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I started to laugh at her untethered use of the word fuck but cleared my throat. “Okay, but what are they doing here?”
“Well, they were so cute, and Presley wanted one and was gonna take the rest to town to—” A hiccup. “ ’Scuse me. To town tomorrow to see if anyone wanted them or she’d drive them to the animal shelter. And I was sitting there with that box in my lap and was looking at those little babies with no mama to take care of them, and I … well, I …” Her voice wavered, and tears welled in her eyes so high, they touched her pupils. “They’re all alone. And so am I. And so are you. So I brought us puppies. This one’s yours.”
She shoved a puppy into my chest.
“No, wait. This one’s yours.”
She shoved the other puppy into my chest, clutching the first one to hers.
I looked down at the furry, squiggly thing, taking it with no small amount of reluctance. “I don’t want a dog.”
“Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it?” she said to the puppy in her arms in a schmoopy voice. “Jake, aren’t they just so sweet? I could just eat him up.”
“That one’s a girl.”
She glanced for confirmation. “Well, I guess I’ll have to pick a new name. Kevin isn’t exactly neutral, is it?” When she looked up, her nose was a little red, but her eyes were clear. Until she got a good look at me and her face melted into that doe-eyed expression girls got when they looked at a baby.
“Awww, Jake! You’re holding a puppy.” She giggled, but her eyes were shiny again like she was going to cry. “And your shirt’s all unbuttoned. And you don’t have shoes on! I can’t handle it.” She brightened up with an idea. “Let me take a picture of you.” She was already fumbling for her phone.
“Pass.” I dumped the puppy back in her arms with its sibling. “I don’t want a dog, and I don’t want to be all over your stupid social media.”
She made a dramatic grump face and said in a doofy mocking male voice, “I don’t wanna be on the interwebs with the TikTokers and InstantGrammars. You are such a fuddy-duddy. And you can’t say no to the puppy.”
The puppy was back in my arms. “Trust me, I can.”
I tried to give it back, but she pushed it in my direction, her face twisting in a sad sort of frustration.
“Listen, you asshole—you need this puppy, and she needs you. You won’t let me be your friend, so please, take the dog. She doesn’t have anybody else to take care of her, and you don’t have anyone to take care of you. We don’t have Pop anymore, Jake. And I don’t have you and you don’t have me because you’re such a stupid jerk and you never have a shirt on when you know it makes me all …” She crossed her eyes and circled her ear with her pointer finger. “So take the goddamn dog! And I’ll take mine. And then we won’t be alone anymore.”
A slice of white-hot pain cut through me at the despair in her words. At the knowledge on their heels. At the look on her sad, angry face and those shiny tears still in her eyes. How she’d gone through so many forms of tears in such a short period of time astounded me. But that was Olivia. She felt everything. And she always tried to find a way to be happy despite her circumstance. Which, at the moment, was pretty shitty.
And all I’d done was make it worse, simply because I was scared of losing anything else that meant something to me. I’d lost enough.
She was right. We were alone. And we needed a friend, canine and human both.
I looked down at the puppy, and it looked up at me, its little pink tongue darting out and its needle nails shredding the outside of my hand. I glanced toward its tail.
“One problem.”
“What now?”
“This one’s a boy.”
With a relieved laugh, she rolled her eyes. “I swear, I know my way around genitalia.”
We shared a look. The color in her cheeks flared enough to see even in the near dark.
Her chin lifted. “I stand by that statement in any context.”
I held the puppy out for inspection. “Kevin’s a dumb name—only accountants are named Kevin. He looks more like a Rhett.”
“Ugh, you country people. Why can’t Kevin be an accountant? Just let him live his life already.”
“A farm dog needs a good old-fashioned name. Like Buck. Hank maybe. Nash? Ryder? What do we think of Ryder, buddy?”
“So he needs to be a cowboy?”
“Anything’s better than an accountant.”
She stepped next to me to assess the puppy with me. “What about Bowie? You can pretend it’s after the knife, and I can pretend like it’s of the Major Tom variety.”
