“That’ll be twenty-four fifty-one. Cash, credit, or debit.”
She can’t believe she forgot her purse. Crap. She flushes red. He raises his eyebrows. She checks the back pocket of her jeans. Hits pay dirt. Change from the twenty she used to buy the bagel sandwich. Since she was a kid she’s been shoving odds and ends in her back pocket like a squirrel and now one of these little acorns has come in handy. She tells the checkout guy to take off the cream soda. He does.
“That’ll be sixteen sixty-one. Cash, I’m guessing?”
Back home, Levi ignores the chew toy. Instead, he sits in the front foyer staring up at her sneakers on the top shelf of the hall tree. After an hour of trying to will them to fall off, he lumbers to the kitchen and eases his arthritic hindquarters slowly to the floor. He stretches out on his belly and begins to gnaw the wooden leg of the kitchen table. Gus checks her phone. Twenty-two new texts from Lars.
Auggie, baby girl. It’s Lars.
You can’t just fucking ghost me.
Honey, I miss you. Miss me?
Answer me, bitch.
She doesn’t bother reading the rest. Deletes them. Gus has bigger problems. Cash flow. The money she stole from Lars won’t last. She could sell some of Rose’s collectibles, but where? She’s clueless. She’s been living under a rock her whole life. Been taken care of by someone else. She doesn’t know how to pay bills or clean a house or even boil an egg. All she knows how to do is microwave a frozen dinner, shoot a gun, and hot-wire a car. She needs a paycheck. A job. A real job.
Levi has one. Chewing. Gus watches as the dog chews the leg of the table. It’s what Levi does best. Every stick of furniture, every baseboard, the lower rungs of the banister. All of it is scored with teeth marks. Dog’s spent a decade chewing his way through this house. She watches his white whiskers quiver as he gently grinds his teeth. He’s getting old. Doesn’t eat that much. Hardly ever barks. Doesn’t seem to care if she walks him or not. Mostly sleeps all day. No trouble at all when she really thinks about it.
Humane Society can wait. Gus gently slides his muzzle away from the chair leg.
“No, Levi.”
He rolls casually onto his side, stretching his neck toward the leg, and goes back to gently gnawing on it. She lets him.
For the next week, they settle into a daily routine. They meet at the top of the stairs and head down to the kitchen together. Gus makes coffee and mashed bananas on toast sprinkled with Honeycomb. Levi eats his kibble then pushes past the duct tape and out through the broken screen, disappearing into the thick honeysuckles at the back of the yard. Some secret spot where he does his business.
Their routine includes a morning excursion to the dog run at Hampton Park. Levi likes to romp with a Great Dane named Eugene whose owner hasn’t bothered to share his own name. He’s a lanky man with a pointed nose and a pinched mouth. Resembles Eugene. The dogs smell each other then deke and dodge like they’re playing tag. They’re both slow. Levi’s slowed by age and Eugene by his size. He’s all legs. Eugene’s owner talks nonstop. Gus doesn’t mind. Sometimes he’s the only person she talks to all day. And she might be the only person he talks to. They have nothing in common except their dogs. He tells her how Eugene’s been off his food lately. How his poop hasn’t been solid for days. How the vet charges an arm and a leg for Eugene’s low-fat GI food. Sometimes he catches her off guard. Like when he said he wasn’t sure he could go on without Eugene. She doesn’t tell him that most days she feels like a small wooden doll living deep inside layers of bigger wooden dolls. How she’s been nesting for days. How she’s hiding but she’s not sure from what or who.
Back from their morning walk, Levi stares at Augusta until she gets him a cookie from a jar in the kitchen. She asks him to sit. He looks at her. Tongue out, eyes wide. She asks him again. He scratches one ear with his hind leg. She gives up and tosses him the treat. He tries to snap it out of the air but misses and has to scramble after it. She pours another coffee and sits at the table. Levi settles at her feet and chews contentedly.
Gus loves the view out the open back door. The warm breeze of the fan. The cool floors on her bare feet. There’s only one thing wrong with her kitchen world. That door next to the pantry. The basement door. As a child, she hated looking down those stairs when it stood open. Deep into the basement with its dark corners and hairy walls.
Gus decided a few days back to pretend that there was no basement in Rose’s house. That a simple hook-and-eye latch was sufficient to keep any basement monsters down below where they belonged.
Not all doors are meant to be opened.
THAT NIGHT, A RAGING THUNDERSTORM ROLLS THROUGH THE neighborhood. Levi scurries into her bedroom. Panting. Body trembling. She pats the bed and he jumps up and snuggles close, burying his nose in her armpit. She strokes his ears. He puffs short, shallow breaths. He’s terrified. She lies back, watching the fierce wind paint tree shadows on the walls. Lightning flashes. It’s breathtaking. She always loved thunderstorms. Loved jumping in her mother’s bed. Pretending she was scared so she could sleep next to her.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Gus wakes from a restless sleep to a strange sound. Levi isn’t beside her anymore. A sharp squeak like someone’s moving furniture comes from down the hall. She slips silently out of bed. Inches into the hall. The noise is coming from Rose’s room. Her mind dances to the gun in Rose’s bedside table. Levi hasn’t barked once. She grabs a plunger from the bathroom. Envisions the dog, lying dead on the carpet. Lars waiting in the dark to murder her before taking his own life. Gus tiptoes toward the half-open door. Plunger out in front of her, mind reeling, she slowly peers inside Rose’s bedroom. It’s dark. There’s a commotion. She can hear Levi snarling. He’s alive. She feels along the wall for the light switch. Flips on the light.
There’s no one in Rose’s room but the dog. The crazy dog. He’s perched on the edge of the bed, leaning over, bum in the air, furiously tearing chunks from Rose’s mattress. He’s managed to rip holes down the length of the mattress all the way to the corner. Ignoring Gus, he jumps off the bed and starts pulling great swaths of cotton stuffing out of the mattress. With each yank, the entire bed shifts and squeaks against the floorboards as he disembowels the mattress.
“Levi. No! Bad dog.”
Momentarily, he lifts his head and looks over at her with big dumb eyes, clumps of stuffing hanging from his drooling lips. He hacks violently as the stuffing catches in his throat, then he returns to eviscerating the mattress. Gus drops the plunger and grabs Levi by his neck fur. She pulls him away from the bed. He vomits a soggy wad of fluff.
“Jesus, dog. Really?”
She shoves him, and he slides across the floorboards. Then he slinks to the corner. Tail between his legs.
Gus stares at the mess. The mattress is toast. She picks up the wad that Levi hacked up. She gags. Searches for a garbage can. There’s one next to the bedside table. She’s about to toss it in when she spots a face in the wad. The Queen’s face. She gently pulls the soggy wad apart. Inside is a chewed-up twenty-dollar bill.
She looks at Levi who’s standing in the corner. He wags his tail.
She looks at the mattress.
Gus kneels down and reaches her hand into one of the holes. Feels around. Nothing but stuffing. She digs deeper. Up to her elbow. Then she touches something plastic. She yanks, but it’s stuck. She gets both hands inside the hole and is able to grip the plastic. Uses her feet against the bed for leverage. Then, like a baby being born, it slides out of the open wound in the mattress. A large plastic garment bag. The edge is torn where Levi got his teeth into it, the rest vacuum-sealed flat and zippered tight. Gus lays the bag on the floor. Straddles it. Grabs hold of the zipper and opens the bag. She stares at the contents, then looks over at Levi.