THAT NIGHT, IN ONE of the motor courts that Walter preferred, places where cash and men with young girls didn’t seem to excite anyone’s curiosity, he asked if her period was finished.
“Yes,” she said, her stomach suddenly queasy, drawing her knees to her chest. So far, he had not touched her, not in that way. So far. But maybe that was because he had thought she wasn’t a woman yet, and therefore off-limits.
“So I can put these back in the truck for a while?” He held up the box of sanitary pads.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“A month.” She paused, not wanting to admit the next part. “Sometimes more.”
A month. Would he really keep her for another month? Did she have a month’s worth of stories about Charley and Mr. Steinbeck? She hoped so.
15
I CAN READ YOU LIKE a book is not generally a generous expression. It is a criticism, an accusation of naïveté, a suggestion that someone is trying to manipulate another person, but failing. Similarly, I can see right through you has a sinister feel to it. Or, even: I’d know you anywhere.
Yet in a long and happy relationship, that kind of transparency and instant recognition has an endearing comfort. So when Peter arrived home one evening, actually in time for supper with the children, and announced he was ready for the family to get a dog, Eliza had no problem discerning his motives. Peter had always opposed having a dog for any number of reasons—dirt, hair, the possibility that Albie would prove to be allergic. But his primary objection had been that Eliza would become the dog’s caretaker, although she had insisted she wouldn’t care. Now, he announced at dinner, in front of the children, that he had changed his mind, which left Eliza feeling a little sandbagged. What if she no longer wanted a dog? If Peter could change his vote from no to yes, why wouldn’t he check first to see if she had changed hers?
“A real dog,” Peter said.
“What do you mean by ‘real’?” asked Iso, the young lawyer. She was waiting, Eliza realized, for the penny to drop, one of the few Briticisms she allowed herself. She preferred it to the idea of the other shoe dropping.
“Not one of those toy things, that you carry around in your arms. And not a terrier of any kind. They’re too high-strung. A Lab, or…a German shepherd.”
“I don’t like the idea of purebred dogs, when there are so many dogs in kennels waiting to be adopted,” Eliza said, even as Iso cried “German shepherd” and Albie countered with “Black Lab!”
“No, the shelter is fine, that’s a good idea,” Peter decreed. “Mixed breeds are healthier and smarter. Just as long as it’s a real dog. We’ll go Saturday.”
That was three days away, and intrepid Iso quickly learned that they could search the local kennel’s inventory online, which was providential, as Albie noted, “Because we can talk about the dogs without hurting their feelings.” As Peter pored over the children’s choices in the evening, eliminating some, approving others, Eliza began to realize what he meant by a real dog. Big. Peter wanted them to have a big dog. And she began to wonder: Had the lawyer, Blanding, told Peter something more about Walter or Barbara LaFortuny? Was that the penny that had yet to drop?
IN THE END, FOR ALL their careful study and rational discussion, they allowed a dog to choose them. Reba, a shaggy, sad-eyed mix of terrier and shepherd, had studied them with the resignation of a dog who never gets picked. She had been in the kennel, a no-kill one, for a record eighteen months. Peter demurred—she wasn’t small, but she wasn’t big or intimidating—and Iso was casually cruel about the dog’s lack of charisma. But Eliza and Albie became passionate, intense champions and—after a surprising amount of paperwork and references—Reba came to live with them a week later.
“Can we at least rename her?” Iso asked. “Everyone will think we named her after that actress on that silly sitcom.”
It took Eliza a second to sort out that Reba McEntire, forever in her head as a country singer, was apparently on a sitcom these days. Eliza wondered if Iso had any memory of the fact that, back when she was a baby in Texas, Eliza had developed a bizarre fondness for CMT, the station that played country music videos, and she had liked Reba quite a bit. There had been a whole series of videos that seemed to tell a little story, about a man and a woman who circled each other in some romance novel setting, possibly one of those islands off the coast of South Carolina. And she had been a doctor, or some such, who met the love of her life in Guatemala, or someplace, but they didn’t end up together, and somehow that was okay. Madonna in the 1980s, Reba in the 1990s—who was her musical role model now, as the first decade of the new century drew to an end? Eliza wasn’t sure she could even name a current pop star. Not on the basis of her work, at any rate. She knew, in spite of herself, which one had been beaten by her boyfriend, and the one who had been arrested for kleptomania, and the one who kept going to rehab. But don’t ask her what they sang.
“No,” Eliza told Iso, with a vehemence that caught them both off guard. “You don’t just go around changing people’s names.”
“I did,” Iso pointed out. “You did.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were Elizabeth, when you were younger, and then you decided you wanted to be Eliza.”
They were in the backyard with Albie, watching Reba adjust to her new life. She didn’t seem to trust it. She would walk a few feet away from them, then turn her head back toward them as if to ask: Is this allowed? Even her sniffs seemed tentative, halfhearted.
Eliza caught herself before blurting out: “How do you know that?” After all, there was no reason to be defensive about shortening her name. Instead she said: “I’ve been Eliza so long, I sometimes forget I was ever Elizabeth.”
“It’s right there, on your driver’s license.”
True enough. Only—“What were you doing with my driver’s license?”
Iso blushed. “I wanted a breath mint the other day, so I looked in your purse.”
“I don’t keep breath mints in my billfold, Iso.” Waiting her out, not accusing her, but not letting her think that she was getting away with anything, either.
“And I needed a dollar. A girl in my class is having a birthday and we’re all going to pitch in a dollar to buy her a gift.”
“A dollar?” Come on, Iso. Lie big or go home.
“There are twenty-five kids in my class. We’re getting her an iTunes gift certificate.”
“And will this happen every time someone has a birthday?”
Iso was caught. Her daughter, too, could be read like a book, at least for now. Eliza thought about her own parents, how much they must have known about the little secrets she carved out for herself, how indulgent they had been. They had probably thought: What’s the harm, in her dressing up like Madonna when we’re not around? What does it matter if she likes to cut through the woods to go to the fast-food places along Route 40? At least she’s getting plenty of fresh air and exercise. They had been right, yet they had been wrong, too. There was harm, everywhere.