"Wonderful!" Robyn gushes, waves to Dumpster Guy. "It's good to see you again, Silas! I hope you've enjoyed the meals I've left you!" Behind her maniacal grin her eyes are flashing.
Whoa! Suddenly Robyn and Corey are in a Genuineness and Generosity contest.
A woman with a baby in a carrier bursts in from the rain, pauses, dripping, on the doormat behind "Silas", and wheels right back outside.
Corey fervently wishes he could follow.
But this is war. As another customer sneaks out, Corey places their order. He will never forgive Sophie (or Robyn) for this.
He will take an extra-long shower tonight.
The Kid
"My friend told me…" said the kid whose nose barely cleared the counter, who stood on tiptoe and levered himself up by his forearms. "…told me I can get stuff here."
Corey hated kids. They were immune to his charm, for reasons that were obvious to me but obscure to him. They annoyed him by telling the truth and asking uncomfortable questions and always needing, needing something that he couldn't give.
Corey was wary. "What kind of stuff? We've got some toys, but they're mostly lame."
"Take a break, Corey," I said, stood up and stretched. When I trotted out from behind the counter, the kid reared back a bit, surprised. I wagged my tail and said, "Don't be afraid. I'm cute, see? I've sniffed you at school."
I bounced around on my one rear leg, trying to keep my balance. I wobbled when my tail got going, which wasn't often, these days.
The boy kept his hands to himself. Looked doubtfully at Corey. "Can I pet your dog?"
"You bet. She loves that. And her name is Poo-bear."
"That's a stupid name," said the boy. "The kids at school call her Sophie."
"Really?" he said. "Sophie?"
I winked at Corey to put him in his place.
The boy rested his hand on my back, then pulled it away. "Why do you keep your leg bent like that?" the boy asked me.
"Because I broke it a long time ago," I said.
"Does it hurt?" he asked, kneeling to inspect it.
"Sometimes," I said. "It hurts most when I feel lonely."
Draping his arms around my neck, he whispered, "My dad is going in the hospital."
I didn't say anything, because what was there to say, and besides, he couldn't Hear me, really. Instead, I let him stroke my forehead and count my toenails and look at my underside to see if I was a Boy or a Girl.
We sprawled on the linoleum. I led him on a behind-the-scenes tour of the shop: under the racks, behind the counter and into the back room. I stuck my head into the broken doily case and showed him the macadamia chocolate chip cookie that I had buried there after receiving it from Corey the day before. The boy and I ate the cookie in awed delight while Corey stepped out for his third chai of the day.
And that night, when I drifted off to sleep with my head nestled into Virgil's bony hip, I felt clean for the first time in a long time.
I had been so wrapped up in adult concerns like getting out of the pound and putting food on the table that I had forgotten what is really important: the little things.
Rent
Since I had taken over purchasing, there was very little merchandise that needed to be hidden in the basement or left in the alley to excite Dumpster Guy's fears.
But I could feel the evil in the basement like a living thing. It breathed sickly air. It throbbed with rage. It howled to be heard.
When I had suggested to Virgil that we remove the Stuff from the basement, he clammed up and his eyes bulged, and that's how I knew: something else was hidden down there, and it was Secret.
Although I had some respect for Virgil, he was still human and therefore complicated. His secret could be anything: Theft? Murder? I never asked him outright because we didn't have that sort of relationship.
Over the years, the sales floor reached max capacity and the excess spilled into the storage room in the back of the shop. Stories in cartons and bags were stacked on shelves and heaped in corners and jumbled in the middle of the floor. By the basement stairs they were piled so high that you couldn't even see the door. And whatever evil lurked down there it would have to get past all those stories to hurt us.
The cowbell clattered while Corey was sweet-talking an angry customer, and a gust of wind from outside brought the scent of Robyn: flowery shampoo, cinnamon rolls and rage. Uh-oh.
Stepping off my bed, I peeked around the edge of the counter. In Robyn's hand was a sheaf of papers.
