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“No.”There’s no hiding the panic in my voice now. I turn back to the road, taking a few more steps before I answer her again. “She’s almost here. It’s fine.”
Mom beams at me. “I’m so happy you’re finding some time to be social.” She waves her whole arm over her head. The movement like,I’m proud of youthismuch.
I walk away before my mother can find another thing to be overly helpful about. The reminder, in Jesse’s voice, to let my parents coddle me hangs low like a storm cloud. It’s one thing to tell my parents that my friend Jesse is coming over to help out in the yard. It’s another to tell them that I’m in a psych department study and we’re going to the animal shelter together in the hopes of making friends with other grown adults. Because who can’t make friends?
Me and thirty other adults, apparently.
I stop in the middle of the driveway once I’ve rounded the sharp corner toward the road, muddy pothole water slowly seeping into my sneaker. “What am I doing?” I mutter.
It’s so overwhelming sometimes: the work I have to do, preparing for my next class, writing a proposal for a class that will probably never see the light of day; the petty urge to compose a scathing letter back to my Betrayer in Chief; the desire to meet new people and the warring need to hide under my bed because if I don’t try then I can’t get hurt; figuring out how to handle the video call with my old colleague at Lancaster, the final sign that maybe I should do what Dad wants me to do. Maybe I should rest on my father’s laurels one last time and just leave.
The thought rocks me back on my heels. It’s kind of devastating, having to go back to Brian and Nora’s Island of Disloyalty—which is what they should rename the British Isles—and not even being able to dothatwithout my father’s help.
“Hey.” Jesse stands at the top of the drive, his truck idling behind him. “Are you alright?”
I blink. Am I? Suddenly I feel like crying, like all of the overwhelm is leaking out of my tear ducts.
He meets me halfway, his hands stuffed into the pockets of jeans tight enough that I shouldn’t be thinking about them. Not when we’re friends.
I wave my hand at him, the one with a bandage my father has painstakingly wrapped for me every day since I cut my hand open. He squints against the sun. “I could have met you at your door,” he says. I’d sent him a text this morning about stopping at the top of the driveway.
“I don’t want to sacrifice your undercarriage to our driveway any more than I have already.” I gesture to the potholes and divots and tracks made by our cars over many years. “Dad keeps saying he’ll fix it himself—what with his boundless knowledge of grading and asphalt and...” I shake my head.
Jesse presses his lips together in a new face. Not a smile, not a Grump Face, but one I put into my mental catalog under “Ways Jesse Communicates.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m not... I don’t think my dad remembers how old he is sometimes. He’s not in the best shape despite being mentally sharper than me.”
Jesse nods. “You want him to take care of himself.”
I nod back. I do. My dad is my hero, but his brand of heroism is doing more harm than good. Maybe he wasn’t trying to help at all, maybe he was trying to tell me the whole time that I shouldn’t have come back here, and I was too consumed with my own mortification to listen. Maybe I’m making myself suffer, through the humiliation of my job, of this study, for nothing.
“Lu?” Jesse frowns. I think that might be the first time he’s called me Lu. It’s familiar. A name my parents have used forever, a name a friend would use. “You ready to go be friendly?” He says “friendly” like someone might say “roasted” or “impaled.”
“Yeah.” I smile, for real this time, warmer, like the feeling planted low in my belly at the sound of his voice. I breathe deep, the smell of the mud in my parents’ driveway, the smell of Jesse’s fabric softener caught on the breeze. Jesse’s here, he’s doing this. He’s a part of this now and so am I. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Nine
Jesse
The interior of the one-story, long, gray building smells like bleach with an underlying stench of animals and pee. Despite the smell, the floors gleam like they’ve just been mopped, the windows looking into the kennels are crystal clear, and there isn’t a hairball in sight. At the front desk, a brown-skinned woman with a bindi on her forehead and wearing deep purple lipstick sits at a computer. “Can I help you?” She doesn’t look up from the screen.
Lulu and I glance at each other. “We’re here for the...um...friendship event?” Lulu says, making it sound like we are Care Bears. The woman continues to tap away, her long burnt orange fingernails flying over the keyboard, double-clicks her mouse, then finally glances between us like a tennis match.
“Oh.The university thing? Right through this door. Follow me.” She grabs a set of keys hanging on the hook behind her and we follow her down an echoing tiled hallway. “Do y’all plan on adopting any dogs today?”
Lulu winces, shrugs. “Is that mandatory?”
She laughs. “No. But you should think about it. Dogs really are people’s best friends.” The attendant pushes through swinging doors at the end of the hall and we’re assaulted with noise. Laughter and talking and yips and barks. A few people I recognize from Pete’s bar greet us as we step into the room but most of their attention is—rightfully—on the dogs. Old mutts, well-bred puppies, a fair number of pit bulls, and a lot more small dogs than I expected to see play in an open kennel area or in fenced-off pens. Everyone is down on the floor, rolling around with them and tossing a ball across a long turf-covered dog run. At the other end of the room, a group of three each have a dog on a leash and wait at another set of doors to go outside with them.
I thought we’d get a tour of the place. That they’d let a few people take a dog or two out of its kennel. But not this. This is a dog circus. This is like a dog café but there’s no coffee and extra dogs. “This is...” I turn to Lulu, my astonishment at the scale of this event evident in my tone. But she’s gone.
“Look! Jesse, look!” Lulu is on the floor a few feet away, a dog the size of a loaf of bread in her lap. “His name is Spot and hehasa spot. Look at his spot, Jesse.” Lulu holds the dog up, a bit awkwardly since the dog obviously does not like levitation and wriggles in her hands, the spot in question around its eye, brown against white fur. She hugs him to her chest, and he licks her chin, forgiven. She giggles and laughs until she has to put his wiggling body down. “Isn’t he cute?” she asks it in that way that can accept no other answer but the affirmative.
“He’s really cute,” I say dutifully.
And so is she. Cute, happy, glowing. I look away. If I don’t look away, I’m going to smile. I’m going to smile as big as she smiles. Meet her where she’s at. It will be obvious that as much as we are friends, just friends, I think she’s fucking beautiful. And smart. And charming. And she makes my stomach feel tight, but not in a bad way, when I look at her.
In a really good way, in fact.
