Authors: Renee Manfredi
Anna sent a few saucepan lids clattering to the floor. Marvin looked up, just as Anna wanted him to.
“Anna?” he said, coming into the kitchhen a minute later, breathless.
“Yeah,” she said.
“It’s not what you think.”
“I think it’s pot. Am I wrong?”
“No. Are you mad?” he asked.
“No. I’m assuming, of course, that you don’t smoke in front of Flynn. I might be a little concerned if she saw you smoking, or you were under the influence when she’s in your care.”
He waved this away. “Certainly not.”
Anna began peeling potatoes. “Then I don’t have a problem with it. Will Christine be joining us for dinner?”
“No,” he said. “She has other plans.”
Anna opened the oven and basted the turkey, rearranged the dressing around the bird. When she turned, Marvin was still standing there. “Yes?” she said.
He ran his hands through his hair. “You might be a little mad at me when I tell you this, but I swear to God I honestly forgot until this morning, until, uh, ten minutes ago when I realized Flynn was still in bed.”
“What?” Anna said, alarmed.
“Today’s Thanksgiving, which is when we have always celebrated Flynnie’s birthday.”
“I thought her birthday was the second week in December?”
“It was. Is. But we changed it. Too close to Christmas. Anyway, Flynn’s always depressed on her birthday, and this year, uh, without Poppy it’s probably going to be worse.”
“I wish you would have told me. I have nothing for her. I don’t know
what she wants.”
“Well, I do. And it can be from both of us. And I actually, uh, Christine that is, has it at her house. I need to run over and pick it up.”
“What is it?”
“A dog. A puppy. Flynn’s been asking for a dog since she could talk. The cat was just a compromise. What do you think?”
Anna sighed, poured a cup of coffee and sat. She looked over at him. As a matter of fact, she had dreamed of a dog last night or the night before. A dog running around the house in Maine. They had acreage there, plenty of room for a dog. Why not? If it would make her granddaughter happy and give her yet another reason to move out of Boston, why not? She looked over at Marvin. She wished he would put some clothes on. “What kind of dog is it?”
“I think it’s a Border collie mix.”
“Yeah, okay. Why not. Border collies aren’t too big.”
Except that by the time Marvin got back with it, just as Flynn was stumbling out of her bedroom, Anna saw that this puppy, forty pounds if he was an ounce, was a Newfoundland.
“Oh! I knew it!” Flynn said, and got down on her hands and knees. “I knew he would come to me.”
“Happy Birthday, sweetheart. He’s from your grandma and me.”
Flynn smiled up at Anna, the first genuine smile she had seen in days. “Thank you,” she said, and hugged Anna tight.
“You’re welcome, dear. You might want to take him outside to pee. Puppies have to pee a lot. Take him out back so he’s safe inside the fence.” Anna watched Flynn go out. She turned to Marvin. “That’s one damn big Border collie.”
“He is?” Marvin turned to her, with a dreamy look.
“Who told you that was a Border collie, Marvin? That’s a Newfoundland. I’d say a purebred.”
“Oh. Are they good with kids?”
“That dog is going to be enormous. I’d say a hundred and fifty pounds at least.”
“Oh! I had no idea. I don’t know dog breeds. I got him at the animal shelter. What do you want me to do? Should I take him back and get something smaller?”
She raised an eyebrow. “And why would you assume that Flynn hasn’t already named him and planned his future? Too late.”
“I’m sorry, Anna.”
“Oh, well, we’ll make the best of it, I suppose. I’m not crazy about big dogs, but if it makes Flynn happy, I’ll adjust. Anyway, I’ve heard that Newfies are one of the best breeds to have around children.”
Marvin put his arm around her and kissed her on the forehead. “Thank you,” he said softly.
Flynn played with the dog under the table. He liked to chew on shoelaces, and every few minutes a voice—Greta’s, her grandma’s—came down from above telling Flynn to move the puppy away. The Wise Men were in the body of the dog. Flynn knew they would find a way to be with her, to live someplace besides her dreams. A big dog, with plenty of room for the men who were sometimes wise men, sometimes tiny pips, and when they couldn’t decide, were whips. They weren’t so nice when they turned into whips, was what she was learning. They were huge and angry, talked about how Gladys Knight had deserted them and left them underground. They wanted revenge. Plus, as the whips they bossed Flynn around. They sat on her chest this morning so she couldn’t leave the bed when she wanted to, but only lie there in the morning sun while they told her things like her mother never loved her and she was never coming back. They told her it was her fault Greta’s baby died because Flynn selfishly wanted Greta for herself. Greta wouldn’t be Flynn’s new mother; she had already adopted a girl in Flynn’s place. Even her grandma, the whips told her, didn’t love her so much. She only tolerated Flynn because Anna wanted Marvin around. Flynn thought this was probably true; her father and her grandmother were in true love, though she thought the whips were lying when they told her Anna and Marvin had hired kidnapers to take her away in the middle of the night.