She saw me and her step faltered.
"What do you want?" I said.
Corey glanced my way, took in the situation. "Sophie!" he called, and gave me a meaningful look.
I groaned (Not growled. There is a difference. A slight difference.) and flopped back onto my bed, pretending to ignore them both, but really I was observing carefully.
Corey did a kind of dance toward Robyn, then back to the dissatisfied customer. Then he gave Robyn his most Genuine grin. Her smile was equally unconvincing.
And in that moment I had an insight. I realized that he wanted everyone to like him, even if they were jerks. No, especially if they were jerks. It was what he ran on. It was his fuel.
But he especially wanted Robyn to like him, not just because she was a jerk, but because she was a flowery and cinnamon jerk.
"Robyn! What can I do for you?" He clapped his hand on the angry customer's back and spun him out the door while simultaneously making it look like a welcoming gesture to Robyn. Wow, he was good.
"Did the new landlord raise your rent, too?" she said.
Corey's eyebrows shot up. The pause was a little too long. I started panting. Couldn't help it. It's something I do when I'm worried. I tried to remember whether Virgil had mentioned a Land Lord. God help us if we were behind on the rent. Since I couldn't read or write checks, I'd always left the bills to Virgil. Now that I thought about it, there was a big pile of mail on Virgil's kitchen table and another heap from the slot in the shop door that I'd shoved behind the naked mannequin next to the book section.
Corey said, "We haven't gotten anything yet."
When he returned from escorting her back to her café, he squatted, steaming chai in hand, and helped me paw through the heap of old mail behind the mannequin. Most of it was junk, according to Corey, and he heaved it into the dumpster out back.
He set aside a handful of letters.
We went up to Virgil's apartment and sniffed over the mail stacked there.
Corey also paged through Virgil's address book and found the number for Virgil's granddaughter, Truffle. According to Corey, it was disturbing that Virgil's phone was disconnected. I set him straight. I explained how there had been a phone in the shop at one time, too, and that Virgil had liberated us from its tyranny.
Corey started to call Truffle on his cell phone, but Virgil got very angry and turned up the volume on The Shopping Network so that Corey couldn't concentrate.
Corey whipped the remote control out of Virgil's hand, powered it off and flung it into the bedroom. I almost ran to fetch it.
I didn't want Corey to call Truffle either. What if she took me back to the Pound?
Corey growled that Virgil needed to get his bills in order or the cable TV might be disconnected. That got our attention.
So we spent the rest of the afternoon making calls on Corey's cell phone and signing checks. Corey drove us to the bank to deposit several ice cream cartons of money.
Corey went down to Latte Love to get us some dinner, and Virgil and I discussed the disturbing turn of events. While we had been minding our business the world had turned against us. The rent increase was astronomical. The new landlord must be trying to force us out. Maybe they had a more lucrative tenant in the wings. A chain store, maybe. Office Depot or something.
We couldn't leave, of course, because of Virgil's secret in the basement.
Corey paid his cousin to come and clean Virgil's apartment. Her cleaning fee cleaned out the cash register.
/>
I accused him of wasting money. He called me a farty old dog.
When she was done, the apartment reeked of bleach, the cupboards overflowed, and the carpet was damp. Virgil had a temper tantrum because the cousin ran the carpet cleaner during a documentary about mermaids. Corey had taken Virgil to Zoom Burger to get him out of the way.
I sniffed the whole place over and kept sneezing. The cousin gave me a dirty look, like I could help it.
Next thing I knew, I was in the tub and she was massaging my crotch with Head & Shoulders and dumping pitchers of urine temperature water on my head. The humiliation was indescribable.
As she was rubbing me down with a bath towel, Virgil and Corey returned. I took the opportunity to slip outside, tumble down the steps and do a Fosbury Flop into the gutter, rubbing gravel and leaves and cigarette butts into my neck fur to cover up the mortifying shampoo smell. A dog could get mauled for smelling like that.
