Chapter 7
MAGNOLIA
My mother called while I was elbow-deep in a fifty-pound bag of kibble, which was exactly the wrong moment and also the only kind of moment my mother ever called in, because Audrey Bennett did not believe in waiting for a good time.
A good time was a thing other people sat around hoping for. She'd built an entire life on the principle that you called when you had two minutes, said the true thing, and got off the phone before either party could ruin it.
"You're not answering with your hands," she said, by way of hello. "I can hear the kibble."
"I'm putting it on speaker. Hi, Mom."
"Don't get dog food on your phone, Magnolia, those things cost more than my first car." A pause, the click of a pen—she was at her desk, then, between patients, the way she lived most of her waking life.
My mother ran a cardiology unit at a hospital in Atlanta, a department she'd been quietly rebuilding for the better part of four years into something that got written up in journals I didn't understand.
She'd spent her marriage giving her career away in pieces, one base at a time, and she'd spent the years since taking it back with both hands.
I was proud of her in a way that had its own ache in it, because the woman she'd become was so obviously the woman she'd always been, just finally allowed.
"How was the weekend with your father?” she asked.
And there it was. Not how are you, not how are the dogs. How was the weekend with your father, asked in the careful, level voice she used for things she'd decided not to feel too much about in front of anyone, including herself.
"Good," I said. "He bought me a grill."
"Of course, he did."
"Unsolicited. The size of a Buick."
"Of course, it is." But there was something under the dryness, something that turned the corner of it soft. "Is he eating? He doesn't eat right when he's on his own, he never has, he'll stand at the counter and call a sleeve of crackers dinner."
"He looked good, Mom."
"Is he sleeping?" A beat. "His knee. Did he say anything about the knee?"
I shifted the phone and looked out at the round pen, where Walt was working a young dog, and I thought about how to answer a question that wasn't the question.
Because my mother did not ask after a man she'd divorced years ago the way you ask after an ex.
She asked the way you ask after someone you still, against your own better judgment and all the paperwork, kept a room for.
She asked detailed questions. Knee questions.
Crackers questions. The questions of a physician, sure—but also the questions of a woman who had loved a man enough to leave him, because staying would have meant disappearing, and who had never once stopped wanting to know whether he was warm and fed and sleeping through the night.
"He's good, Mom," I said, gently, because gentle was the only way to hold a thing that fragile. "He misses you. He'd never say it. But the house in Georgia's too quiet and he drove four hours to assemble a grill I didn't ask for, so."
The line went still. For a second I thought I'd overstepped—my mother did not invite people into the locked rooms, not even me, not even on a good day.
"He could move closer to a real hospital," she said finally, lightly, like it was nothing, like it was a thought she was having for the first time and not one she'd clearly turned over more than once.
"That base clinic isn't going to catch anything.
If something happened to that knee, or worse—he's an hour from anyone who could—" She stopped.
Started again, brisk, the door swinging shut.
"Anyway. That's his business. Eat a vegetable, Magnolia, you sound pale. "
"You can't hear pale."
"I can hear everything. I'm your mother and a doctor, it's a double curse. I love you. Go feed your wolves."
She was gone before I could say it back, the way she always was, leaving me standing in a kennel holding a phone.
I’d think about it later. I had a visitor coming.
She pulled up twenty minutes after, and the first thing I noticed was the car—not flashy, but the expensive kind of not-flashy, a deep gray SUV that sat too solidly on its wheels, the way vehicles do when there's more under the panels than there needs to be.
The second thing I noticed was the woman who got out of it, because she got out of it already talking.
"Okay, this place is a dream, I drove past the turn twice, there's no sign, are you Maggie?
You're Maggie. I'm Claire." She had a firm handshake and a journalist's eyes, quick and warm and missing nothing, taking in the stable, the round pen, me, the dog hair on absolutely everything, all in one sweep.
"Claire Dixon. I called about the fostering thing.
I know I sound insane on the phone, I get told that a lot, I do a podcast, my whole job is sounding slightly insane into a microphone. "
“Yeah,” I said, shaking her hand and liking her immediately. "I'm Maggie."
"This is going to sound like a line, but—" She looked around again, and this time the brightness in her face dropped half a register into something more real.
"My show's true crime. The Unseen. I chase the ugly stuff—cover-ups, the people counting on nobody looking.
And a while back, I started pulling a thread on what happens to some of these dogs after their contracts run out.
Where they end up. Who's making money cutting corners on animals the government already paid to train and then washed its hands of.
