The dog relaxed a little, and Quinn wondered if maybe she’d been taking the wrong tack, cooing and patting. Maybe the dog could sense the condescension in her voice the same way she could sense it in Bill’s. No wonder it was cowering under a truck.
The cold crept through her coat and the knees of her gabardine pants, and Quinn shifted on the concrete, trying to find a warm place. There wasn’t one. “You know,” she said to the dog, “we could be having this conversation in my car. With the heater going.”
The dog cocked its head at her, still tense but photogenic as hell.
“I’m freezing my ass off here,” Quinn said. “Why don’t we go be cute in the car?”
“You owe me. McKenzie.” Jason called as he jogged up beside her and dropped the bag on the ground. “Change is in the bag. I pass art for this, right?”
Quinn unwrapped the first burger, breaking it in half and then in quarters as she talked to the dog. “Look, see, I’m a good person. Food.”
She shoved the first piece under the truck as far she could and then moved her hand back, so the dog could come forward. It stared at the food, but it didn’t move. “It’s okay, it’s good,” she said, and felt Jason kneel down beside her.
Jason peered under the van again. “It’s too scared to take the burger. We’re going to have to go get it.”
“No,” Quinn said. “We can’t scare it more—”
“Look, McKenzie, sometimes nice isn’t the way to go.” Jason talked to her like an equal, which should have been insolent but wasn’t. They were equals. They were saving a dog. “If it was hungry enough for the food to get it, we’d have it by now. This part isn’t working.”
“So what’s your plan?” Quinn said.
Jason ducked his head to look under the van again. “It’s cornered against the wheel and the tire. It can run out the front or this side, that’s all. We toss it the burger pieces, I go under and grab it while it’s distracted, and you stay down at the end in case I miss and it shoots out the front.”
It wasn’t all that different from Bill’s plan, Quinn knew. But it was. Jason cared about the dog. “You got it,” she said and handed over the rest of the burger.
Jason squirmed his shoulder under the van to throw the pieces toward the dog, and Quinn stumbled to her feet on the ice and went around to the front of the van. She looked under it in time to see the dog lean toward the meat. Jason’s hand shot out and grabbed the dog’s leg, and then all hell broke loose.
This was one dog that didn’t want to be caught. The shrieking and yelping echoed under the metal van, and Jason cursed as he pulled the struggling dog out by one leg. Quinn caught the dog just as Jason yanked it all the way out. She scooped it into her arms and cuddled it to her as it squirmed. “Did you get bit?” she said, and Jason stood up, brushing ice and dirt from his letter jacket.
“Nope,” he said. “That’s a polite little dog. Loud, though.” He picked up the bag and said, “There’s another burger in here to make friends with.” He ducked his head to look at the dog’s face. “Hey, you. You just found a nice lady to live with. Be nice, too.” He scratched the dog behind the ears even while it strained to be free, and then he grinned at Quinn as he handed her the bag. “See you.”
Bill pulled up in her car as he was walking away. Jason said, “Hey, coach,” and kept on walking without looking back. Usually, the lifters fought to bask in Bill’s glory; here was another thing about Jason Quinn liked.
“What was that all about?” Bill asked as he got out of the car, and Quinn said, “Jason got the dog out,” and slid past him into the drivers’ seat he’d just vacated.
Bill chuckled. Quinn loathed people who chuckled, she decided as she clutched the struggling dog. Nothing like a supercilious laugh to really piss a person off.
“Well, I’m glad you got the dog out,” he said, and she felt guilty again because he really was a nice guy.
“I’ll call you later,” she said, trying to hook the door closed with her elbow, and he motioned her arm away and shut the door for her. “Later,” she mouthed through the window, and then let the dog go.
It rolled into the passenger seat and then scrambled between the seats into the hatchback.
“Look,” Quinn said. “There is food involved. And no more grabbing, I swear.” She opened the bag and tore a piece off the second burger and threw it back to the dog.
The dog snarfed it down, gulping in its hurry.
“Come here,” Quinn said, and put the next piece closer, within her reach.
