Seventeen
“Don’t get attached because we’re not keeping it,” I said, as the twins dropped to their knees and threw their arms around
the dog’s neck.
“Oh, Mommy,” Alice began. Phoebe finished her sentence, “We love her so much.”
“Don’t start! We are not keeping it,” I repeated, feeling like an ogre, but an ogre without the bandwidth to care for a high-maintenance pet.
The dog thumped its tail in delight as Phoebe draped herself over its back. “Everyone at school has big families,” Phoebe
said. “Can’t we at least have one dog?”
“Johnica has seventy-two cousins!” Alice said.
“And her mom has like three sister wives,” I added, under my breath.
“Only two,” Phoebe said. “And they live across the street.”
Alice looked concerned our conversation was veering off-track. “What we’re trying to say is we miss Grandma Lulu. So much.
No one else in the whole world can do a Kermit voice like she could.”
“I miss her too,” I said, my voice catching.
“And we think having a dog could help,” Alice said.
Clearly, the girls were yearning for things I hadn’t been able to provide—a big extended family, or at the very least more
friends around. A dog did not seem like too much to ask. Yet all I could think about was how if we kept the dog, it might
run away or get hit by a car. I didn’t want my girls to go through that sort of loss. I didn’t think I could take it myself.
With the twins busy throwing a blanket over the dog and pretending it was a ghost, I opened Connor’s packages and letters in the kitchen, hoping for an Ipsy box full of clues instead of makeup.
Instead I found payday loan offers, a round blanket that looked like a giant tortilla, and a T-shirt that said ASK ME ABOUT MY COCK.
Trial and error revealed that if the wearer pulled the hem over his head, it looked like he was a rooster. And he got to
show off his abs. A nifty optical illusion for the strip club.
Connor’s phone dinged. Another voice memo from Ralphie the Lizard—which I couldn’t listen to unless I used Connor’s face to
unlock his cell. The last thing I wanted to do was climb into a playhouse with a corpse. But having kids on my own had taught
me how to do things that terrified me.
First, I went to my bedroom closet and stuffed Connor’s teal vest into a Hefty Cinch Sak. I’d give anything to be able to
remember how I ended up wearing that vest! The twins didn’t even look up when I told them I was taking out the garbage. Instead
I trudged through the fresh snow of the backyard, dragged the playhouse doors open, and crawled inside. Now that I’d been
in Connor’s house and had eaten one of his ice cream sandwiches, it was even harder to see his stiff, cold, crumpled body.
I pushed the trash bag into the far corner of the cramped space and leaned in to examine the lump on Connor’s forehead—likely
caused by Salma Hayek whacking him with a beer bottle. A decent egg, but it hardly looked fatal. I couldn’t bring myself to
yank his pants further down to check out the stab wound on his thigh, but the relatively small bloodstain told me all I needed
to know there. Next, I unbuttoned his shirt to examine the stab wound on his chest. It was partially obscured by dried blood,
but didn’t look deep enough to have killed him either. Clearly I was missing something.
I crawled out and headed toward the house, then stood shivering by the sliding glass door with Connor’s unlocked phone. I
hit play on the voice memo. “Confirm you can meet Baylee at Burgdorf Saturday at one for the handoff. If I don’t hear your
voice, she’s not going.”
There was no chance Connor would be at Burgdorf, but I couldn’t exactly send Ralphie a voice memo from Connor telling him that. Hurriedly, I checked to see if any other messages had come in.
Natty Lite: Let me know when we can meet up. It’s urgent.
I texted back: sorry, man. out of town.
In the living room, Alice and Phoebe were wrestling the dog’s hind legs into a tutu. Instead of being annoyed, the pit bull
beamed.
“Her name is Little Sister!” Phoebe and Alice yelled in unison. It was spooky to see them actually agreeing on something.
A rooster crowed and the dog barked. My mom had been pretty tickled when she’d installed that rooster doorbell. I threw open
the door, ready to tell the person on the other side I needed organized religion like a bear needs a prom dress.
But it was Miranda Carson, looking stylish in a fur-trimmed coat. The blood in my veins turned to Slushee. Had she come to
investigate my unfit parenting for CPS? A loud thunk sounded behind me, followed by a wail. Alice had tripped over the dog.
“Is now a bad time?” Miranda asked, but she was already sailing into my living room. You have to welcome in a vampire, but
former-high-school-cheerleaders-turned-CPS-case-workers are apparently a type of creature who can cross the threshold into
your home with no invitation whatsoever.
The dog barreled at Miranda. Everything went into slow motion as I experienced the sort of terror you can only feel when your
foster pit bull is about to attack a Child Protective Services worker.
But Little Sister stopped short at Miranda’s feet, spun in a circle, let out a joyful bark, and looked up at her with adoring
eyes. Jesus, Mary, and Joan Rivers, if I had a Xanax, I’d take it.
Miranda stared at the dog.
“Her name is Little Sister,” Phoebe said, running over and hugging Little Sister’s midsection territorially. “If you think she’s your dog, you’re wrong. She’s ours.”
“That’s not my dog,” Miranda said, staring at the pup as if trying to place it. “But I’ve met a dog before that looked exactly
like that one.”
The twins beamed. The fact that Miranda was not here to reclaim Little Sister was clearly enough to win them over.
“When we saw you before, we didn’t like you,” Phoebe said. “But you seem nicer today. Even though you snatch people’s children.”
“Phoebe!” I said. “That’s not polite.” I made a mental note to talk to her about how it was sometimes important not to tell
annoying people how annoying they are.
“I help keep children safe,” Miranda said, but she didn’t seem ruffled. She’d likely heard worse. She glanced around the living
room, taking in my mom’s odd decor. The disco ball dangling from the ceiling; the window ledges lined with fake food; the
avocado tree my mom had named Frank Sinatra; the couch draped with her DIY tie-dye slipcover; the walls hung with David Hockney
prints she’d bought at a gallery show in LA.
“This was your mom’s place, right?” Miranda said.
I nodded, and tried to push down my grief. Seeing Miranda made time collapse. I was a junior in high school again, complaining,
“Why couldn’t I have been born a Miranda Carson?” But my mom said I was perfect. In reality I was funny, awkward, weird, dancing
and sweating fiercely in my Mr. Potato Pants mascot suit, just to make my fellow students laugh—until I was defrocked because
Miranda hid her vodka in my duffel bag.
“Your mom was always so cool and quirky,” this middle-aged Miranda said, and for a second I thought I detected an unexpected
note of jealousy in her voice.
“She sure was,” I said.
“I remember one time both our moms were around to pick us up at the end of practice. My mom was starting in on me for not being crisp enough on some stupid cheerleading move and your mom said, ‘Miranda, honey, I thought you looked just great out there.’” Miranda’s eyes gleamed and for a second I thought she’d start to cry.
Instead, she set her purse down on my couch, and said, “Any chance you’d like to offer me a cup of tea?
” She didn’t look like she was here to document my parenting fails for CPS, but perhaps it was a sneak attack.
Absolutely not, I wanted to say. But instead I went to turn the kettle on.