Once I got my scent normalized and ate an apple strudel off the kitchen table I felt better, and life went on pretty much as before, until the day Robyn marched into the shop again.
Mice
Robyn marched into the shop, mouse corpse dangling from a wooden trap, and waved it in our faces.
Rage came off her in ripples. Corey and I were both trapped behind the counter. I made a mental note: build a sales counter escape hatch.
"We caught seven mice last night, and I know for a fact they're coming in through YOUR basement."
"You don't know that," said Corey.
Robyn ignored him. "This could get me put out of business, you asshole. Either poison them or get your lazy dog to catch them or whatever, but if they're not gone in a week, I'm calling the new landlord. With what I'm paying now, there's no way I should have to deal with this."
"I'm not lazy," I said, after she was gone.
"You are, kind of," Corey replied.
That afternoon, Corey started shifting boxes in the back room, to try to get down to the basement.
I lay on the floor where he kept tripping on me, and told him a lot of irrelevant stories. When he started making progress in spite of my efforts, I sent him home and went to talk to Virgil. We needed a strategy.
Otherwise, Corey would go into the basement, and he would let out all the creepy stories and he would find Virgil's Secret.
Honestly, at first, I hadn't even feared The Basement. When my retail career was just taking off, I had been more curious than afraid. But every time I tried to sniff through the gap under the door, Virgil barked at me.
And gradually, I started to fear the basement, too, because I was sure that Virgil had his reasons. Just like Virgil trusted me to certain matters, I trusted his judgment on things: deciding what's scary, handling the Mail and writing checks. It turns out, that was a mistake.
So, even though I knew that his judgment was fading, I still trusted him about the basement. Or maybe I didn't trust him. I trusted his fear, and I worried what would happen to us if the secret of the basement was uncovered.
That night, I plunked myself in Virgil's line of vision from the easy chair to the TV, and I gave him Nelson's glare until he pressed the mute button and said, "What?".
"You have to tell me what's in the basement," I said.
"Why?"
"So that I can protect us."
And then I explained about Robyn and the mice, the Land Lord, and about Corey, who was suddenly on a cleaning spree.
"But they can't do that!"
"They will. They are."
"There are things in the basement, Sophie...You can't just...just...You have to dispose of these things properly."
"Because they're dangerous?"
"It's not that simple. It's...Nothing is that simple. Life is complicated and horrible things happen, but you can't just throw things away because they--"
Suddenly, he had more energy than I'd seen in months. While I watched, he hunted around for his worn deerskin gloves and the white sneakers with the Velcro closures. He searched through drawers for keys, muttering to himself. Then he presented himself for basement duty, fully outfitted, by the hall table. I had to remind him that door opening was his responsibility.
Virgil and I went down to the shop, and we started shuffling boxes. Many of them were too heavy to carry, so we ripped them open and their stories fell out, and then we pushed the stories to the side, but that made piles and more piles that we had to wade through.
Then Virgil yelped and a pile of Stuff teetered. As I jumped out of the way, Virgil just crossed his arms over his head and cowered, and a pile cascaded down on top of him, knocking him over. He lay half-buried, crying and saying, "Sophie, old age is hell."
Well, I wasn't exactly young, either. I was ten, which is seventy in people years. But I didn't just give up any time I got buried.
I dug him out, mostly. Then I lay down by his head and he fondled my ears.
"Sophie," Virgil croaked. "You're a good girl."
A frisson of nostalgia zinged through me. He had never used those words before. Words that He and She had used. I hadn't known we had that sort of relationship.
"The mice did this once before," he said. "Otherwise I would never have checked under the stairs. Why would I? We thought she wandered away."
His eyes closed and the tears slipped from under his lids.
"When I found Helen, the mice had already started to..." he shuddered.
Who was Helen? I sniffed his scalp for clues.
"Sometimes I think you really understand me, Sophie," he said. "Sometimes I think you're the only one."
Then Virgil told himself a story, and I listened, and I filled in the gaps in my mind's eye.
I learned what was really in the basement, and how it had all begun, all those years ago.