She heard voices outside the car, and turned to see Bill put his hand on the shoulder of one of the lifters. The kid looked toward the car, shook his head, and moved on. Bill looked back at her and shrugged and smiled. It took her a minute to catch on: he was trying to give her dog away. He thought he was helping, of course, but the dumbass was trying to give her dog away to a weight-lifter. Was he insane?
The dog climbed into the passenger seat and whimpered.
“Sorry,” Quinn said, and gave it another chunk of hamburger. “I got distracted.” The dog ate more slowly this time, watching every move Quinn made with what appeared to be grave suspicion but not terror. It was still shaking, but that was probably from the cold. Quinn turned the heater higher, knowing it was futile; CRXs are slow to warm up.
“I’m supposed to meet people at four,” she told the dog as she fed it another piece of the burger. “Darla and Stephanie. I’m late. You weren’t part of my plan.”
The dog ate the hamburger and then whined again until she’d fed it the whole thing. Not enough. It cocked its head at her, looking for more.
“Very cute,” she said, and patted her lap. “Come here, kid.”
The dog thought it over for a moment and then stood, its legs looking impossibly thin, nothing more than fur-covered bone.
“I’ll get you more food soon,” Quinn said, and the dog whined and quivered until she reached over and lifted it onto her lap.
Its shiny smooth coat was cold, no insulation to keep a body warm, and the dog shuddered against her, trying to get close to her heat. Quinn unbuttoned her coat and wrapped it around the dog’s shivering skinny little body until only its head poked out. “It’s okay,” she said again, and the dog looked up at her and then pushed its head under her coat, looking for complete warmth and safety.
“I’ll take care of you,” Quinn said, and wondered who she could give this one to, who would be kind enough and quiet enough and loving enough and attentive enough to make this dog happy.
Not a weight-lifter, that was for damn sure. Well, maybe Jason, but he hadn’t been interested. If he had been, he’d have said so. He’d only been in her second semester art class two days, but she already had a clear appreciation of Jason as somebody who got what he wanted. If he’d wanted this dog, she’d have been in his truck by now.
Who else?
Bill tapped on the window, and Quinn exhaled through her teeth in exasperation before she rolled it down. “What?”
“I think I’ve found somebody to take the dog.” Bill smiled at her reassuringly. Daddy knows best. Quinn looked beyond him and saw the tramp from the parking lot.
The man was old and looked as if he hadn’t had a bath since warm weather. His body stooped in a curve echoed by his red-veined nose, hunched in part from bad posture and in part to look into her car. Quinn held the dog tighter. The old man’s eyes were rheumy and his fingers poked through the holes in his gloves. This guy couldn’t take care of himself; how was he going to take care of a dog?
“Do you have a place to stay?” Quinn asked him, feeling guilty that she was willing to rescue a dog and not a human being in equally bad condition.
“Yes, ma’am.” The old man’s voice was gravely as he edged forward. “I’m staying in a nice little farm, out on the edge of town. That little dog would like it there.”
Quinn drew back a little. This whole situation was weird. Why would a tramp want this dog? She shot a glance a Bill. “I think I’ll just
hold onto the dog for awhile.”
“Quinn,” Bill said, exasperated, which raised her spirits a notch. “Who are you going to give it to?”
Good question. Not Darla. Darla was good at loving, but with three kids and two dogs already, not to mention a full-time job as a beautician and a part-time job as bookkeeper for her husband’s service station, there’d be no cherishing for this poor baby. And not Stephanie, with no understanding of animals, and a careless, forgetful way with affection, a husband who was allergic to dogs, and a brand new job as an English teacher that was already making her crazy. Stephanie sometimes forgot she had a daughter; she’d definitely forget she had a dog. And not her mother, who’d told her the last time she’d shown up with a stray, “No. I can’t take the responsibility. Beau is all I can handle,” while Beau slept the righteous sleep of the elderly dog on the floor behind them, canine potted plant.
The dog sighed and stirred against her, still shivering, and she patted the lump under her coat. Not Darla, Steph, or her Mom, but also not this tramp.
“Mr. Saylor said he’d be glad of the company,” Bill said. ‘Two good deeds at once.”
“No,” Quinn said.
