My Boyfriends' Dogs (2 page)

“Rune,” I say again, confirming the sound of it.

Louie gives me a tired nod, then shouts back to Rune the Identity-Crisis Guy. “You go ahead and have your say, Rune. My friend here won't mind.”

“Your friend?” Rune shouts. “Your
friend
?” He scowls at my three dogs. They're curled on top of each other, being as good as I've ever seen them be. Rune points at us, and the tattoos circling his gigantic arm bulge. He sputters, but no real words come out.

“My new friend,” Louie answers calmly, the tiniest grin tugging at the corners of his mouth.

Rune reaches around to untie his apron, then throws it to the floor. “Okay then. Your
friend's
dogs are going to get this joint shut down. You got any idea the kind of fines that health inspector will slap on you for having three dogs—three
wet
dogs—in your restaurant?”

I hadn't thought of that. “He's right, Louie. I'm really sorry.” I shove back my chair to get up, but Louie reaches across the table and pats my hand.

“You stay put, young lady,” Louie says. “It would be worth a whole heap of fines to hear what such a pretty young woman as yourself, dressed in just about the finest gown I've ever seen, is doing in a café in St. Louis with her three dogs at this time of night.”

“Technically, they're my boyfriends' dogs,” I admit.

“You steal them dogs?” asks Identity-Crisis Guy. “From your boyfriend? ”

“Boyfriends. Plural,” I correct.

“She didn't steal these dogs,” Louie insists, rushing to my defense. “Do these dogs look stolen to you, Rune?” He turns to me. “You tell him, Bailey.”

I glance at the back table, where the younger guy is still sitting alone, studying the
Dispatch
in the dim light of the closed café. When I don't answer Louie and Rune right away, this guy looks over at us, and I think,
Ha! You are so listening.
I'll bet he's been listening all along.

“Well, it's a long story, about the prom, and me being here with the dogs and everything.” I'm explaining all this to Louie. Only I'm still looking back at the corner guy, and he's still looking back at me. It feels a little like the stare-down contests Amber and I used to get into in elementary school.

“Long story, you say?” Louie asks. “Well, we got time for long stories at Louie's. Contemplating that storm outside, I'd say a long story might be the best thing on the menu right about now. Wouldn't you say so, Colt?” He hollers this last part to Staring Corner Guy.

“Can't argue with that, Louie,” replies Colt the Corner Guy. “But then I know better than to argue with you about anything.” He gets up and strolls across to the other side of the room, where he lifts a green sweater from the coatrack. He shakes it out and carries it over to our table. He's almost as tall as Louie, fit as a Lab, but he moves like a greyhound, sleek and confident.

Towering over me, he looks older than I thought, definitely a college guy. He has nice eyes, beagle eyes, round and dark. There's something familiar about him, but maybe it's just those eyes. I love beagles.

He puts the ghastly green sweater around my shoulders. It's ugly, but warm. I stick my arms into the sleeves and sniff my elbow. Faint tobacco and cheap perfume. I start to make a comment about the similarities between this color and pond scum, but I think better of it.

“Whose sweater is it?” I ask, rolling up the sleeves and wrapping the sweater over my gown's glittery bodice, covering hundreds of tiny hand-sewn pearls.

“This sweater has been hanging on that same hook, ruining the atmosphere, ever since I started coming here,” Colt explains. “I don't think your customer will mind if your new friend borrows it, do you, Louie?”

“I'd say you're right, Colt,” Louie answers with an ease that lets me know they're good friends. He motions for Colt to sit down with us.

Colt grabs a chair off the next table and slides it to ours. Before he sits down, though, he grabs another chair and sets it on the other side of the table. If this other chair is for Identity-Crisis Guy Rune, he doesn't take Colt up on the offer.

Colt eases into the chair next to mine, and I try to ignore how boyishly cute he is. Or how he smells fresh like the rain, in a good way. Or how his eyes shine, even in dim light.

This is
so
not the time. I'm still in my prom dress, for crying out loud.

“Go ahead now, Miss Bailey,” Louie says, nodding to me. “We're listening.”

“Are you sure you want to hear—?” I begin.

But Colt stops me with a raised, just-a-minute finger. “I was hoping we could exchange names first.” He reaches down to Adam, my terrier, and scratches the dog right under his chin, the exact spot Adam loves to have scratched. “I'm Colt.” He looks over at me, his mouth barely giving in to a smile as he raises an eyebrow like he's asking my name in exchange.

I give it. “Bailey. Bailey Daley.”

Identity-Crisis Guy snorts a laugh from behind the counter. His back is to us, and he's wiping the same spot he was five minutes ago.

“I was actually asking for the dogs' names,” Colt says, shooting me that dimpled grin again.

I'm pretty sure my face is turning red, but the light's so dim in here, it probably doesn't show. “The dogs' names? Adam and Eve and Shirley.”

“Adam and Eve and Shirley?” Colt asks, like I'm making this up.

Rune, still safely behind the counter, groans.

“Which is which?” Louie asks, without a hint of doubting or joking in his voice.

I point to the appropriate canine as I list off the names. “Shirley the Shih Tzu, Eve the Dalmatian. And Adam.” Poor Adam has put on so much weight. He used to be skinny. “Hard to believe I've had Adam since I was a sophomore,” I say to myself more than anybody else. “Adam was my first.”

