Anne Marie Potter

Sequel to “The Last Place He Saw Her”

And now the God-damned dog was wearing his mother’s scarf.

The tornado that carried his mother away took her house as well, and Gavin’s father had come to live with them. The old man never returned to his position at the bank. Instead, he’d spent hundreds of hours driving the rusting, storm-dented Buick from township to township, staring at branches and peering into ditches. The only thing he’d ever come home with was a half-dead dog.

Natural disasters in Pennsylvania normally ran the gamut from floods to fires, with an occasional blizzard or nuclear meltdown. Nobody had expected the F4 that tore the town up by its roots on that Remembrance Day. Iris Wyn had never been found. Two days after the tornado, investigators from three agencies met with Myrin and Gavin in the high school cafeteria turned command center. Stretching an area map across a table where Gavin had once eaten his tuna-fish sandwiches—a table that had served as a morgue gurney the night of the storm—a pair of weather scientists used compasses to map trajectories and make debris predictions. Best guess, his mother’s body was caught in the top of a tree or floating in someone’s livestock pond.

Days of uncertainty had stretched into months of unrelenting grief for Myrin Wyn. It had been hard watching hope die in the old man’s eyes. An arthritic stoop started folding him in half and he grew so thin that bones threatened to poke through rice-paper cheeks. When his heart began to fail, Gavin and Diedre started looking at nursing homes. And then Myrin Wynn had taken a drive down Pennside Road and found a dog in a ditch—a filthy half-crippled skeleton with listless eyes and festering wounds full of burrowing grubs. The vet recommended euthanasia, but the old man had become so agitated that the veterinarian relented and began tweezing out wriggling white larvae and disinfecting wounds. Myrin had refused to leave the dog at the clinic and the nurse sent them home with best wishes and a paper bag full of doggie drugs and vitamins.

The dog recovered and then flourished at the center of Myrin Wyn’s world. Diedre supervised the medication, but it was Myrin who watched the clock and helped the dog swallow pain pills and antibiotics on a strict schedule.  She slept in a soft bed beside the old man’s chair, close enough for his hand to rest on her patchwork of red fur and bald pink skin. Soon she was able to lift her head and began watching him with big brown eyes, the cartilage in her ears twitching at the soft sound of his voice.

“All he does is sit in that room,” Gavin complained to Diedre, “him and that damn dog.”

“That dog is keeping your father alive, Gavin. You should be grateful.”

His wife was right, as usual. His father was no longer a walking corpse. The old man stoop and shuffle was gone and, as long as the dog was close by, he ate decent meals. Before long, old man and mutt were making daily journeys to the mailbox at the end of the driveway, although both needed to stop for an occasional rest. Gavin’s daughters adored the dog. Brit snuck her snacks while Tatie whispered pre-adolescent secrets into her red floppy ears. Baby Iris clipped handfuls of plastic barrettes into the dog’s long red fur and more than once they’d found her using the dog’s soft round belly for a pillow. The dog took it all in stride, seeming to have an affinity for small, energetic things. She was a sweet-tempered, beautiful animal and Gavin loathed her.

He’d hated the dog since the morning he walked past his father’s room and heard “I love you” spoken in the old man’s timid voice. Gavin’s feelings had been fish-tailing ever since. He refused to believe that it was simple jealousy, although he had every right. His children never lit up when they saw him, never threw themselves at his feet.  And his father sure as hell had never said “I love you” to his only child. Gavin doubted if his father had ever said those words to anyone before, and now he was whispering that mushy crap to a damned dog, of all things. Suddenly, Gavin was seeing something soft in the center of his father and it unsettled him.          Everything Gavin had ever learned about being a man—the no-nonsense focus on the important things, the air of strong, silent authority—he learned from watching his father walk through the world. It was funny that Gavin had become a lawyer—a professional mouth-piece—because if he knew anything, it was that real men kept their mouths shut until they were ready to say something important, something world-changing, something God-damn empire-building. Chitchat was for girls, and everyone knows that girls are weaker than boys. Weaker, and not as smart.

Gavin threw himself on the couch, loosened his tie, and kicked his shoes off. Nobody would dare bother him here. It was his den, his bear-cave, his man-cave. No women, children, or dogs allowed. He took another swallow of scotch. He didn’t drink often, so it didn’t take much to get him mullered as a newt. Five fingers into the bottle and his world was disintegrating at the edges.

