knows that he himself is even hotter.
The thought of Dr. George pulling up to the barn in his brick-red pickup does nothing for Natalie today.
She doesn’t even crack a smile. “How’s it going there? ” asks Austin.
“Not great,” she says. Her voice is made of steel. “My dad is putting the house on the market. Kara is coming tomorrow. And,
have you seen the article?” She tries to keep her voice from going up on the word article but up it goes.
“He’s putting the house on the market? What article?”
“The house is a whole other thing. We’re all devastated. Well, Mae and I are devastated. But the article—the link I sent you
yesterday. New York Magazine. The one the reporter spent a whole day with us for? The big media hit?”
“Didn’t get a chance.” She hears the clink of a fork against a plate, the water running, the microwave door opening and closing.
“Early to bed, early to rise, you know. How’d it come out?”
How did it come out? “Well, it’s a disaster. It’s a complete disaster.”
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
He’s chewing now. His unconcern is killing her. It is absolutely killing her! “Because of you!” she says. “Because of what
you said!”
“What’d I say?”
“The thing about—”
She hears the chime of their fancy doorbell. “Sorry, babe, I have to run, okay? Dr. George is squeezing me in before another
appointment. I’ll look at it later, but whatever it is, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s just an article. I’m sure it’s fine.
Love you.”
“It is not fine!” she says. “I could lose hundreds of followers. Thousands! You know how it works! If there’s a whiff of controversy
I can lose the affiliates—” But she’s speaking to nobody; he’s gone.
Caspian says, “Ommy mad.” She releases him from the portable seat and holds him against her.
“Mommy isn’t mad,” she says, even though, yes, Mommy is filled with an unspeakable rage so sharp she could slice a roast with
it. She breathes in raggedly and says, “Should we go check on your sisters?”
Out on the patio, Mae buckles Leo into his harness and goes over her supplies. Dog? Check. Treat pouch? Check. Poop bags?
Check. Long leash? Check. Small hangover from too many small cups of wine? Check.
Plus-size heartache? Double check. She can’t believe her father is selling the house; she can’t believe this piece of her mother will soon be gone, poof, as quick as you can
say “purchase and sale.” She can’t believe Jordan isn’t even upset about it. What treachery! And besides the emotional sting,
Mae doesn’t know how she’s going to be able to pull herself out of her current hole with the disappearance of this, her last
remaining safety net.
She can’t believe how stupid she was to fall into her current hole in the first place. You hear about people getting scammed
all the time. And you think, I would never fall for that. A little piece of you thinks, They got what they deserved, for not
knowing any better. For being vulnerable, scammable. Yet here she is.
Even amid all this, with all these different thoughts and emotions crisscrossing in her mind, a dog needs to get out in the morning.
This is how dogs work. Mae and Leo make their way to the cool morning sand.
She lets Leo sniff around a little before they begin their training session.
She’s already impressed by the progress he’s made around Natalie’s kids and Cinnamon.
Another few days of consistent training, and he’ll be acting like a real member of the family.
(“Consistency is key.” —Hal Miller.)
Mae scans the beach. She’ll go all the way to the left as she’s facing the water, toward the rocks that line the northernmost
edge of the beach and divide it from Straw’s Point and Rye Harbor. This is the less populated section, where she’s more likely
to have space for herself and Leo, whose strong reactions to others could be construed as . . . well, negative. Even frightening,
especially given the pit bull part of his DNA. This is what she told Human Leo during the assessment, which took place in
the backyard of Hal’s bungalow on Mapleton Hill.
Human Leo sucked in his breath. “Is he aggressive?”
Mae shook her head. “Reactivity is often misread as aggression. Usually a reactive dog is fearful, so when he’s lunging toward
a person or barking at another dog, what he’s trying to do is drive the thing that’s scaring him away before a perceived harm
can take place.” She was pleased with herself for this succinct explanation. She glanced at Hal to see how she’d done; Hal
was beaming at her.
Human Leo nodded slowly, taking this in. “Okay. That makes sense. I really want this to work out. I really want to keep Leo.”
“I didn’t know you were considering not keeping him,” Mae said sternly. She hates when people give up too easily on dogs.