“Flynnie, get the dog out of there,” her father said from above. “Take him into the living room.”
Flynn picked up the puppy and did as she was told. Greta’s new deaf daughter, Lily, tried to catch him. Lily was only three, but Flynn knew the whips were making Lily do things. Pull the puppy’s tail, they told her, and laughed when she did. Flynn heard the noise inside Lily, a continuous
screaming and crying and begging for help, angry sounds of not being noticed or loved enough. Being deaf meant you had the power to hear what people said inside their heads, but not aloud. Flynn understood about not being heard. About people not hearing her. In this way, Flynn could see inside Lily. Deaf people were usually saints in other lifetimes. Flynn thought Lily was probably Joan of Arc. She was surrounded with the blue-white light of angels. All the anger of that man sitting across from her grandma, Jack, was in Lily’s head. Then Flynn, through Lily, felt his anger, too: it was like someone had held two spoons over two candles, then pressed them onto her temples. There was a buzzing of bees. Her grandma’s fear was a cold spot behind her eyes, and made the sound of an owl. Only heaven was silent.
The whips now rose from the dog’s body, filled the room with their awful light and their stench of sickness—the same smell she remembered when a squirrel got into the eaves of the house in Alaska and died. The whips’ hair grew to six feet in six seconds then twisted into snaky coils and sucked up every bit of dirt in the house. Her father used to say the ’80s stank, and this must be what she smelled now. The stench of a decade over her grandma’s delicious cooking. The whips turned into huge balls of light and flew around the holiday table.
We’re fireflies! We’ll take no crap, we’ll sing to you in our wise-guy rap
!
Flynn covered her ears. They were so loud. But the man called Jack was speaking to her. “What?” Flynn said.
“I said, what’s the puppy’s name?”
Flynn picked him up. “His name is Baby Jesus,” Flynn said. She decided that this must be his name, since she couldn’t find the little figure that went with Mary and Joseph in the house barn. She assumed Baby Jesus was with Gladys Knight somewhere, underground where the Pips used to be.
“What?” Anna said. “What are you naming him?”
“Baby Jesus.”
Everybody at the table laughed at her.
“You can’t call a dog that, sweetheart,” Anna said.
“Why?” Flynn said.
“Why don’t you call him Buddha?” Jack said. “He’s fat like a Buddha.”
“He’s fat like a Buddha now, but he’s going to be big as all outdoors,”
Anna said. “He’s from a far-flung kennel specializing in large Border collies.” She winked at Marvin, who laughed.
Flynn fed turkey to the dog, who was already helping himself to her plate as they sat together on the couch. “May we be excused?”
Anna nodded to her, uncorked the sixth bottle of wine for the evening. The heavy drinking didn’t feel entirely celebratory. Jack and Stuart, unlike the energetic pair she remembered meeting, seemed strained and tense; Mike had left as soon as the plates were cleared. Greta didn’t even look up when he said goodbye. Even Marvin, normally the one Anna counted on for his gift of small talk, was dreamy and abstracted. Only Greta seemed happy—radiant, in fact, in the presence of the little girl she was planning to rename Agnes, after her mother, but who was Lily for now.
“You can put her in my room for a nap,” Anna said, when she saw Lily was getting sleepy. Greta nodded and stood.
“This was a lovely evening, Anna,” Jack said, and smiled at her.
Anna took his hand and squeezed it. “I hope I’m not hearing ‘but we really have to go’ next. Because there’s pie and coffee. And leftovers for the midnight snack after the movie.”
“Oh? There’s a movie?” Jack said, leaning forward.
Marvin turned to look at her. She hadn’t planned on any movie; it just came out of her mouth the minute it popped into her head. “Yep. A Thanksgiving tradition around here.
Fiddler on the Roof
.” Anna didn’t especially like this movie—one of several videos left in the hall closet by the previous tenant—but she didn’t want the evening to end.
As the day wore on, the idea of moving, of selling this townhouse grew from a possibility to a certainty. This wasn’t the right environment for Flynn. Anna had been worried about her all day, concerned about the look in Flynn’s eyes, a wild-eyed look, as though she was buried under the weight of sorrow or fear—Anna couldn’t say which.
Anna started the movie, then went to check on Flynn. She was sitting up in bed, the puppy in her lap, and reading the Bible aloud. Anna smiled. The dog was pretty cute. It wore an expression of worried concentration, as if he was truly concerned with the message of the book of Revelation.
