Photo Credit: TL Sherwood

Sara’s new Italian sandals have heels she knows no sane American tourist would attempt on cobblestones. Yesterday the Roman shoe salesman assessed her calves with an unreconstructed male gaze culminating in a subsequent nod of approval—as if her legs had been put on this earth for his pleasure, which she knew was also wrong in every possible way and for which she now pays the price with a sore back and unsteady gait.

Had she even thought about her legs like that in months, perhaps years? The children grab at her skirt and shoulder bag as her husband hurries on ahead in the wake of the tour guide. Sara answers her own question: on a rocky path in the Roman Forum, an American woman jettisons her sensible shoes and doesn’t have a clue which way to turn.

“Gelato,” her son Graham says, for the umpteenth time.

“Gelato,” little Rachel repeats.

They buzz around her like the bees in the Villa Boghese that very morning. Rachel was stung, something so shocking to her that her eyes welled up with indignation more than pain. Sara longs for such shock, although like the sandals, she suspects that the aftermath would hardly be worth it.

Under the shadow of a cross that rises from the ruins, as if Christianity itself were a monumental afterthought, she saunters toward the tour group, drawn not so much by the sights as by the sweat beading routinely, handsomely, on the guide’s brown neck. At the back of the group, her husband Richard appears rapt, his whole being hung on the guide’s every stilted English phrase.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Sara whispers.

Richard wheels around, letting the crowd go ahead to the next sight without him. “What? Why? We have to keep up.”

“You go ahead.”

He looks perplexed yet sincere, as if seeing one more ancient pile of rubble will answer anything. Sara thinks he wants them to carry on by simply going forward.

“I’ll wait in the shade with the kids,” she says. “We’ll meet you outside the Colosseum.”

“Here, take some euros.”

“What for?” Sara gestures at the ancient olive trees, the dry landscape, the spiky weeds poking through stones unmoved for all time.

“Get the kids something from the snack carts,” Richard suggests and turns to them. “What do you think, guys, you want some limonata?” His accent hurts Sara’s ears, he’s trying so hard. She knows she is being uncharitable, but perhaps, she considers, that’s who she is now.

The children huddle, deciding if their longing for gelato can be satisfied by limonata instead. That’s the question, isn’t it? she thinks. Can one high, desperate longing be satisfied by something else instead?

Sara’s husband gives her coins from his jangling pockets. He is generous, always has been. It makes her wonder how they’ll resolve things. Amicably, she suspects.

Graham reaches his sweaty hand into hers for the money. Coins fall to the pebbled ground and Richard tells him to cool it and to pick up the change for his mother.

“All right, you guys,” he adds, “I’ll see you in forty-five minutes over at the entrance to the Colosseum. Help Mommy find me, all right?”

Then he looks at Sara and presses her purse against her hip, ever mindful of the notorious Roman pickpockets, although their family stands alone on the path. He lowers his voice and leans in closer. “You seem a little out of it today. I’ll take the kids later so you can nap. But stay alert now, OK? Don’t get lost.” His expression is as searching and mystified as when he gazed up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling earlier that day.

Sara nods slowly, noncommittally, the latent teenager in her unwilling to offer more. She knows she’s being a brat and wishes he would recognize it, too. Richard turns and scurries up the trail and the children and Sara watch him go. She tries to picture that this is how it will be from then on.

Over the past week, their family has stumbled into dark medieval churches looking for the finger bones and femurs of saints, the preserved bodies of bishops still in their robes, their wax faces surprisingly plump considering there’s nothing inside. The bodies are hollow, eviscerated, and yet people kneel before them and close their eyes.

Graham pulls on Sara’s purse and jolts her back to the moment. “Euros, Mom. We’re dying of thirst.”

For an eleven-year-old, he has the presence of someone much older, she thinks, packing all the punch his father lacks. Somehow Sara knows her son will be all right. And little Rachel will be too young to remember. She will try to recall her parents together from snapshots on trips like this one—the picture this morning in front of the fountain in the Villa Borghese. Their separation will mix in her mind with that first bee sting and the Mediterranean heat, all mysterious and conveying a pain that startles, but eventually envelopes, like humidity on the skin.