“Why?” Bill said and Quinn wanted to say, “Because I want her.”
Except she couldn’t have a dog. Their apartment didn’t allow them which was understandable or had been up until today when suddenly it wasn’t, it was unfair, she should be able to have a dog, she should be able to have this dog. She cuddled the dog, irrationally angry, not just with Bill who had done nothing wrong, but also with Mr. Saylor who was trying to take the dog from her, her landlady, Mrs. Poole, who wouldn’t let her keep her, and her mother, and the world in general. After thirteen years of rescuing dogs, and finding homes for them, and watching other people cuddle and keep and name the dogs she’d saved, today she wanted to be the one to do the keeping. And the naming. It was January fifth, still time to make a New Year’s Resolution. This is the year I will get a dog. This is the year I will get a life.
Except she couldn’t have a dog.
“Maybe I’ll give it to Nick,” she told Bill. Nick was so laid back, he was almost catatonic. “No flair,” her sister Zoë had said when she’d walked out on him nineteen years before, “No zazz at all.” Which in this case was a plus; the last thing a nervous little dog needed was an owner with zazz.
“Nick does not want a dog,” Bill said.
“We don’t know that.” Quinn clutched the dog tighter. “He lives in that apartment above the garage so he won’t have a landlord problem. I bet he’d like this dog.” Okay, that was stretching the truth, but he might like the dog.
The dog snuggled closer, trying to crawl inside her warmth, and Quinn said, “Hey, baby.” It poked its head out of her coat and quivered up at her with anxious pit-dark eyes, soaking up warmth and anxious for love, shivering with need.
“I still think—“ Bill said, and Quinn said, “Good-bye,” without looking at him, and rolled the window up, still looking into the dog’s dark eyes. “You look like a Katie,” she told it. “K-k-k-Katie, just like the song. A pretty, skinny K-k-k-Katie.”
And then she thought, I named a dog. And even though she knew Nick would probably change the name, she bent closer and said, “Katie. Katie, Katie, Katie,” and the dog sighed and burrowed back into the dark warmth of her coat.
* * *
Nick Ziegler dropped the hood on the Toyota and pressed it down to make sure the latch caught. They had the all the lights on in the garage, but the place was still dim in the late afternoon winter sunshine, in spite of all the glass in the garage bay doors, in spite of how clean the glass was, thanks to Darla’s spit-clean management of the place. It was the kind of day to be home with a good book, maybe a fire if he’d had a fireplace, coffee laced with brandy, Paul Simon on the stereo. Or Springsteen. Anything instead of Celine Dion and the Top Ten Max played every day.
“Did you find it?” Max asked him from the door to the office.
“There is no oil leak.” Nick picked up a rag from the bench to make sure the car was clean, no fingerprints, no oil smears. Ziegler Brothers did good work.
“That’s what I told her,” Max said. “But she said, ‘Look again, please. That woman is just over cautious.”
Nick considered telling Max that Barbara Neidemeyer was not interested in a phantom oil leak, she was interested in a big, successful, good-old-boy half-owner of Ziegler Brothers Garage and Service Station, but he didn’t consider it for long. Max wasn’t interested in Barbara and even if he was, it was none of Nick’s business. People needed to go to hell in their own way, he’d decided long ago when he’d gone to hell in his, and if he had some scars from past screw-ups, he had some interesting memories, too. No point in getting in the way of Max’s interesting memories.
“She’s never been that fussy about her car before,” Max groused on. “You’d think she didn’t trust us anymore.”
Nick reconsidered tipping him off. Max wasn’t dumb, but he’d been married to Darla for seventeen years, so up until now she was all the woman he’d ever needed to know about, Darla being the kind of woman who occupied a man’s life permanently. Which was another reason not to tip Max off, come to think of it. If Barbara had plans for Max, Darla would take care of them.
Max squinted out one of the windows in the door to the first bay. “Did Bill knock Quinn up when we weren’t looking?”
Nick rubbed the oil off his fingers before he answered, making sure his voice was even. “Doesn’t seem like something Bill would do.”
“She’s going into Lois’s,” Max said, squinting through the dirty window. “And she looks like she’s holding her stomach and it’s big.”
