“Everything looks good,” I said honestly, my eyes scanning down all the egg-and-meat combination options. I had been running so late for work every day this week, I’d usually been eating a granola bar as I drove.
“You folks set?” A middle-aged waitress, glasses on a chain around her neck, approached our table, her pencil already poised above her order pad. She was wearing a name tag on her red uniform T-shirt that read ANGELA.
My father ordered a short stack of the blueberry pancakes and a side of bacon, and I got what I’d always ordered, the Pocono Omelet, which was distinguished by the fact that it mostly contained eggs and different kinds of meat and cheese, without any vegetables whatsoever.
Angela nodded and wrote down our order as she walked away. And I looked across the table at my dad and felt suddenly on the spot.
It wasn’t that my father and I had never eaten together, just the two of us. We had certainly gotten ice cream together more times than I could count. But it was rare for it to be just the two of us at a meal, and, frankly, to have his undivided attention at all—no siblings, no BlackBerry constantly buzzing. I wondered if this was the time to do what I’d been thinking about ever since I’d gone with him to the hospital—the moment that I should tell him I loved him. But just as I thought this, Angela reappeared with her coffeepot and poured cups for both of us, and I felt that the opportunity had passed.
My dad took a sip of his coffee and made a face after he swallowed, widening his eyes and raising his eyebrows at me. “Wow,” he said, deadpan. “So I don’t think I’ll be sleeping for the next week or so.”
“Strong?” I asked. I squeezed some cream into it and stirred in some sugar as my dad nodded. I liked coffee, as long as I could get it to taste as little like coffee as possible. I took a tentative sip, and even with my additions, could taste how strong the coffee was. “Well, now I’m awake,” I said, adding in some more cream, partially to make it less strong and partially because the squeezy bottle just made it fun.
Silence fell between us for a moment, and I found myself racking my brain for conversation topics. I glanced down at my paper placemat and saw that it was printed with ads for local businesses, and in the center was something billed as the Diner’s De-Lite! It had a word scramble, a Sudoku puzzle, and a five-question quiz. I looked at the quiz more closely and realized it wasn’t asking trivia questions. Instead, it was called The Dish! and was a list of personal questions—What did you want to be when you grew up? What’s your favorite food? What’s your best memory? Where’s your favorite place to travel? It seemed like it was a get-to-know-your-table-companion game. Or maybe you were supposed to guess the answers for the other person and compare—there weren’t any instructions.
I looked up and saw that my dad was also reading his placemat. “What do you think?” he asked, nodding down at it. “Should we give it a whirl?”
By the time our food arrived, we’d solved the word scramble and the Sudoku puzzle. My dad dug into his pancakes as I took a bite of my omelet. I tried to concentrate on the cheese-and-meat extravaganza I was currently experiencing, but my glance kept returning to the five-question quiz. As I read the questions again, I realized I didn’t know any of my father’s answers. And even though he was sitting across from me, adding more syrup to his blueberry waffles and tapping his coffee cup for a refill, I knew—even though I hated to know it—that at some point, some point soon, he wouldn’t be around to ask. So I needed to find out his answers to these questions—which seemed somehow both utterly trivial and incredibly important.
“So,” I said, pushing my plate a little off to the side and looking down at question one, “what is your favorite movie?” I realized I knew the answer to that as soon as I’d asked it, and together we said, “Casablanca.”
“You got it,” my dad said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe that none of my progeny have seen it. It is, from first frame to last, a perfect movie.”
“I’ll see it,” I promised. I’d said this to him a lot in the past when he’d started giving me a hard time for not having seen it. But I meant it now.
“Although,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s probably better to see it on the big screen. That’s what I’ve always heard. Never gotten the chance to see it that way, myself, though.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “You know the plot, right?”
“Sure,” I said quickly, but not, apparently, fast enough.
“So it’s the dawn of World War II,” he said, settling back in his chair, “and we’re in unoccupied French Morocco….”