Graham takes the coins and grabs Rachel’s hand. They dash off up the path. At least they have each other, Sara thinks.

“Slow down,” she shouts after them. “I need to keep you in sight.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Graham shouts back over his shoulder.

“Yeah, Mom, don’t worry,” Rachel copies. Her voice rises and tangles in the olive branches where the sparrows twitter at midday.

As Sara meanders after them, she notices off to the side of the path a flight of ancient stone steps leading up an embankment to nowhere. At the top, a young Italian couple stands close together, their arms around one another. What a romantic sight, she thinks, the woman with sunlight in the folds of her summer dress. Sara pauses and gazes up at them, prepared to smile and sigh, then move on. The young man wears sleek black pants and Sara notices the way his browned forearms and smooth forehead glisten. The girl rises on her toes to reach him and Sara can understand why.

As they kiss, she notices how the young man’s hand curves over the young woman’s hip. It presses down her thigh and disappears into the fabric between her legs, the small purple, embroidered flowers on the white background crimped against his outstretched fingers. Her skirt will be wrinkled, Sara thinks, and quickly feels embarrassed that she is the only one who cares. Any initial thought that this was a tame embrace vanishes as the girl lets out a throaty laugh and squeezes the man’s shoulder in a claw-like grip. He does not smile and, what’s more important, does not remove his hand from between her legs.

Sara stays frozen on the path, enthralled. She glances down at her new sandals covered now in fine, ancient dust. Something about them on her is as outrageous as the kissing couple, she thinks, and lets out a surprising laugh, too. It’s far quieter than the girl’s, but every bit as guttural and real. Sara rubs the toe of a sandal against the back of her leg, warm from the sun and firm.

When she looks up again, the couple has moved away from the steps and crossed a ledge overlooking a deep archaeological pit. To arrive at their next stopping spot, Sara sees that they’ve slipped around a low rope barrier and entered an area where tourists aren’t allowed. She can’t help wondering what they think they’re doing there in a forbidden area with groups of tourists drifting by on the paths below.

Without thinking, Sara heads off the central path, too. She hurries up the stairs to keep the couple in sight. Each stone step is high and as she ascends, her skirt catches air and flares outward. With heat billowing around her, her thighs feel damp and shadowed and secret beneath the light fabric. When she reaches the top step, she realizes that she now is exposed, too, her purpose unclear. When she looks across at the couple she is glad to see they haven’t noticed her.

They stand, locked in an embrace at the edge of the cliff beside the pit. The man has bent his dark head into the woman’s neck and appears to be feasting there. The neck looks startlingly white against his black hair, and then Sara notices the actual lips and open mouth as he kisses the woman’s skin. The wetness of his tongue on her cool neck, Sara thinks. That’s all she thinks, because it is a thought unto itself: attention must be paid to that tongue and those lips and the press of his body against hers, his hand at the small of her back, pulling her towards him, her dress hiked up, the girl’s leg up now, too, and the pretty violets smashed.

Sara looks away and still can’t fathom what they think they’re doing, what she is doing. They can’t make love there on that cliff, can they? she wonders. Or do people do that in Italy, because it is Italy? Perhaps, like her new sandals, allowances are made for such things—sex and passion woven into everyday life. She finished reading Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet on the plane ride over and keeps catching herself searching for tangled, hidden passion everywhere she looks. In Rome, secrets lay as stacked and layered and porous as the crumbled walls of archaeological digs.

Early that morning, metal shutters clattered as the shop opened up downstairs. Voices like none Sara had ever heard before echoed off the alley walls, busting wide apart the day. Arguing voices asking only for some milk. If she shed tears, she knows they wouldn’t translate: any crying in Italian evaporates, unshed in the scorched air. Swallows swoop past now, disrupting thought and whatever is left of her former self.

