Dancing Dogs by Jon Katz

Author:Jon Katz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345536167
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-24T21:00:00+00:00

Dancing Dogs

KARA WENT TO THE HARRINGTONS’ HOUSE TWICE A WEEK TO clean, dust, vacuum, take out the garbage, and brush the two imperious poodles who lived there.

Mrs. Harrington said it made her nervous to have people cleaning when she was home. But since she seldom left the house, there was little that Kara could do about the situation. Mrs. Harrington didn’t like Kara making noise, moving things around, or interrupting her. If Kara had questions for her, she was supposed to leave them in writing on the kitchen table. Mrs. Harrington was especially prickly before her thrice-weekly card games. But Kara was paid well—$30 an hour—worth the hour each way she had to travel to the roomy old Victorian that was the Harrington home.

It was more than she got at Walmart, or at the 7-Eleven, or Target, or on the night shift at the factory in Argyle where she stuffed catheters into boxes and brought them to the shipping bay. It was more than the $10.50 she got at the supermarket, or the $12 she got driving part-time for the post office. And it was more than the $2.15, plus tips, she got waitressing at the diner on Route 40. The deal was the owner would make up the difference if the tips came to less than the minimum wage. This, she said, was the best joke since Brad told Jennifer they would spend their whole lives together.

Kara was a slight, wiry woman with brown hair cut short to keep it out of the way. Her husband, Greg, thought she worked obsessively, but then Greg had been out of work since the Clinton impeachment. At least he walked her three Welsh corgis every afternoon while she was out working, even though he and the dogs weren’t crazy about one another.

Good jobs were not easy to find, especially for a small-town, upstate–New York girl with no college education, so even though Mrs. Harrington sometimes looked at Kara as though she were dog poop scraped off a shoe, it was regular work and she needed it.

One afternoon, Kara found that she was out of vacuum-cleaner bags. Unable to do her work, she momentarily forgot Mrs. Harrington’s edicts, and walked to the doorway of the parlor, where Mrs. Harrington and her lady friends were finishing their delicate finger sandwiches before settling down to some bridge. Kara cleared her throat. Mrs. Harrington looked up, startled at the sound. The other three ladies hushed and clinked their spoons against their teacups, almost in unison. Mrs. Harrington’s awful old cat, Martha, glowered at Kara and hopped up onto the sofa.

“Mrs. Harrington,” she said. “Sorry to disturb you—”

Mrs. Harrington looked annoyed. She stood up. She didn’t come over to talk to Kara privately or ask her what she wanted. Instead, she simply hissed across the room: “Kara, I’ve asked you not to disturb us during lunch. This better be an emergency.”

Kara flushed. “There are no bags for the vacuum,” she said, perhaps a bit more sharply than she intended.

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