By the time we turned down Dockside, I was thoroughly full and had heard most of the plot of Casablanca. He was now waxing nostalgic about the music when something at the foot of our driveway caught my eye. “Dad!” I yelled, my voice sharp, and he stepped on the brake, slamming me forward against my seat belt and then back against the seat again.
“What?” he asked, looking around. “What is it?”
I looked down from my window and saw the dog, who was basically doing the canine equivalent of stalking, sitting in the middle of our driveway. “It’s that dog,” I said. I got out of the car and shut my door. He looked particularly mangy in the bright sunlight, and I wondered, for the first time, collar notwithstanding, whether he actually had a home to go to. He wagged his tail as I approached, which surprised me, since the only interactions I’d had with him had not been friendly ones. Maybe this dog had an amazing capacity for forgiveness—or, more likely, a really short memory.
I reached my fingers under his collar and pulled him aside, out of the way of the car, and my father drove on past us.
“Is that the same dog from before?” my dad asked, and I nodded as I walked toward the house. As I’d been expecting, the dog followed, looking so thrilled to find himself on the promised land, the driveway, that he was practically high-stepping.
“Yeah,” I said. The dog stopped when I stopped, sitting at my feet, and I bent down and looked at his tag. I was hoping the scratched gold disk might give me an address or phone number where I could finally deposit him. But the tag read only MURPHY. This rang a bell with me for some reason, but I couldn’t remember why. “Same one.”
“No tags?” my father asked, bending down slowly and wincing a little as he did so, until he was crouched in front of the dog.
“No address or owner,” I said, “just a name. Murphy.” Upon hearing this, the dog stopped scratching himself and sat up at attention, tail thumping on the ground again.
“Hey there,” my dad said softly. He rested his hand on the dog’s head and scratched him between the ears. “Between you and me,” he said, almost confidentially to the dog, “you don’t smell too good.”
“So what should we do?” I asked. I knew, vaguely, mostly from TV shows, about shelters and vets’ offices, but had never had any experience with them myself.
“Well,” my dad said, pushing himself to his feet a little unsteadily, “I think the first thing is to talk to the neighbors, make sure he’s not just someone’s pet who wandered away. And then if nobody claims him, I think there’s an animal shelter in Mountainview.”
“What’s going on?” Gelsey asked as she stepped onto the porch, not wearing her tennis or her dance clothes, but instead, a pink sundress with sandals, her hair loose and hanging around her shoulders. Her eyes widened when she looked at the dog. “Did we get a dog?” she asked, her voice raising excitedly on the last word, making her sound actually twelve for once, and not twelve-going-on-twenty-nine.
“No,” my father and I said together.
“Oh,” Gelsey said, her face falling.
“I should get to work,” my father said, turning to head inside. He was still working on his case, the FedEx truck still arriving with files from his office. The deliveries were no longer happening every day, but had gone down to two or three times a week. My dad had also taken to closing his laptop screen if any of us leaned in for a look, fueling Warren’s speculation that he was also spending a lot of time of this mys
tery project of his. “Can you handle this, Taylor?” he asked, nodding down at the dog. The dog was now scratching his ear with his back paw, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his fate was being discussed.
“Sure,” I said, even though I would have very much preferred someone else handle it, as my experience with dogs had been pretty much limited to watching Top Dog. I started to leave, to begin the process of talking to the neighbors, when I caught a glimpse of my sister still standing on the porch. When I was her age, I rarely just hung around the house. I always had something going on with Henry or Lucy. But, in fairness, Gelsey hadn’t been here since she was little, and she wasn’t the greatest at making friends. I glanced at the house next door and remembered the girl I’d seen. “Gelsey, come with me,” I called to her. “And bring the cookies.”
chapter seventeen
WE HEARD THE ARGUMENT BEFORE WE MADE IT TO THE FRONT steps. It was impossible not to hear it—there was just a screen door, and the words carried all the way out to the gravel of the driveway, where Gelsey, the dog, and I all paused.