It was supposed to be a story about a contractor.
" Her jaw tightened around whatever she'd actually found at the end of that thread.
"I could not stop thinking about the dogs themselves.
This whole population of—of soldiers, basically.
Who served and got hurt and came home, and there's no letter, no medal, nobody at the gate.
The story moved on. They didn't." She caught herself, laughed at herself, a woman well aware of her own runaway heart.
"Sorry. I came to foster a dog, not to read you my notes. "
"You can do both," I said. "Most people who last in this do both."
I walked her down the aisle. She was good with them—didn't reach through the gates, didn't baby-talk, let them come to her, which told me she'd either done her reading or had decent instincts or both.
She slowed at Max's kennel and went quiet in a way most people don't have the sense to.
Max was at his door, where he lived now, but he'd turned his vigil into something less like grief and more like a job—watching for the world to bring him something to do.
"That one's not available," I said. "He's mine, in the ways that matter. Still putting himself back together."
"What happened to him?"
"He lost his person." I didn't elaborate. She didn't ask me to, which I noticed and which I think she noticed me noticing.
It was the dog in the next run that got her.
Banjo—a shepherd mix with one ear that worked and one that flopped, a wash-out who'd never settled enough to certify and had bounced through three homes that found him too much.
He wasn't broken the way Max was broken.
He was just too big and too anxious and too loud with his love, the kind of dog who knocks you down trying to get into your lap, the kind nobody picks because everybody wants the easy one.
Banjo took one look at Claire and lost his entire mind with joy. Claire crouched down in her good clothes on a concrete floor and let a sixty-pound disaster wash her face.
That was that. I've watched it happen a hundred times. The dog picks. We just do the paperwork.
"Him," she said, from under the dog. "I want him. Is it him? It's him."
"It's a foster, to start," I said, smiling. "We do a home visit first. Make sure the space is right, the fence is sound, everybody under your roof is on board. I come out, I look around, I meet the family. Standard."
Something flickered across her face—fast, there and gone, a person recalculating.
"The family," she repeated. "Right. That might be—my house is a lot.
There are a lot of people in and out. My husband's family is—big.
Complicated. Protective." She said the word protective with a wryness that suggested it carried more freight than she was going to unpack for a stranger in a kennel.
"But the fence is good. The fence is very good. We do not have a fence problem."
"I'll bring my clipboard and my best behavior," I said.
"Bring the clipboard. Skip the best behavior.
I like people better when they don't bother.
" She stood, brushing fur off knees that were going to need more than brushing, and looked at me with that quick, warm scrutiny again.
I had the brief, unsettling sense of being read by someone who read for a living.
"You're new here. Charleston, I mean. You've got the look. "
"What look?"
"Six months in, still half a stranger, doing fine and lonely as hell about it.
" She said it without an ounce of cruelty, the way you'd point out that someone had something on their collar.
"I had it, too, when I landed. This town's a closed oyster.
Takes a crowbar." She pulled out her phone, fired off something one-handed.
"I'm putting my number in your system as the foster contact, but I'm also putting it in your actual phone, because you're going to come do my home visit and then you're going to stay for a glass of wine.
That's not a request, that's how I do things. Ask anyone."
I didn't have it in me to say no, and I didn't want to.
She loaded back into the too-solid SUV. Then, she was gone in a haze of oyster-shell dust, off to whatever big, complicated, protective life she went home to, leaving me with a foster file half-started and the strange, light feeling of having made a friend by ambush.
I pulled out my phone to log her number.
And, the way I did now, the way I hated that I did now, my thumb went first to the other thread. The brave little message.
Delivered. Still just Delivered. Never Read.
Though that meant nothing, and I knew it meant nothing, and I told myself so for the hundredth time.
A man like Cash would have his read receipts shut off—of course, he would; a man who lived the way he lived didn't broadcast when he'd seen a thing, didn't hand anyone that much.
The message could have been read a dozen times over and I'd never know it from this side of the screen.
Delivered was all his phone would ever give me.
It wasn't a no. It wasn't anything. It was just the one word the machine would allow, and I'd built a whole cathedral of meaning on top of it, anyway.
I looked at it for one second longer than was good for me, at that one-sided word holding up the whole weight of everything I'd been dumb enough to hope. Then, I did the new thing, the thing I was practicing—I put it away.
Doors were opening. I could feel it. I just couldn't see, yet, what was on the other side of any of them.
I clocked out, and I drove home to my wolves.