Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard

Author:Jo Ann Beard [Beard, Jo Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

What You Seek Is Seeking You

You gotta take the dog,” Nathan insisted over the phone. “Don’t you remember how much you love the dog?”

“I admired the dog,” Stephen said. “Totally different thing.”

Aiko had once caught a squirrel and then let it go in a mind-blowing act of canine chivalry. Stephen, visiting, had seen the whole thing from his brother’s deck: The Lab ambling through the garden, her stomach swinging from side to side, sniffing thoughtfully at clumps of flowers and freshening up her scent trail. Across the yard a squirrel paused upside down at the base of a tree, its tail pulsing. Suddenly, the dog made her move; the squirrel twisted feverishly back and forth and then gave up, hanging limply from Aiko’s mouth, eyes bright, waiting for what would come next.

“I never told you this before,” Stephen said, “but Melissa told her to kill it. She throws open the bedroom window and goes, Fucking kill it, you mutt.” Melissa was Nathan’s wife, tall and erratic, an elementary-school teacher who was constantly saying and doing things you didn’t want associated with children.

“Oh my God!” Nathan murmured, appalled. “Isn’t that exactly what I’ve been saying?”

Stephen knew where this was heading. If he didn’t agree to take their dog, he was going to have to listen once again to Nathan’s circuitous explanation of why he had been having sex with the woman who did their taxes.

“See, Melissa could even make a dog go against its own nature! I’m telling you, there’s something about her that makes you just want to do the opposite of what she tells you.” Nathan listened for a moment to the noncommittal sound of his brother paying no attention, the intermittent crumple of a newspaper. “You just have to disagree with somebody like that, right? Don’t you?” Nothing. “‘Fucking kill it, you mutt,’ and the dog drops the squirrel. I mean, you basically have to drop the squirrel; it’s the only reasonable response. Let me ask you,” he said as though what he was about to say was a new thought, one that had just come to him, “can you believe I stayed married to her for almost four years?”

“Who, the dog?”

“What?”

“You were talking about the dog, and then you said, ‘Can you believe I stayed married to her for almost four years?’”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Nathan said, peering into the fridge. He was going to make himself some eggs. Fuck the way he’d been living, Pop-Tarts thirty times a day. Fuck Melissa and fuck Renée too, for that matter, signing up for an online dating service, him having to run across her self-satisfied face on his computer screen at three o’clock in the morning.

“You were talking about the dog, and then you said, ‘Can you believe’—”

“Could you shut up? You got any awareness of how backward you are? I mean, you’re my brother, but you can’t even follow a simple conversation.” The last egg in the carton had something dark green smeared across the shell.

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