Adam thumps his rat tail and turns his broad head to me. The dog has no neck, just a bunch of wrinkles around his collar. I stare into the plump white terrier's eyes and see the eyes of his master. Green eyes.

“I had a dog just like this when I was a boy,” Louie says, reaching over to pet Adam. “Pure mutt. He loved everybody he met. And everybody sure loved him.”

“Tell me about it,” I mutter, thinking, remembering.

Louie leans back in his chair and folds his arms across his chest. “No, you tell me about it. How'd that be?”

LOUIE OF ST. LOUIE

LOUIE TRIES TO GET COMFORTABLE as he studies the nice-looking girl in the fancy gown and waits for her to tell them her story. He should have known the second he heard the tap on the door that this was going to be a long night at Louie of St. Louie's.

Truth is, he nearly went on up to bed right before closing time. Rune isn't the best cook Louie ever had, not by a long shot, but the big guy can handle cleanup and closing. They only had one customer after dinner hours, and that was just Colt. The kid has been stopping by almost every night for a couple of months, always for a tall glass of apple juice and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
But he never stayed past closing.

Louie's been living above the café for almost ten years, ever since his Lily passed. He hasn't missed the old house either, not without Lily in it. It wasn't the same house. That's all. And with the boys grown, with grown boys of their own living clear across the country, he doesn't need but the three rooms upstairs.

But he didn't go up to bed tonight. Since the cancer first reached his bones, sleep hasn't been something Louie looks forward to. He feels it in his bones that it won't be too long now before he'll be with his Lily again. That'll be all right.

Then he heard that knocking and opened the door. Finding a wet gal dressed like a princess standing on the threshold was just about the last thing he expected. But there she was. And here she is.

Here they all are.

“We are all ears, Ms. Bailey Daley,” he tells the pretty young girl wrapped in the green sweater. “You want Rune to fetch you something to eat while you tell us your story?”

“Kitchen's closed!” Rune shouts back.

Louie worries that Rune will give himself an ulcer one day . . . or somebody else. How that man stays married to his fine wife is one of life's great mysteries. “Now, now, Rune. We got bread and cold cuts, don't we?”

The girl reaches across the table and touches Louie's hand. Her hand is warm now, at least. The last strand of her coal black hair escapes from the fancy curls she had plastered to her head when she walked in. Now the curls bounce around her face like coils of fine black licorice. She reminds Louie of his granddaughter, Jason's girl.

“I'm not hungry, Louie. Really. Thanks, though.” She turns toward the kitchen. “Thank you too, Rune!”

She's something, this little gal in her fancy gown.

“I'm not sure where to start,” she admits, shaking her hair so it falls around her shoulders, covering the green sweater.

Colt moves his chair in closer so he can see her face. Louie figures the young fella wants to hear this as much as he does.

“How about starting at the beginning?” Louie suggests.

“The beginning, huh?” Bailey sighs. She reaches down and strokes the old white mutt at her feet. “I guess that means I start with you, doesn't it, boy?”

“Adam, right?” Colt asks.

“Right.” The girl settles back into her chair in a relaxed way she hasn't done since walking into Louie's. “It all started with Adam.”

They say there's a line that crosses the middle of the whole universe. They say you can't see that line. But if you step over it, if you cross it, there's no going back.

I crossed that line on March 19 of my sophomore year in high school. And I didn't even realize it—not fully anyway—until the end of May, so of course by then it was too late to do much about it.

The morning began like most school mornings. I woke, showered, and then stood in front of the full-length mirror, my eyes firmly shut while I recited my morning mantra:

I opened my eyes and studied my reflection. Then I tossed my dog-eared copy of
Teen Mind Over Teen Matters: The Art of Positive Thinking
into the trash, where it belonged.

“Bailey!” my mother hollered up the hall at me. “Hurry, will you?”

“I'm hurrying,” I called back, examining the horribly outdated contents of my closet. What
would
a sixteen-year-old with extraordinarily large breasts, a fantastic bod, and hair to die for wear on a bright spring day?

I might have settled for stonewashed jeans and a wrinkly T-shirt, but Amber and I had vowed to hold each other accountable for our last two remaining New Year's resolutions: 1) Dress better, so that we'd 2) Land our first boyfriends.

I'd had zero luck with number two, so the least I could do was try to stick with number one. I settled on a denim mini (Amber assured me they were back) and a gray-and-white-striped rugby shirt.

“Look at this,” Mom said as soon as I stepped into the kitchen. She didn't look up from the classifieds. “Three garage sales between here and school.”

“Mom,” I whined. “Not on the way
to
school. Promise.”

Now she looked up. My mom could have passed for my sister, which was sometimes fun, like when we went to Florida and they carded her every time she ordered white wine, which was exactly why she ordered it. Or, not so fun, like when the lifeguard hit on her instead of me. She was shorter than me and could still wear jeans she'd worn in high school. Plus, she had great hair, and great hazel eyes that were now aimed at my semi-bare thighs. “Bailey, was your skirt that short when we bought it, or did you grow six inches when I wasn't looking?”

I grabbed a bagel. “Isn't it garbage pickup day in Grove?”

“You're right!”

My mother was so easy to distract it almost took the fun out of it. Rich people in the Grove district threw away furniture that cost more than our house.

“We
have
to go there on the way to school, Bailey.”

“Grove isn't on the way to school.”

“Well, sort of. If Fourth Street were blocked off like it is for parades. And if they were doing construction again on Elm.” Mom gulped her coffee.