When she looks up again, the couple is moving on. The man has the woman’s pale hand in his and he’s steering her further across the ledge. Sara spots a grove of olive trees in the near distance and imagines he will take her to that quiet spot, where the rocky ground appears to give way to soft grass. He will ease her to it and the girl will pull him down.

Sara can feel the young man’s hand, the force of it pressing against her thighs. He pushes her back, hair outstretched like a virgin’s on a sacrificial slab. Only nothing about the couple is virginal, and certainly nothing about Sara is, either, which is why she wants to step over the rope barrier, teeter across the precarious ledge, and join them in the partially hidden incline that has been used for this purpose since time immemorial. Only in her own country, in her own stark life, would someone hesitate, Sara thinks, as she hesitates. Yet here she would do it, she tells herself, surely she would.

Then she looks back and realizes she can’t see the main path that leads to the limonata carts or the plaza where Richard will be meeting them shortly. Sara can’t see the kids any longer. She scrambles along the rocky hillside, clomps hastily down the stacked steps, and hurries back onto the trail again. Her greatest fear in this moment is that Richard will have left the tour early and discovered the kids alone by the snack carts. Her absence, she thinks, will prove something undeniable about her. A recklessness and irresponsibility that show she is a bad mother. Richard has recently accused her of being untethered. He doesn’t know the half of it.

In the days before their trip, she lost the car keys three times, accidentally shut the cat in the garage overnight, and forgot to pick up Graham from soccer again. She left a flame on under an empty pot and kept the water going in Rachel’s bath until a grey cloud appeared on the dining room ceiling. Richard may never know the details, but he grasps the overall effect: she’s lost, perhaps dangerously so.

Sara slows on the path and tries to consider the truth. She has been leaving for some time now, so much so as to be already almost gone. It’s a wonder she’s here at all. But she is a mother and a mother needs to be present. She needs to watch over her kids who, she reminds herself with another jolt, are nowhere in sight. The thought of her imminent and justifiable punishment rises before her: he will get the kids if she doesn’t get her shit together.

Sara hurries up the trail and pushes through the turnstile that leads out of the Forum, glancing at the souvenir and snack carts that circle the cobblestones. And look, she thinks, there are her children, bent over their drinks, the long, serpentine straws curving into their mouths. As she approaches, she hears the happy slurping, the pull of the syrupy liquid to their young lips.

Then Sara realizes those aren’t the sounds at all: instead of satisfaction, the burbling noise she hears is crying. She dashes forward and crouches down in front of Rachel. Her daughter’s face is red from the sun, but her cheeks are dry and her expression seems far too old for her age. Sara turns quickly and sees the last thing she expects: Graham’s face streaked with tears. She grabs her son by the wrist, not meaning to frighten him, but he lets out a cry and drops his drink. Acid yellow liquid spills onto the cobblestones like urine.

“What’s wrong?” Sara asks. “Did a bee sting you, too?”

Graham’s narrow shoulders heave and he tosses himself against her. Sara rocks back on her heels and lands on her ass on the hard cobblestones.

“Graham,” she says, starting to scold him, but something in his shaking body stops her. Sara tries to peel her son off her chest so she can see him better, but he won’t let go.

“Rachel,” she says over his shoulder. “Tell Mommy what happened.”

Her daughter bows her head lower toward her drink and lets out an old lady’s worried sigh.

“Did you spend all the money your father gave you? Is that it? You can tell me. I won’t be angry with you.”

She rubs a hand over Graham’s hair and he flinches.

“Children,” Sara tries more seriously, “If you won’t tell me what’s going on, I’ll have to ask one of the grownups here.” She spreads her arm towards the milling strangers, not one bit sure her meager Italian could do the job.

Her son yanks himself away and he shakes his head hard and scowls.

“Oh, for God’s sake, darling, it can’t be all that bad,” Sara says, her voice harsher than intended. She knows she shouldn’t have wandered off, but really, can it be all that terrible?

Graham wipes his cheeks with his forearm and looks at her, pausing for what has to be dramatic effect. “You don’t know, Mom,” he finally says. “You’ll never know.”