Judith Flies
It starts with Virgil's daughter Judith on the night of her prom. The night that is supposed to be magical, but isn't.
She wears the taffeta dress as she lies on her bed, tears streaming down her face, listens to sad songs on the clock radio, and wonders why she is such a loser. Mark Powers hasn't even called. Six o'clock, her classmates are having romantic dinners. Seven o'clock, eight o'clock, dancing. Midnight, running free in the quiet streets. Parked in the dark, fumbling in the back seat. Sunrise comes, and they are all probably sitting on a grassy hillside together, holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
Judith has never been one of those belonging people. But the taffeta dress was supposed to change that. The dress brings out the green of her eyes and shows off her starved-for new figure. Because of the dress, she hoped (until now) that they would see her, really see her, and prom would be the beginning of her real life, her belonging life. Or maybe she fooled herself that for once in her life something magical would happen.
Her real life, she tells herself, the one that everyone deserves, will never happen. And she stays up until dawn weeping.
As the sun inflates outside her bedroom window, in the dirty space between the Steele's garage and the vacant house next door, she can't bear it. Can't bear to think of those empty, unmagical years ahead of her. Of continuing to trudge through life as she has done every day since she can remember. Of clambering over hurdles that others have set, only to find more hurdles and more, with no reward, no finish line in sight.
And what is the point of that?
Before her parents stir in their tiny bedroom across the hall, she creeps from her room, steps into the morning air that nips at her bare shoulders, and down the iron staircase to Longfellow Street.
What does it matter that she is cold? That will end soon enough. She wanders down the cracked sidewalk, brainstorming, and when she sees the overpass, she knows. That is where she will cross over. Or maybe it will just end: all the pain, and trudging, trudging. Or maybe as they say, she will go to hell. But she is already in hell, isn't she? She is very familiar with hell. She will take her chances.
So she kicks off the dyed-to-match satin kitten heels. The ones her mother tho
ught so excessive, on top of the price of the magical dress that Judith begged for. And she claws her way up the chain link fence, the wires biting into her fingers and toes.
She straddles the top, timing the traffic far below on the highway, and when a tractor trailer full of metal pipes puffs out a cloud of black exhaust and surges toward her, she leaps.
At first, she thinks that she has screwed it up like everything else in her life, because the taffeta hem of her skirt catches on the scalloped wire top of the fence. She hangs for a moment, flailing, then the dress tears, tears, and she drops, and she flies, for just a moment, before the truck slams her into the next world.
Somehow the next day, Virgil's wife Helen retrieves the sash of Judith's dress, mottled with burgundy splotches of blood. She steals it when they view the body. But steal, perhaps, is not the right word, because who else would it belong to? Not Judith. Not now that she has become this mangled lump of meat, with the draping sheet meant to protect Virgil and Helen's eyes.
But how could it be more awful? Impossible.
Knowing that your child is dead, that she has probably killed herself and that you didn't even know anything was wrong? No mangled view of blood and meat can make that worse, because that pain is all about your own shortcomings, your own blindness.
And then, the revelations from the locked diary that Virgil breaks open with a kitchen knife. The diary that Virgil secretly devours, trying to figure out what went wrong. Remember, her junior year, when she got so fat, and he made all the poorly concealed remarks about her weight? How her mother cut out the Woman's Day article about the Grapefruit Diet? It wasn't about Judith's weakness for lemon creme sandwich cookies. It was about a baby. A baby born and given away while they sat in bed, Helen doing word searches, Virgil reading novels, refusing steadfastly to talk about the troubles of their hearts.
They thought they were practical. No-nonsense. They thought their daughter was visiting her pen-pal in Indiana for the summer, when in fact she went into labor at a home for unwed mothers, and gave birth to a baby that she came to believe was a punishment.
And the child, their grand-daughter, was given away.
The father? A boy who was willing to relieve Judith of the burden of her virginity for twenty dollars and the understanding that he was not her boyfriend. Because Judith was weird, he said.