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Bernadette seemed pretty upset when she looked down at Smuckers’s water bowl. I made Carly fill it and we got out of there as quickly as possible after that.
That was the first step down the slippery slope of being a pet whisperer.
Bernadette’s next move was a masterful one. From a different bench, she spotted Carly playing Frisbee in the park with some girlfriends. She asked her if she’d walk Smuckers for thirty bucks—just around the park.
Carly jumped at it and treated her friends to frozen yogurt afterward. Days later came the big ask—Bernadette wanted Carly to be her permanent dog walker, once a day, an easy thirty bucks. No doubt she suspected how badly Carly would want it, and probably figured I wasn’t going to let Carly walk the streets of Manhattan alone with that dog.
I said no to Carly at first, but eventually I relented, after making Carly agree that twenty-five out of every thirty bucks would go to a college fund. And, really, dog walking is a legit service, unlike pet whisperer. Especially for Bernadette.
From then on, we’d stop off at Bernadette’s apartment on the way home from Carly’s school. We’d grab Smuckers and do an errand or two. Sometimes we’d take him to watch the neighborhood mimes. We feel sorry for them, because they are really not at all talented, but they always brighten up in a gleeful mime way when Smuckers comes around.
Little by little, Smuckers began delivering safety-conscious or morale-boosting messages to Bernadette. She was so alone, and Smuckers was the only one she seemed inclined to listen to. It felt like a public service.
Sometimes I’d wonder if Bernadette sensed our kinship—my summer as a universally hated media sensation and her present as a despised neighborhood fixture.
Either way, that money was a kindness to Carly and to me. Another reason I didn’t feel inclined to press for more for Smuckers’s upkeep.
True, I’d switched over his food from frozen raw rabbit meat to a sad dime-store brand, and the closest Smuckers has had to a blowout at a dog salon with original Warhol art is a brightly colored dog brush dragged through her fur, but Smuckers has a great life with lots of fawning attention from teenaged girls.
I decide I’ll go to the reading anyway, though, because if Bernadette left money for Smuckers to go to his special groomer and vet and all that, well, that was the bargain I’d made.
Luckily, the reading is during school hours the following week. It takes place on the Upper East Side and the letter specifically requests Smuckers’s presence.
I brush him extra well, put a dapper black-sequined bow tie on him, bundle him into his flowered carrying case, and set off. I throw a buck into the mimes’ hat set on the way to the subway station. I transfer at 59th and Lex and then walk a few blocks. I budgeted extra time so I wouldn’t have to splurge on a cab.
It’s cool for early September—autumn is definitely in the air. My iPhone map function guides me deeper and deeper into a neighborhood where I’ve never been, though I’m more inclined to call it an enchanted glen; the trees are huge and healthy, the streets are clean, and the buildings have a fairy-tale sheen to them. Will a unicorn soon bound out from the foliage?
I arrive at the address on the letter, which turns out to be an impossibly vertical mansion made from white marble, of all things. I go up the walk, ascend the strangely spotless stairway, and push through beveled-glass doors.
The inside is all lush carpet and ornate woodwork, even on the ceiling. I take Smuckers out of his case and carry him in my arms as I go in search of room eleven. I’m glad I have the letter with me, because I’m thinking they might not let me in, even though I’m wearing an ultra-trustworthy outfit with a delicate obsidian necklace of my own design.
Room eleven turns out to be full of illustrious-looking people standing around talking against a backdrop of chandeliers and dark carved wood. It’s like I stumbled into a photo shoot for Dior.
I spot Henry right away. He’s not technically in the middle of the room, but he’s definitely the center of gravity, forcing everyone to orbit around him with his asshole sheen of power.
Most of the people here have the blue eyes and gold-burnished dark hair of Henry, as well as the imperious stature, though nobody wears it quite like him. It reminds me of the way a high school girl gets into a certain style and all her friends follow her, but nobody quite pulls it off like she does.
Henry spots me immediately, or more accurately, glowers at me immediately, a disturbance in the field of poshness, and then they all turn to glower at me, as if on the silent and kingly command of Henry. And they all have this look like they can’t even!
Henry is the one to address me. “What are you doing here?”
My belly squeezes. My throat feels thick. Standing there, squirming under the power of Henry’s glower, I’m suddenly sick, sick, sick of myself. How did I get back here, cowering before the overwhelming force of wealth and power?
I’m suddenly grateful for Smuckers in my arms, a canine shield of cuteness. I squeeze him tight. “I was called. Or…Smuckers was. This letter came to Smuckers care of me. A summons, I suppose is the word. I don’t know. It seemed official…”
Stop over explaining, I tell myself. You’ve done nothing wrong. He can’t hurt you. Hold your head high.
“In other words, you think you got your payday, after all,” Henry says.
I straighten my backbone. “Sorry, Richie McRichface, we were summoned, just like the rest of you probably were.”
A hush comes over the room. I look around.
“What? Did somebody murder the butler with a golden candlestick?”
Henry’s eyes glitter. He’s every inch the lion at the gates of the palace, the epitome of the kind of person I vowed never to be pushed around by or terrorized by ever again.
I hold out the letter, heart pounding, a mouse in Henry’s mighty jaws, dangling by my tail. No way will I let him know it.