Sara can’t help it, but she laughs. Not a lot, and not loud, but enough. She wants to tell her eleven-year-old that he can’t possibly understand the extent to which no one will know, no one will ever understand. The cruelty of her own laughter dawns on Sara a little too slowly and she stops abruptly. The children watch her, worried, perhaps even scared.

She suddenly feels exquisite sympathy for these small people, although in this moment it is hard to grasp that they are hers. Her son’s words, spoken so firmly, seem foreign to her. She simply doesn’t get their meaning. She wants to believe that they are spoken not to inflict pain, but are the pain itself. But even that motherly understanding, she thinks, is lost in this untranslatable moment.

Sara looks past the children. For an instant, the Colosseum recedes into the distance and the cobblestones that fan out around her rise into a wall that encircles her children. She senses they are disappearing down an ancient stone tunnel. She must reach for them before they are sucked away from her and into a rough-hewn quarry where the innocents are taken. It’s a crazy thought, she thinks. The heat is getting to her, dehydration and the pain in her back.

She looks over at the man who runs the limonata cart, hoping he can help return her children to her. She will buy more sugary drinks from him to set things right. Grey stubble shades his face and his eyes are hidden under a plaid cap. Sara sizes him up and wonders if he is the culprit who has harmed her son. Yes, he is the dangerous one. But then the old Italian man smiles down at a little girl who stands beside her mother, politely waiting for her drink. Sara notices the mother holds her daughter’s hand, and she thinks, that should have been me. I should have been that mother, thanking the lemon man.

So if the lemon man didn’t do it, Sara wonders, who did? A young Algerian in an NYU t-shirt leans against his souvenir truck, his head bent into his cell phone. Under the shade of an ancient tree, the ubiquitous matrons dressed in black shake their heads at some long-repeated tale. A blond, Northern European family sits wedged together on a bench, eating their sandwiches on dark bread.

Which one of these people stole my son’s change from his hand, Sara wonders, or tried to sell him something illicit, or yelled at him needlessly? Which one is a pervert or a pedophile, a nightmare come true? It must have been the lemon man, she thinks again. He is the bad guy. Although now he is whistling as he unloads bright lemons from a wooden box.

She decides she will interrogate him nonetheless in a language he doesn’t understand. She will shout at the old man in English and blame him and insist he explain why this country of fine wines and routine epiphanies has not moored her more successfully to her life. Give me back my son, my family, Sara will shout, when really it is herself she wants returned. That’s when her husband steps into her line of sight. He looks plain and well-intentioned, familiar and somehow right.

“That was fascinating,” he says, nodding over his shoulder at the Colosseum that has righted itself again and appears appropriately colossal.

He leans forward and offers a peck to the air near Sara’s cheek. Instinctively, and for no good reason, she leans toward him, too.

She looks down at Graham to try to understand what has happened between them while his father has been gone. Her son stares up at her with an adult expression, one that shows he has things under control now. He surreptitiously wipes away any sign of tears.

“Everything all right?” Richard asks, glancing at each of them. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Graham says firmly. “We’re good. Mom bought us lemonade. Mine spilled, but it’s no big deal.”

Graham offers a manly shrug. He is protecting her, Sara realizes. Something bad has happened and he is covering it up for her sake. Something has come between us, something terrible, Sara thinks. A flicker of understanding passes over her as she wonders if that something is her.

Richard looks to her for an explanation, but Sara is at a loss. She looks to Graham again, and after a long moment, she nods in agreement with him that they are fine. Graham and Sara have made a pact. In one brief moment, her son has become fully-grown and capable of deception, as well as sacrifice and love.

But, Sara reminds herself, I am his mother, not his accomplice. Now is the moment to speak up, to set things straight. The voices of strangers, the wings of birds flapping as they rise to the triumphal arch, the chatter of birds as they settle on the cross casting a shadow on the path, the guides explaining significant moments in history to the interested tourists, the calls of the street vendors: Sara must speak above it all. And yet she stalls. She’s still not sure what to say. She stands frozen and feels nothing until Graham steps forward and takes her hand.

“Let’s go, Mom,” he says. “Time to go.”