What did they expect when they took home a rescue? That they were rescuing something perfect? No. Perfect things do not need
to be rescued.
“Nonono,” Leo said, really fast. “I’m in it for the long haul. I want him to be my companion. I want to take him on road trips
and everything.”
“Like Thelma and Louise!”
“Exactly,” said Leo. “With a happier ending.”
Mae found herself thinking wistfully of taking a road trip with the Leos, then she immediately chastised herself. “I can help
him,” she said. “I know I can. Your fee will not go to waste.” Hal frowned slightly at this; later he told Mae that he’d prefer
the fee not be discussed during an assessment. Hal is a purist.
She held out her hand, and they shook to seal the deal. She saw Leo looking at the tattoos on the back of the hand, at the
way they traveled all the way up her arm, disappearing into her tank top.
“I like what you have going on there,” he said. “All the ink.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I apprenticed at Ink It.” She considered her arm. Her favorite tattoo is the first one she got from
Tony, the shooting star, an approximation of the one she saw the night Theresa died.
Now, on her own stretch of beach, she clips the long leash onto Leo and takes him through some warm-up exercises to focus
him: some fist bumps (Leo’s nose to her fist), some eye contact practice, a few sits and downs. Leo is smart and a quick learner,
and his attention stays on Mae. He wants to do a good job, she can tell. He has a good heart. And if you have a good heart,
Mae believes, everything else can be trained.
She gives Leo lots of leash—the long leash is fifty feet long—and steps back, her foot on the end, so she can call Leo toward
her. They do this three times, and each time Leo performs perfectly. She rewards him plentifully. She takes a video. She’ll
send it to Hal so he can see her progress.
Then she sees an unleashed dog, a German shepherd, running along the edge of the water.
The shepherd clocks Leo and Mae and heads directly toward them.
The owner, a man in board shorts and a T-shirt, had been walking behind the dog, talking on a cell phone, paying no attention.
Mae grabs the end of Leo’s leash, but she’s not in time to reel in the whole length of it.
Leo pulls all the way out, straining toward the other dog.
The shepherd stops and stands stock-still.
She can almost see his dog brain working, trying to make a decision.
“Excuse me!” she calls to the man in board shorts. “Will you please call your dog?”
He can’t hear her. She’s yelling now. Leo is whining, and the whining turns to growling. “Call your dog! Excuse me! Call your dog!”
The man looks up, assesses the situation, calls the dog. He’s too far away for her to hear what the name is. The dog looks
back toward the man, ignores him, puts his attention back on Leo. The man calls again, then finally the dog makes the right
decision, running toward his owner, who clips a leash on him. It takes all Mae’s strength to hold Leo back as he strains against
his own leash, barking, until the dog is farther away. It takes Leo several minutes to calm, and he’s still breathing hard
when he looks imploringly at Mae, as if to say, I did a bad job, didn’t I?
“It wasn’t our finest moment,” she admits. “But we’ll get there. Remember, we’re all about progress, not perfection.” Her
heart is beating so fast.
Her phone pings, a text from Tony. You owe me for last month’s rent. Can you Venmo me 1200?
It’s not even five in the morning in Boulder—what is Tony doing up already? She sits down next to Leo in the sand, and he
puts his big goofy head in her lap. He’s spent. She looks back at her phone. Of course. Tony isn’t up already—Tony is up still. Drinking, vaping weed, basically being Tony. She looks out at the water, finding the humps of the Isles of Shoals. Momentarily,
they anchor her.
I didn’t live with you last month, she texts back. Did you forget?
Her heart is beating almost as fast as Leo’s, thinking of the credit card fees Venmo will hit her with if she pays Tony, in
addition to the fees already accruing on the credit card itself. But she doesn’t have the cash in her account.
You left with no warning. You still owe me.
She wants to call her mom, and with just the thought of that a lump rises in her throat. How did that lump get there so fast?
What is wrong with her? She’s letting grief over her mother consume her, more than two years after Theresa’s death. When everyone else in
the family—even her father, maybe especially her father—is emerging from the mourning period, she’s still stuck there, and