The door was on Nick’s way to the sink anyway, so he ducked his head to look past Max’s ear. Quinn did look awkward, her brown coat bunched around her stomach, the dark bell of her pageboy haircut swinging forward as she bent over. “Maybe she’s sick,” he said and moved past Max to go out to her, and then she turned to lean into the door, and he saw a dog poke its head up from the neck of her coat. Not her stomach, another stray. “Forget it,” he told Max. “It’s a dog.”
“I am not adopting another dog,” Max said. “Two is more than enough.”
Nick went on to the sink. “Maybe she’s going to give it to Lois.”
“Quinn’s meeting Darla over there,” Max said gloomily. “She’ll talk her into it.” Then he brightened. “Unless Lois kicks her out for bringing the dog in. She’s awful particular about that restaurant.”
Nick nudged the tap with his wrist. “If Quinn wants to take the dog in, Lois will let her.” The hot water splashed over his hands and he scrubbed gritty soap into them, paying more attention than usual because he was irritated with Max and he didn’t like being irritated with Max; Max was the best person he knew, even with his godawful taste in music. It was that crack about Quinn that bothered him, even though Nick knew Max wouldn’t have thought that Quinn in trouble was funny, that Max would have been the first to help her if she was. It had just been a joke, the whole damn world knew Bill would never get Quinn in trouble, although he should have married her by now, not that it was any of Nick’s business. He turned the taps off and dried his hands, and heard Max finish a sentence he’d missed the beginning of. “What?”
“I said, Lois would have to be in an awful good mood to let that happen.”
“She probably is.” Nick’s annoyance made him go on to add a little grief to Max’s life. “Darla said Barbara dumped Matthew.”
Max looked as startled as was possible for somebody with a permanently calm face. “What?”
“Barbara Niedemeyer set Lois’s husband free,” Nick said. “Darla says everybody thinks he’s going back to Lois. Don’t you ever talk to your wife?”
Max pointed a finger at Nick. “Anything else Barbara wants checked, you’re doing.”
“Why don’t you just run a full check on the damn car now so she doesn’t have to come back,” Nick said.
“Save us both a lot of trouble.”
“She’s a good-looking woman,” Max said. “Good job at the bank. You check the car.”
“I don’t need a woman with a good job,” Nick said. “The car’s all yours.”
“You own half the garage,” Max said. “You’re better looking than I am. Hell, you’re single. Why isn’t she asking you to check her oil leak?”
“I didn’t tell Darla that Barbara was asking you to fix her car—” Nick began.
“Good,” Max said.
“—but she’s going to find out anyway,” Nick finished. “You might as well face trouble head on.”
Max looked skeptical. “Which is what you always do, except I’ve never seen it.”
“No, I duck trouble.” Nick moved past him to start on Mrs. Conn’s Chevy. “But I can do that because I’m fast on my feet. You aren’t.” He heard Max let out a sigh behind him and then a couple of minutes later, from under the Chevy, he heard the hood go up on Barbara’s Toyota again. Max was no dummy.”
“Nick?” Max said.
“Yeah?”
“Sorry about that crack about Quinn. I didn’t mean it the way it came out.”
Nick stared up at the salt-pitted underside of the Chevy and thought of Quinn, determined and exasperating and solid, the complete opposite of her crazy sister. Quinn in trouble wasn’t funny. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I know you’re close.”
“Not that close.”
When Max didn’t say anything else, Nick put his mind back where it belonged, on the Chevy. Cars were understandable. They took a little patience and a lot of knowledge, but they always worked the same way. They were fixable. Which was more than he could say for people. Nothing a good mechanic could do about Quinn and Bill not getting married, or Max and Darla and Barbara, for that matter. Any more than anybody could have fixed him and Zoë. He didn’t think about Zoë much any more, even the news she’d gotten married six years ago hadn’t made much than a crease in his concentration, although Quinn had been worried for him. But for some reason today, things were getting to him. That crack about Quinn, Barbara and Max even though Max wasn’t a cheater, things that didn’t matter, that weren’t true, all of sudden things like that were bothering him. This was why it was a bad idea to think about people.