Who was he kidding? He’d been losing chunks of himself since he fell in love with Renee What’s-her-name at fourth-grade band camp. Every time he thought he had it figured–that whole male/female thing—somebody came along and stuck a fork in his guts. A God-damned spaghetti fork…

About three minutes after he’d met Diedre, he’d known that she was both stronger and smarter than he was and, truth be told, that was why he’d pursued her. He was sure that, given enough time and the right circumstances, she’d fall, and he’d prove what he had known all along—that he was, by nature, superior to any woman…to every woman. He needed to prove it, by God, because if he didn’t, or couldn’t, he’d lose the place he’d so carefully carved out for himself…ruler of all, master of everything.  Men were supposed to be better at everything; it was simply the way of things, the natural order. If he waited long enough, everyone would know that he was king of the whole shebang and Diedre was only playing second fiddle in the Wyn band.  But he’d been waiting for fifteen years and now he had a wife who didn’t need him for anything but sex, three iron-willed daughters that were smart enough to become president, a fly-away mother, and a father who babbled nonsense to furry things. Even the idiotic dog ignored him, for Christ’s sake.

God hated him.

Movement in the doorway caught his attention, a small hand twirling a Barbie doll by its hair. So much for the man-cave. Gavin did his best to look sober and not slur his words. “Hello, Tatie, my Tatie.”

The ten-year-old sucked on her lower lip and regarded him through narrowed eyes. After a moment, she filled her lungs to capacity and yelled, “Mommy, Daddy’s sozzled!”

Gavin watched her run down the hallway toward the kitchen and waited for the inevitable second act. It didn’t take an oracle to predict the next cave-crasher and, sure enough, a minute later, Deidre was standing in the doorway. She didn’t look angry. She looked…beautiful. Even dressed in baggy sweats and carrying the thirteen pounds she’d gained with Iris, she looked like she could step right into a Greek painting. Maybe playing second fiddle to a Goddess wasn’t such a bad deal.

“Where did our daughter learn a word like “sozzled?” he asked, doing his best to look dignified. Hard to do when you’re on a slow slither between chartreuse couch cushions.

“Word Hippo. She and Brit are obsessed.”

Gavin tried to extricate himself from the couch, but only succeeded in spilling his drink. “Seems like only yesterday they were obsessed with boobies and boogers. I suppose we better start saving for medical school.”

“For Tatie, definitely. Brit seems to think that what you do is pretty cool. Although with her personality, I’d be looking for her at the plaintiff’s table.”

Gavin was surprised that his daughter even knew what he did for a living. Surprised, but pleased. “Remind me to retire before that happens. I’m not sure I could survive the humiliation of getting trounced by my own kid.”

Diedre laughed: a soft wind-chime. Gavin remembered the days when she had played the flute in the Drexel Symphony Orchestra, her long blond hair put up with a fancy comb. How, after the concerts, she’d held on to him to keep from falling in her high heels. How she’d burrowed into his overcoat to keep warm during the frigid Philly winters. He hadn’t always been superfluous.

“Mommy?” The voice came from the doorway where all three of their daughters were lined up like little Russian nesting dolls. At the end of the line, like a furry red stepchild, the dog panted and stared. “Iris got a splinter,” Tatie announced, “I think you have to do surgery.”

Little Iris held up the offending digit and sniffled.

“Oh dear,” Diedre said solemnly. “Shall I get out the medical magic wand?”

Three heads nodded in unison, and they left Gavin sitting alone in his man-cave. He missed them immediately. The dog was the last to go, but not before overturning the scotch bottle with a solid thwack of her long red tail.

Then the dog was back, this time with Gavin’s father in tow. The old man pointed at the wet spot on the carpet. “Your bottle tipped over.”

“With a little help from somebody’s tail.”

His father grinned and patted the dog’s head. “Good girl.”

“Dad, I think we should go hunting before the weather turns. Just you, me, and the redhead.” Gavin wasn’t sure why he’d said it. Maybe it was the booze. Maybe it was Diedre’s unspoken reminders that his father was an old man and old men didn’t live forever. Maybe it was the way his mother had left without warning.

His father grinned even wider. “We’d like that, son. We’d like that a lot.”

Bumping over back roads with his old man, dressed in matching camo, Gavin was bitten by nostalgia. “Just like when I was a kid, huh, Dad?”