Back in the living room, Anna gathered up the dessert plates and coffee cups and took them into the kitchen. Greta followed her, grabbed a dishtowel. “Oh, don’t do that,” Anna said. “There’s not a lot.”
“Why not? Lily’s asleep. And I’m not into musicals much. Sorry.”
“Neither am I. But isn’t it great? No obnoxiously loud football game.”
Greta took a plate from Anna’s hand, and it slipped to the floor and shattered. She burst into tears.
“It’s fine. It wasn’t even mine. It was here when I got here. It couldn’t have been uglier.”
“Sorry.”
“Leave it. I’ll clean it up later.” Anna dunked her hands in the hot, lemony water. “What’s the matter, dear?” Just then, she heard Flynn laugh—laugh! How long had it been?—and Jack’s teasing voice. She wanted to rush in to see the pink flush that was surely on her granddaughter’s face. She had Poppy’s laugh, Anna decided, looked like her mother when she giggled, which she was doing now. Anna smiled, felt a flutter of happiness.
She looked over at Greta, knew what Greta was going to say before she said it.
“I’m leaving him. As soon as Lily’s adoption papers are final. I had him followed.” Greta’s face was ashen.
“Where’s he been?”
Greta laughed bitterly. “It’s humiliating. All along I’d been preparing myself for some hot young thing, some whiplash blonde or buxom brunette, but
this
. It seems I’m competing with flowers for my husband’s attention.”
Anna turned the water off. “What?”
“All those times he’s been gone. Hours and hours, claiming he’s just driving around….”
“Yeah. Where was he?”
“The botanical gardens. Sitting for hours among the gerbera daisies and Eleanor roses.”
Anna laughed in surprise.
“Yeah, that’s what I did when the investigator told me. The P.I. said, ‘Is your husband a religious man, Mrs. Allen? Because I watched him and his lips were moving like he was talking to the flowers, then I realized he must be praying.’”
“I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” Anna said. “Well, but it’s not entirely bad, is it?”
“How can it be in any way good? My husband would rather stare at a bunch of plants than at me. He should be home helping me paint Lily’s nursery. Sometimes I think the only reason he agreed to adopt Lily was that she was named after a flower. ‘Stargazer Lily’ he calls her. Christ.”
“Wow,” Anna said. “Wow. You mean to tell me all those hours, all those missing hours, he’s been hanging around gardens and parks?”
“Yes. There were two weekend trips. Business trips, Mike said. That’s where the investigator thought he would nail him. He followed him to a cabin near the border of Maine. But no other woman, just more botany. Two days he spent bundled up in parkas staring at the vegetation.” She took the saucepan from Anna’s hand.
“My God,” Anna said. “Did you confront him?”
“Partially. I feel like a fool. What do you say? ‘I know you’ve been seeing the birches. I know about Daisy and Rose’? I did tell him that a friend saw him at the botanical gardens when he claimed to be at a business lunch.”
“What did he say?” Anna emptied the water carafe into the fern on the windowsill.
“He said it made him less lonely to sit among beautiful things. I don’t even want to consider the implications of that statement.”
They fell silent. “Mysteries,” Anna said finally. “What little mysteries people are.”
Flynn came into the kitchen just as they were finishing up the cleaning. “Baby Jesus had an accident.”
“Okay,” Anna said. “I’ll be right in. Go take him outside. He needs to go out every hour.”
Anna found all three men on the couch engrossed in the movie. It was the scene of the eldest daughter on her wedding day, the father bemoaning the passage of time with the melancholic “Sunrise, Sunset.”
“How’s the movie?” Anna asked, but all three of them were so engrossed in it that they didn’t look away, which Anna found comforting. The best kind of answer, she always thought, had no sound.
Five days before Christmas, Jack still didn’t have plans for the holidays. Most days he stayed in, baffled and amazed at how few friends he had; all of his friendships in the past, the ones he and Stuart shared as a couple,
were nurtured and sustained by Stuart. Jack hand’t appreciated Stuart’s gracious elegance until now, how making guests comfortable was an art unto itself. He had one friend, two, if he counted Anna, whom he had talked to a handful of times since Thanksgiving and who promised to visit just as soon as she could. Jane came over every week, every Wednesday, with a briefcase full of work for Jack from the firm. Sick as he felt most times, he couldn’t bear idleness, so he arranged with Hank Sherman to be hired on as a consultant. It was easy work and Jack could determine the pace. He had only to study the portfolios of the accounts handled by the new young hires and offer his assessment of their investment strategies.