Sara looks down and wishes she could move forward, take a firm step in her new sandals.

“All right, then,” Richard says as he takes Rachel’s hand. “We’ve got just enough time to catch the next bus back to the hotel.”

“We’re coming,” Graham answers for his mother as he starts to pull them up the ancient stones.

“Richard,” Sara finally says. “Wait.”

Graham looks up at her, his face dark with adult betrayal. He tries again to pull her onward, to march them into the future he assumes is theirs.

Sara turns to her husband, opens her mouth, and begins.

Virginia Pye is the author of two award-winning novels, Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust, and the short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness. Her stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Literary Hub, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, The North American Review, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She lived in Richmond, Virginia for many years and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Find her online at www.virginiapye.com, FB, Twitter, and Instagram.

“Crying in Italian” first appeared in the anthology Abundant Grace.

Photo Credit: TL Sherwood

Bubba arrived at my cousin Joan’s country house with a dog-owner’s instruction book, a vocabulary list, and a handwritten note from his previous owner: “If Bubba is going to be in a threatening situation (like going to the vet, being around other dogs or going for a walk ☺), you should use the choke collar.” Joan tells me this as we sip gin-and-tonics on her sprawling patio. “Choke collar,” she scoffs at the smiling face. “The point is, Bubba is supposed to be my guard dog.”

At eight months, Bubba is “still a puppy,” guessed to be part Labrador, part Golden Retriever. He is broad-shouldered and the jumbled color of whole wheat flour. When I’d arrived, Bubba had nearly bowled me over on the gravel driveway, his paws the size of boxing gloves jabbing my stomach. He’d seemed friendly enough, but his throbbing tongue, branded by a round black bullseye, worried me. He was drooling buckets.

Joan thinks she needs Bubba because, although she lives in the city, last week her country place was burglarized during the day. “I can’t imagine how they had the nerve to steal a truckload of hay,” she says, rubbing a wedge of lime around the rim of her glass. When she came up last weekend, she’d noticed that about a hundred bales–the good stuff, from her second cutting–were missing from her horse barn. “How do you do it?” she asks me. “In broad daylight, do you just back up a flatbed and start pitching?”

Being a city girl myself, I have no idea.

With her closest neighbors a mile away in every direction, I understand why, despite the elaborate alarm system hooked up to the Barkeyville police station, Joan feels vulnerable. She’s five-foot-four and built like a fireplug, but she is forty-eight years old, has a standing appointment for her weekly manicure (Chick Pick Cherry), and is typically swathed in heavy gold jewelry, most of it from Tiffany’s. When one of Joan’s friends, who was moving to California, offered her Bubba, the businesswoman in her recognized the obvious advantages of “live” protection, equivalent, she said, to having a man around. Now, as Bubba pants beside Joan’s chaise lounge, he looks perfectly at home, not at all aware that he is destined to be “guard dog.” Indeed, it’s hard for me to imagine that the thwack! thwack! thwack! of Bubba’s ebullient tail will scare off any poachers.

“Isn’t he a little friendly to be a guard dog?” I ask tentatively. Joan is a hard-nosed, highly competent executive vice president of something vitally important at a major communications company, and I don’t often question her.

“He’ll learn,” she says. Joan believes that all problems are manageable, given the right tactics against the right strategies.

I’m surprised that Joan replaced Max, her thirteen-pound pedigreed schnauzer, so quickly. He died just five weeks ago. Joan got Max the day after her husband Tom, without any warning or hint of disharmony, moved out to live with a paralegal at his firm who was honey-haired and fresh from college at Florida State. That was a dozen years ago. Joan was so angry she hired the meanest divorce lawyer in the city and pushed Tom’s partnership lifestyle back to early-student. She busied herself with her career, bought a country home and was “done” with men, except for Max, whom she called her “little gentleman” and insisted was nearly human. She fed him macrobiotic diets, allergy pills wrapped in liver sausage, and seedless green grapes instead of doggie treats. She forgave Max his sweet tooth when he found a guest’s purse on the floor and managed to get it open and eat the lipsticks and breath mints inside, or when he found the smell of her new yellow Pappagallo pumps irresistible. She would never forgive Tom.