Myrin Wyn smiled. “As long as we’re cold, wet, and miserable, and don’t manage to kill anything bigger than a mosquito.”

Gavin laughed. “Yeah, we were never very good at this, were we? And I don’t know about you, but I’m too old to sleep on the ground. That’s why I borrowed this little Airstream. It’ll be the perfect size for the two of us.” Sitting between them, the dog whined in a pitch that could have shattered glass. Gavin rolled his eyes. “Okay, okay, it’ll be the perfect size for the three of us.” He could have sworn the mutt was smiling. Really.

A half-hour later, the trio was moving slowly through the gentle slopes and gullies that characterized the Erie Drift Plane. In a month or so, this corner of Pennsylvania would be buried under lake-effect snow, but today was glorious. Morning was moving across the woods, briefly highlighting silver maple and yellow-poplar in soft October sunlight. Even the jo-pye weed and bull thistle looked delicate and regal in the autumn cabaret. After the tornado, people watched every dark cloud with anxious eyes, but days like today made people want to trust God again.

“I don’t suppose you know anything about hunting birds?” Gavin asked the dog.

She stared up at him with brown liquid eyes and wagged her tail.

“That’s what I thought,” Gavin said. For the first time, he noticed that she was graying around the muzzle. He’d had to help her out of the truck, but he thought it was because she’d been sick and weak for so long. But now he realized that the dog was just old. Please hold on, he thought. My father couldn’t stand it if you died. His heart would fall right out of his chest. Gavin had spent a lifetime battling sentimentality. It was so weak, so female. These days, though, his mental filter was riddled with holes and the thoughts clobbered him with bouts of sadness he could barely endure.

As they stepped from field to forest, things grew dark, and it was easy to think about the end of the world. The tornado had saved its wrath for town and there hadn’t been a forest fire in the area since 1922.  Nothing held the vines and sucker trees in check and overhead was a tangle of final-growth vines dying to sticks. Poison ivy climbed trunks and competed with the oak and maple leaves for brightest patch of red. The pines and hemlocks were still dropping cones and the chipmunks and tree squirrels were moving their fattening bodies from pile to pile. As Gavin helped his father over logs and down embankments, he thought about how time changed lives. He hadn’t touched his father since he was a little boy—a big hand holding a little hand to cross the street—and now they were holding hands again, a beefy hand with manicured and polished nails holding a Halloween decoration—a skeleton hand sheathed in paper Mache.

It had been a wet year and the forest floor was thick with rotting leaves and logs. The wild grape and blackberry brambles were still hanging on to their leaves and the poison sumac was turning an eye-searing orange. Gavin had bought the acreage from a farmer who had run Herefords on the property for thirty years.  The herd had left mud and manure slicks running down the creek beds into the stream. The last of the cows had gone to auction long ago, but their sharp, heavy hooves had cut permanent paths down to the water. A good three inches ran over the fossil-pocked shale in the streambed. Gavin watched the minnows dart and the water striders skitter across the surface of small pools.  He wondered if his daughters might enjoy an occasional afternoon down here.  Maybe they’d like to look for crawdads and newts. Maybe they’d just enjoy spending the day with their father.

They had a little while before the impending darkness would turn roots and stumps into leg-breakers, but his father looked tired. It was a good thing the mini-fridge was stocked with cold-cuts, because they hadn’t fired a shot, much less bagged dinner. The dog had flushed a rabbit and, with great contentment, sat down to watch it nibble grass. Empty-handed, the trio made their way back to the trailer and by sundown were staring at a campfire, drenched in mosquito repellent and utter laziness.

Gavin wasn’t sure how he’d let it happen. He couldn’t have been more surprised if a squirrel had pointed a rifle at him. Thinking about where he could take his family on vacation next summer—they’d never been to Yellowstone—he was absent-mindedly running his hands through the dog’s silky fur. When she moved in and licked his chin and cheek, he said “Yes, yes…I love you, too.”  Unable to believe that his own mouth had uttered such mush, Gavin looked around to see if anyone had heard him. In the dim firelight he saw the awful truth—the dog and his father were both smiling at him. Really.

Ann Marie Potter currently lives in the beautiful state of Wyoming where she watches the wind blow, the sky snow, and the deer play—and poop—in her front yard. Her fiction has appeared in The Storyteller, The Meadow, Peauxdunque Review, and Literally Stories.