“You knew what this would do!” a woman’s voice, shaking with anger, rang out. “I told you back when we were undercover. You’ve killed Sasha with this, you heartless bastard!”
I looked at the front door again, then took a small step in front of my sister. Undercover? Who had ended up next door to us? “I’m not sure,” I said quietly, starting to take a step away. “Maybe—”
“You can’t blame this on me!” a man’s voice rang out, sounding equally angry. “If you’d done what you were supposed to in Minsk, we wouldn’t be here!”
The woman gasped. “How dare you bring up Minsk!” she yelled. “It’s just…” Silence fell, and then, sounding perfectly calm, she said, “I don’t know. It’s a little too much, I think.”
Gelsey frowned at me, and I just shook my head, totally lost, but thinking that there might be a better time for us to ask these people if they were missing a dog. And we didn’t even have the oatmeal raisin cookies with us. When we went to bring them, my mother had told us she’d tossed them out after a week when it became clear they were never going to be eaten. “Let’s come back later,” I said, taking another step away. Gelsey tugged on the dog’s collar, using the makeshift leash—a length of pink satin ribbon, the kind she used for her pointe shoes.
“Hey there!” I glanced up and saw a woman standing in the doorway on the front porch. She looked like she was in her mid-thirties, and was dressed casually, in jeans and a T-shirt that read IN N OUT. She had long, pale blond hair and shielded her eyes from the sun. “What’s up?”
“What’s going on?” a guy came to stand next to her, smiling when he saw us and raising a hand in a wave. He was African-American and looked around the woman’s age. He was dressed almost identically, except that his T-shirt read ZANKOU CHICKEN.
“We, um,” I said, taking a step forward, looking at them closely, still trying to make sense of the argument I’d heard. They didn’t look like spies. But really good spies probably didn’t. “Had a question. But if this isn’t a good time…” They just stared at me, looking blank. “It sounded like you might have been in the middle of something,” I tried to clarify. “I didn’t want to disturb.” They still were just staring, so I prompted, “Minsk?”
“Oh!” The woman burst out laughing. “I hope you didn’t think that was real. We were just working.”
“Working?” Gelsey asked, finding her voice and taking a tiny step forward. “Are you actors?”
“Even worse,” the guy said, shaking his head. “Screenwriters. I’m Jeff Gardner, by the way.”
“Kim,” the woman said, waving, a ring on her left hand flashing at me in the sun.
“Hi,” I said, incredibly relived that there was not international espionage going on next door. “I’m Taylor, and this is my sister Gelsey. We live right there,” I said, pointing through their tree hedge to our house.
“Neighbors!” Jeff said with a big smile. “So nice to meet you, Taylor, and…” He paused, looking at my sister. “Did you say Kelsey?”
This happened a lot with her name, and when it did, it was the one time I was grateful to have a name everyone knew and had no problems spelling. My mother hadn’t thought it would be a problem—when she’d named my sister for a famous ballerina, she obviously thought a lot more people would be familiar with it. “Gelsey,” I repeated, louder. “With a g.”
“It’s great to meet you both,” Kim said. Her eyes lingered on my sister for a moment, and she smiled before she turned her head and called into the house, “Nora!”
A second later, the screen door banged open and the girl I’d seen a few days before stepped out onto the porch. She had black curly hair and skin the color of my coffee after I’d added enough milk to make it drinkable. She was also glowering, which was in direct opposition to her parents, who both seemed thrilled to have met us. “This is our daughter, Nora,” Kim said, nudging her until Nora was standing by her side. “These are two of our neighbors,” she said. “Taylor and Gelsey.”
In succession, Nora frowned at me, at Gelsey, and at Murphy. “What’s wrong with your dog?” she asked.
Gelsey frowned right back at her, pulling the ribbon, and the dog, a little closer to her. “Nothing,” she said. “What do you mean?”