“I assume he’s trainable,” Joan says again, “although he’s not as smart as Max. Max had papers a mile long.” Joan introduces everyone by title: CEO, CFO, EVP, etc., and it was important to her that Max had a pedigree. I know she has a little trouble introducing me to her friends because I’m “only” a paralegal, and probably guilty by that shared association with Tom’s bimbo. Joan doesn’t intend a personal insult; to her you either have the pedigree or not, and she’d rather spend her time with those with better blood lines. Still, we’re cousins. Like her, I’m single, and I admire her success and her independence and how she doesn’t feel sorry for herself about losing Tom. Had it been me, I would’ve been an emotional cesspool, but Joan treated her divorce like a business proposition and got the most out of it.

~

I also love Joan because she can say out loud the most outrageous things, things the rest of us would be ashamed to admit, but she says them like facts, cold and analytic, without fear of what anyone might think of her. I am reminded of one time in the city when Joan and I were walking Max. We passed by a middle-aged woman who sat on the sidewalk next to a filthy beige plastic pet carrier. The woman wore a blue jean skirt with a frayed hem and heavy, once-white athletic socks. Her maroon sweatshirt was grimy and bulky in the wrong places, as if both her possessions and her pets were burrowed beneath it.

“Feeeeed my caaat! Feeeeed my caaat!” The woman’s drawn-out plea was nasal, as cutting as a bleating goat. She spread the words too thinly to be easily understood, but the sound conveyed insatiable need, a well too deep to be filled. With one hand, she stroked a bit of gray fur curled in her lap. With the other, she rattled a paper cup from Burger King.

“Oh, please!” Joan muttered. “Eat the cat!” As if I weren’t there, she added a management-style bone, “Then, we’ll talk.” She yanked Max away.

“Joan!” I started to open my purse. “The poor woman is begging for her pet!”

“Don’t,” Joan said. She ticked off her business analysis of the woman’s situation. “One, she can’t afford a pet. Two, she can’t afford herself. Three, she should go to a homeless shelter, take her meds, and stop pestering people in my neighborhood.”

I bugged out my eyes to let her know I thought she was being harsh, but I closed my purse.

Joan kept walking, then brightened. “I have to admit it’s a pretty decent marketing hook. Who can resist a pet?”

We just had, but I didn’t say anything. Joan bent down and picked up Max.

~

I’m telling Joan about my latest document production for a big-name client when she jumps from her chaise and charges across the patio.

“No!” she commands, her tone checked, controlled, as if inviting a reasoned discussion with a gunman.

Paws on the glass-topped patio table, Bubba is eagerly inspecting Joan’s signature deviled eggs, each nestled in its own molded oval around the perimeter of a blue-and-white ceramic platter with a center inscription, “Joan’s Little Devils.”

“No!” Joan says again.

Bubba ignores her.

“Down!” she shouts, no longer solicitous.

Bubba doesn’t seem to understand; his snout stretches towards the platter.

“Off! Off!” she shouts. Bubba replants his front feet, flush against Joan’s stomach. She cups his paws and drops them back down on the patio. “Good boy,” she says, patting the top of his head.

“Right on target,” she mutters to herself, then turns to me. “‘Off ‘ is one of his words,” she says. Bubba sits by the table expectantly while she goes inside and brings me the instruction booklet, “Your New Best Friend.”

I read out loud, “Dogs are like people…” Bubba lifts one paw to the table and cocks his head towards Joan, his tongue snapping like a lizard’s.

“Max was never like this,” Joan says. “Max knew not to beg. I absolutely cannot bear that. No!” She slaps Bubba’s rump. “Off!”

With an almost-human toss of his snout, as if one thing’s as good as another, Bubba zig-zags across the yard, following the cologne of an unseen critter.

“That’s right,” I venture, knowing that I am on thin ice. “Max just went to the kitchen and took what he wanted!”

