Stella stepped toward her sister-in-law, forcing her up against the wall, and she grabbed Mickey’s face in her right hand. Mickey was too surprised to squeal.
“This isn’t about money, you stupid bitch.” Stella pinched harder—she would be only too satisfied to see purple circles like clown rouge on Mickey’s face tomorrow—and then released her. “You get your act together and find somewhere to live or I will call the cops and report you all.”
“For what?” Mickey said between her sobs.
“I’ll think of something.” Stella stepped away from her sister-in-law. “You go get your little girls at my house now. They need their mother, even if she is a stupid bitch.”
That was all the invitation Mickey needed to flee the kitchen. Stella heard her let herself out the front door. She turned to gaze out the window at the vivid green lawn of the backyard, where there was no sign of the monster, her father.
Now what?
Instinctively, Stella felt her work wasn’t quite done. She took a carving knife out of the drawer by the sink and let herself out onto the back porch to wait for her father.
MORE THAN TWO HOURSand no sign of Penny. Bernadette was hoarse but stubborn. She couldn’t call out anymore, so she clapped as she walked up and down the wetland paths. The heat had receded, leaving the damp air feeling falsely cool, and the diagonal light of the yellow-orange sun splattered among the knee-high reeds where the marsh water pooled.
Bernie cried silently as she walked and clapped. It was too much time. If Penny had been here she would have come by now. She’d walked every footpath between the highway and the ocean for a stretch of two miles. She’d whistled and poked unwillingly with a stick among clumps of bushes, hoping she did not find a carcass. Not knowing would be better than knowing at that point, she thought. She could not know that Penny had been adopted by a loving beach family just as easily as she could not know that Penny had been dismantled by raccoons.
She wiped the salty snot from her chin with the inside of her striped Gardener’s uniform sleeve and blinked away her tears. No mourning in front of her grandfather; only rage. She watched him from this distance as he stood twenty feet from the car, clapping halfheartedly every so often. Bernie had locked him out of the car so there was no way he could avoid the task she’d set him. The old goat was going to stick it out till it was over.
Well. It was over. There was nothing more she could do here.
The bastard. Bernadette wished, earnestly, that he would die.
She was heading back to the car—more than halfway there, how close she came to missing—when she heard the rustling and stopped. Yes, rustling in the grasses, the length of a football field away, but she heard it.
“Penny,” she croaked, embarrassed at her own hopefulness. She cleared her throat. “Penny!”
The dog ran toward her, reeds parting as she barreled through, her coppery fur ratted and her little legs covered in mud.
“Penny!”She knelt, and the dog leapt into her arms. Her legs were so weak and shaky that she missed and hit her chin on Bernie’s knee. Bernie scooped her up like an infant, cradling her and cupping her face and crying helplessly. It was too good to be true—Bernadette felt that God, whose existence she had been questioning all summer, had given her a miracle. The sweet little dog should have been dead—three days in this hostile wilderness with nothing to eat. But here she was.
On the drive home, Bernadette blasted the radio and sang along euphorically to the Rolling Stones. She rode with Penny in her lap, stroking the dog’s heaving ribs whenever she didn’t have her hand on the stick shift. Grandpa Tony was quiet in the passenger seat. Bernie hoped he was swimming in shame.
As the highway approached Hartford and she got ready to take their exit, Bernadette turned the radio all the way down. “Old man,” she said to him. “You ever touch this dog again—you ever touch any of our animals—I will kill you myself. Okay?” When she said it, she meant it. She was not a violent person, but rationally, if an act of violence was for the good of society, she could do it, she thought. And this would be a service. “I will kill you myself, with my own two hands.”
He snorted, but he didn’t say anything. They pulled into the driveway at number 3 Alder Street and Bernadette leapt out of the car with Penny clutched to her chest, slamming the door behind her and leaving her grandfather to walk himself home.
STELLA WAS SITTING ON THE BACK PORCHof 4 Alder Street at 5:15P.M. when Tina came over to check on her father after work.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at your job?” Tina asked. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for the old man to get home,” Stella said. She showed Tina the carving knife she was hiding behind her leg. “I had to take today off work so I can tell him I’m going to kill him. He needs a little fear in his life.”
“Stella!” Tina was alarmed.
“Come here, Tina.” Stella patted the porch beside her. “I want to tell you why I want to kill him, but I have to whisper.”
Tina listened to the whole story with wide eyes. “But what can you do, Stella?” she said at last.
“I can tell him I’m going to kill him if he does it again.”
“You can’t do that.” Tina was scandalized.
“Why not?”
“You can’t say that to your father!”
“Can’t I?” Stella snapped.
