A Dog in Georgia

One

ONE

THE WOMAN—LONG GRAY COAT , enormous scarf—scuttled toward Amy just as she and Roxy were leaving the dog run in Tompkins Square Park. It was another blue morning in an unseasonably blue February.

“Hey!” the woman called. She had a vaguely familiar face, and for a second Amy thought she was a student—but no, she generally remembered her students. Or maybe someone from the neighborhood?

Or did she work at the restaurant? She had a tired, reedy voice.

“Excuse me! Hey!” the woman called again.

It was so early, though—not even seven-thirty, and restaurant people generally didn’t wake up this early. Amy and Roxy had just finished their morning kibbitz with the regulars: Rufus the Lab, Jazz the mutt, Morty the half-blind pit bull.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, when she was close enough to Amy to be heard over the whine of rush hour and dogs barking inside their oval run. “I have to tell you something.”

“Me?”

“Something terrible.” The woman had an enormous tote bag on her shoulder spilling over with scarves, leaflets, bits of fabric. “I’m really sorry.”

Amy was too tired for this; she hadn’t slept the night before. “I’m not interested,” she said. “Whatever you’re selling.”

“No,” the woman said. “It’s your dog. She’s yours, right?”

WHO ELSE’S COULD SHE BE? Roxy, kind-hearted rescue, smallish German shepherd, the worst defense imaginable against thieves or crazy people. She stepped toward the woman for a pat on the head.

“She’s sweet,” the woman said, obliging.

“Can I help you?” Amy tugged on Roxy’s leash. Heel, girl. But Roxy was blissed out from the woman’s attention, leaning up against her skinny legs.

“I’m just—I hate to tell you this. I’m sorry—I always hate telling people. But your dog is about to—you see, I’m kind of a pet psychic.” The woman said this gently, rubbing the sweet spot in the middle of Roxy’s bony head. “And I think you need to know that your dog is miserable.”

“Excuse me?” Amy straightened, offended.

“No, I’m sorry—not miserable, exactly. Just, like, kind of lost. Kind of directionless.”

“She’s a dog,” Amy said. “That’s not a way a dog can feel.”

“Actually, it is,” the woman said. “It might sound crazy, but I’ve always had a true connection with animals. I know what they’re thinking. Like their deepest emotions.”

“Okay, but in fact,” Amy said, tugging harder on Roxy’s leash, “that’s impossible.”

“It’s been my curse since I was a child,” the woman said. She smiled ruefully, and Amy could see a swipe of maroon lipstick on her teeth. “Sometimes people think I’m crazy.”

I think you’re crazy , but Amy kept it to herself.

“Anyway, something truly metamorphic is coming for her, but it’s going to be very difficult.

Very heavy. I think she knows it, too,” the woman said.

She switched her massive tote bag to her other arm.

“You can tell by the way she walks, her gait. Something needs to be fixed. Please don’t ignore it. ”

“Nothing needs to be fixed,” Amy said. “She walks fine. When did you even see her walk? We’ve been at the dog park since six-thirty—”

“I’ve been watching you all morning,” the woman said, and this was when Amy blinked.

Run, girl! She must have said it out loud, because Roxy took off like a jet, pulling Amy with her, the leash taut, and even as they ran she checked Roxy’s hips and her gait was fine, thank you, and when they were fifty yards away, the edge of Tompkins Square Park, Amy turned around.

The woman had disappeared.

A bad dream. Insanity. Roxy was panting.

“Roxy,” Amy said. “Roxy girl. What the hell was that?”

She sat down on a bench, and Roxy sat at her feet. (Gently, not in pain). She looked around again: students and commuters and dogs and their owners and joggers. Two cops. She knew it made her a bad liberal but Amy felt better once she saw the cops.

The woman had not reemerged, and Amy thought that this was what a sleepless night could do to a person in middle age. Waking nightmares! Hallucinations!

“You want to go home, Rox?”

Roxy looked at Amy with a cocked eyebrow. She was a dog. Where they went wasn’t up to her.

“Do you?”

Roxy shrugged her body downward, rested her heavy head on her paws.

“Do you feel miserable? Lost? Directionless?”

The dog yawned.

Sometimes after the park Amy and Roxy would walk to Union Square, especially if the Greenmarket was on, or sometimes they would stop for breakfast at Veselka, or sometimes they would go home and Amy would work on whatever small projects she had created for herself for the day.

There was less and less to do, really. She wasn’t teaching anything this semester.