Before she can chastise me for criticizing Max, I ask, “Remember the rum cake?”

~

The Easter before Max died, Joan had hosted our entire family at her country house. My mother had brought her famous rum cake, a dense yellow cake with half a cup of Bacardi Dark baked in, and saturated with an additional half-cup through toothpick holes in the top. My mother usually loses patience with the procedure after filling half of the holes, and she then picks up the bottle and douses the other half. Just before serving, she seems to fear that the rum may have evaporated, and douses each slice again.

Twelve of the Strong relatives were seated in Joan’s great room, a combined living and diving room, for a late afternoon Easter dinner. After the meal, my mother insisted on clearing the table, since Joan and I had cooked. It took a little longer than usual for her to deliver her first load to the kitchen. When she returned, she took my plate and furtively lifted her eyebrow. She continued to clear the table, including the butter dishes, the salt and pepper shakers and every last thing not necessary for the dessert course, and then asked if anyone wanted coffee. She took a fair amount of time asking each of us individually, rather than just taking our family’s usual show of hands. I knew something was bothering her.

Hoping to prod her into serving it, I asked, “How’d the rum cake come out?”

She looked at me as if I’d committed some etiquette felony punishable by a year of hard, potato-peeling labor. Then, she put on a little girl face, pulled her lip down with her index finger and said to Joan, with the inflection of a question, “I think maybe Max got into it?”

Joan jumped from her chair. “MAX!!!” she shrieked, bumping against the table and toppling two water glasses.

She flew to the kitchen, and the rest of us, like a team of tornado-chasers, rushed after her. Nose down, Max shuffled past us.

“MAAAX!!!” Joan stomped back out of the kitchen and into the great room. She still clung to her linen napkin, smeared with cranberry, rose lipstick and a dot of brown gravy.

Max took a step towards his box of playthings by the fireplace before he apparently understood Joan’s tone, and stopped dead in his tracks, eyeing the stairs. He looked as if he wanted to bolt up them two at a time, but he was visibly bloated now and could hardly move.

In the kitchen, we saw the offense. There, on the pine table, in the center of a glass plate, surrounded by sugared walnuts, was my mother’s rum cake, gouged like a gravel pit. At least a quarter of the cake was missing.

“Oh, God, Max,” Joan yelped. Max plopped over, legs akimbo, his eyes like onyx, yellow crumbs stuck in his old man’s whiskers, begging her to rub his belly.

“You’re a dog! You’re not supposed to like alcohol! You shouldn’t get drunk!” Joan moaned.

“You’ve always said he was human!” I said cheerfully, but my mother shot me a glance that said I should know better than to choose that moment to mention Joan’s drinking. Luckily, Joan had been too concerned with Max to notice my jibe.

 ~   

Thwack!

We are laughing about the excavated rum cake, and I idly toss one of Max’s weathered tennis balls into the yard. Bubba races after it, hurdling some daylilies in his way. The lilies rebound, but, once more, Joan is disproportionately incensed. She charges after Bubba, screaming “NO!!!” Bubba pauses, momentarily confused, and trots to her, his tail thrashing.

“You’re going to have to learn to be an outside dog,” she mews, almost as if she is talking to Max. It is hard to tell if it is my story or the gin that has first angered her, then softened her up.

“I’m not sure this is going to work,” she says, scratching Bubba’s ear. “It may be too soon.” She takes a deliberate gulp of her gin. “Need another?” she says to me.

I decline, but she goes into the kitchen and returns with a tumbler—her third. It’s not polite to count, but I know from past experience that, after three, she gets a little sloppy and then sleepy. Occasionally she forgets to serve dinner.

Joan sighs and this time looks at me. “It may be too soon.”

I hold my breath. Joan doesn’t often admit mistakes.

“The vet said he could’ve had surgery, and then chemo and maybe radiation, and that he would be in there for like six weeks. But Max was old. I’d had him longer than I’d had Tom, the jerk.” She pauses to take a drink, and wipes her eyes. “Max wouldn’t leave me. He was more loyal than most humans!”