Nora just nodded at him, wrinkling her nose as though it should be obvious. “It’s all matted,” she said.
“That’s actually why we’re here,” I said quickly, trying to head off Gelsey, who had just taken a breath as though to launch into an argument about the merits of the dog’s grooming habits. “We’ve noticed this dog wandering around recently. There’s no address on the tag, so we didn’t know if he might be yours.”
Jeff shook his head. “Not us,” he said. “Have you tried the house on the other side?”
Also known as Henry’s house. “Not yet,” I said brightly. “I guess we’ll ask them next.” We all just stood around for a moment, nobody really quite sure what to say. I saw Kim glance back into the house and realized that she probably wanted to get back to work. “So,” I said, as the silence was starting to edge toward uncomfortable, “screenwriting, huh? That’s cool.” I didn’t know much about screen-writing except for what I’d seen in, ironically, the movies, where writers seemed to be either going out to power lunches or throwing balled-up pieces of paper against the wall.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Jeff said, laughing. “But it pays the bills. We’re in Los Angeles most of the year. It’s our first summer up here.”
I nodded, but was really looking at Gelsey, who was looking down at Murphy, who was scratching his ear again. I no longer knew anything about how twelve-year-olds made friends, and I frankly had never seen Gelsey make a friend, but I figured that in terms of trying to help her, I had done my best. “Okay,” I said, raising my eyebrows at my sister, “we should probably get—”
“Microchipped!” Kim said, snapping her fingers, as she looked down at the dog. “Maybe he’s microchipped. Have you checked it out?”
“No,” I said. I hadn’t even thought about it. “Do you know where they can find that out?”
“Animal shelters, vets’ offices,” Jeff said. “And they do it at the pet store in town. Doggone something or other.”
Kim turned to him, eyebrows raised. “How do you know that?”
“I went in the other day while I was picking up the pizza for dinner,” he said. “I was talking to the girl who works there.”
Now Nora turned to look at her father as well. “Why?” she asked.
“I was thinking,” Jeff said, even more energy coming into his voice, “that it could be a great character. Maybe for a TV pilot—think of all the different people she’d come into contact with.”
Kim was nodding excitedly, her words overlapping his. “I like it,” she said. “And what if she’s also a detective? Righting wrongs, solving mysteries on the side.”
Jeff turned to her, and they now seemed to be talki
ng only to each other. “And the animals play a part,” he said. “They help her solve the crimes.” They looked at each other and smiled, then turned back to us.
“It was great to meet you,” Kim said. “Good luck with the search.” Jeff waved and then they both practically ran inside. A moment later, I could hear the clacking of the keys from two keyboards.
“Come on, Gelsey,” I said, as I turned to go. “Nice to meet you,” I called to the very unfriendly Nora, who still had her arms crossed, and who hadn’t once lost her glower. It was behavior I recognized, but I didn’t remember acting like that until I was at least fourteen. Maybe things just moved more quickly when you grew up in Los Angeles.
“So,” Nora said, grudgingly, when we’d taken a few steps away. Gelsey turned back, crossing her arms in an identical manner. “Do you like the beach?”
“I guess so,” Gelsey said, with a shrug. “My sister works there,” she said, a note of unmistakable pride in her voice that surprised me.
Nora glanced over at me, unimpressed, then back to Gelsey. “Want to go over there?” she asked. “I’m totally bored.”
“Me too,” Gelsey said, the morning’s adventure of finding a home for a lost dog apparently now forgotten. “There’s nothing to do here. My mom’s even making me take tennis.”
Nora’s eyes widened. “Me too!” she said. “It’s so stupid.”
“I know, right?” Gelsey replied.
“Totally,” Nora said.
I had a feeling I knew what the rest of the conversation was going to be like, so I just took the ribbon from Gelsey, who surrendered it easily. “I’ll see you later,” I said. Gelsey waved at me over her shoulder and continued her conversation, not even looking back.