She didn’t have any new writing assignments.

No invitations, no appointments, no openings.

Ferry was at school. She could barely even look at Judd. The cats would be sloshing around in the kitchen sunshine like drunks.

“I kind of want a drink,” Amy said to Roxy. “But I guess it’s too early.”

Still, when they got back to the apartment she checked to see if there was any open Scotch, and there was, and she poured that into the coffee that was in the coffee maker from the day before and she microwaved the two together and glugged in some hazelnut Coffeemate and sat down at the kitchen table and took a sip that was disgusting.

Light streamed in, oppressively, through the wavy casement windows.

Their building had been a factory one hundred years ago—or okay, a sweatshop, immigrant girls producing umbrella frames sixteen hours a day.

But eventually the girls got married and manufacturing moved to the boroughs, and the building survived intact through midcentury abandonment and 1970s squalor before finally succumbing to a bourgeois rehab in the early nineties: brick walls, hardwood floors, original windows and radiators, high ceilings.

In 1994, twelve years before they’d met, Judd had had the foresight to purchase one with his parents’ money.

He’d also had the foresight to purchase a former crack den on Tenth and A, also with his parents’ money, and turn it into Le Coin (pronounced “Le Kwahnh,” in the French way), where crowds still gathered most weeknights and all day weekends to eat oysters and drink champagne.

Amy and Judd had first laid eyes on each other in Le Coin’s sweltering kitchen one Wednesday in November 2006.

She’d come in to apply for a job on the line, and in the way of these things a line cook had no-showed that very morning.

“You can cook?”

The first thing he’d said to her.

“I can,” she said. He handed her an apron and a hairnet and she got to work.

When they got married at City Hall two years later, Ferry and Jorge, the dishwasher, were their only witnesses. They honeymooned at Le Coin, which was where they liked to be anyway.

And over the years his apartment had become their apartment, his child their child, his life her life, his indiscretions her heartbreak.

Her mother had asked her, was she sure? He has so many—tattoos. And Bernstein? Is he—

Yes, Mom, Jewish.

Well, her mother sighed. I do hear they treat their wives nicely.

Amy poured more Scotch into her coffee, wiped some crumbs off the table onto the floor for Roxy to lick up.

Like many restaurant professionals, Judd rarely cooked at home, but still he’d fixed up their kitchen little by little whenever they’d had extra cash: upgrading the stove to a Viking 6 (almost too wide to fit in the freight elevator), installing John Boos butcher block counters and a secondhand La Marzocco espresso maker. She used to love to cook there.

But now, eyeing it through her weariness, Amy saw a half-cocked kitchen that remembered it had once been a sweatshop.

Piles of recycling gathered around the espresso maker, and daisies wilted in a tomato can on the windowsill.

Pet food was scattered about the floors; they were all sloppy eaters in this house.

The kitchen table was scratched from endless breakfasts and craft projects and Ferry’s grade school homework.

The scent of high-octane kitty litter wafted through one door; Judd’s snores wafted through another.

The loud snoring was new. She had read that it could be a sign of heart trouble, or was it that snoring could cause heart trouble?

Judd hadn’t been to the doctor in—years.

Close to a decade. He hadn’t gone even when he promised he’d get that mole checked out, the colonoscopy you were supposed to have at forty-five.

He was bad at promises. Also, he didn’t think he would ever die.

The last time this had happened, four years ago, he had promised her that he would change, that he would never do this again, but—well, bad at promises.

And now, listening to him snore: she wanted to wake him and scream at him, but she had already done that.

What was there to say that she hadn’t said before?

That he could respond to intelligently? What did she want from him anyway?

It was a question he used to ask her all the time.

Her mother used to say that if you couldn’t take things day by day, you should try to take them hour by hour, and if that proved too much you could just take them minute by minute.

Get through this minute, and then the next, and soon you’ll have made it through an hour, then a morning, then a day.

Her mother wasn’t much for good advice, but this nugget had proved useful over the years.

It was 8:12 in the morning. She could make it till 8:13, and then 8:30, and then reassess her life.

Her mother would also have told her not to be an asshole, to grow up and move out, but her mother had died nine years ago on the couch in the tiny Minneapolis house where she’d lived for forty-one years.

(Her brother had found her, peaceful, under a blanket, as if napping.

A Stephen King book on the coffee table, coffee gone cold.

The cat nowhere to be found. Her mother had been seventy-six and deserved the rest.)