I study the daylilies. Joan has never cried in my presence. Now, there is a gash in her voice that I realize must have been welded silent when Tom left. Had she really thought a dog would replace a husband? That if she had Max she wouldn’t mourn Tom? She’d been angry, to be sure, but she’d never admitted to me that she was hurt.

“What could I do?” she asks. “I couldn’t put him through all that.”

“He was your friend,” I say.

Joan straightens in her chair, forcing her voice to the analytic. “It would have cost more for him than for a human being,” she continues.

The calculation is a dead give-away. Her decision was not just a business decision, the prerogative and burden of senior management, but an elective of love.

“So I drove up there, and the vet said he could do it then. I held his little body, and I don’t know if he even knew me, and the vet gave him a shot and that was it.” In a single slurp, she finishes her gin. She puts a hand on the chaise and steadies herself as she stands up.

“Don’t!” I say, surprised how much I sound like her.

She halts, as rigid as a pillar of ice, and glares at me inscrutably, like someone in a coma.

In the heavy silence, my heart throbs dangerously, and I hear, in the distance, country life: a crow cawing, a horse whinnying, a dog barking. It’s not my place to judge Joan’s drinking, but she is my cousin, and now I’ve heard her pain, and I can’t stay silent while she kills herself as surely as the shot that sent Max to sleep.

“Don’t what,” she says flatly. It’s a tone that dares a junior executive to contradict the senior.

“Sit down a minute, and then we’ll eat,” I say.

“I’ll have another drink first,” she says, victorious.

“You drink too much,” I blurt. I am shocked at my boldness. Joan is looking at me like she doesn’t know me. I soften my voice, “It’s not a cure.”

Slowly, her spine releases, her shoulders relax, and her face melts. She opens her dark eyes wide, and blinks to clear her tears.

Thwack! Bubba announces his return to the patio with a slap of his tail at Joan’s knees, and she sits back down. With impeccable timing, Bubba rests his chin on her lap. She hands me her empty glass and waves it away, done for the day.

She looks at Bubba and shakes her head. “It’s not your fault, Bubba. It may be it’s just too soon.”

~

A week later, Joan and I meet in the city for lunch. She isn’t certain yet that Bubba is going to work out. He still doesn’t know all the words on his vocabulary list, but he is learning. She thinks he may be a little too friendly to be a good guard dog. She can’t say why, but he’s growing on her.

Joan doesn’t finish her glass of wine, but we leave the restaurant. It is a bright August day, and the city’s pace is leisurely, pedestrians waiting for “walk” signs just to delay by a few precious moments the return to work. We are at the corner when we hear a stabbing voice.

“Feeeed my coat! Feeed my caaat!”

We turn around. The woman from Joan’s neighborhood squats against the brown mustard brick of the Save-More drugstore, the cat in her lap. In front of the pet carrier, the food bowl is empty.

“Jeez,” Joan mutters, then strides over to the woman.

“Oh, Joan,” I groan, panicked at the scene she might cause. She ignores me, and I look away deliberately, as if I’m considering whether to turn left to Nordstrom’s or right to Macy’s. I hear the woman rattle her coins.

“Thaaaaank you,” the nasal voice says, and I look back in time to see Joan’s outstretched hand over the cat lady’s paper cup.

Joan joins me at the curb, her shoulders thrown back in a business-like stance. There is a moment of silence between us when I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to make her feel self-conscious or incur her wrath. But then I figure there must’ve been a good reason for Joan’s change of heart. Thinking to tease her, I ask, “The marketing hook worked?”

Without looking at me, Joan touches the corner of her eye and says, “Doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him.”

Mary Hutchings Reed is the author of four indie literary mainstream novels: One for the Ark, Warming Up,Saluting the Sun, and Courting Kathleen Hannigan, which foretells the #MeToo movement as it chronicles the challenges facing a young woman lawyer “growing up” in a prestigious Chicago law firm. Mary practiced intellectual property law in Chicago for many years and her short fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, The Tampa Review, Ars Medica and the Ligourian. Read more about her work at www.maryhutchingsreed.com