Off the bedroom, I have a tiny bathroom, a laundry room, and a big walk-in closet that doubles as an office. It’s where I handle my pet-sitting business—at a desk in a windowless cubicle in front of a wall of shelves holding folded Ts and shorts and jeans, Keds and sandals and a couple pairs of heels. A lone rod across the short end holds a few dresses and skirts.
I went inside just long enough to go to the bathroom and check my answering machine. I had three calls from women asking for my pet-sitting rates. I didn’t return any of the calls. I’d already had way more than my daily quota of people, and the day was only half over.
I went back to the porch, switched on both ceiling fans, and lowered myself into the hammock strung in the corner. The surf was tumbling in its endless rhythm and gulls squawked overhead. My thoughts tumbled and squawked along with them as I let the terrible truth of the morning settle in. A man’s life had been taken, and whoever did it had made sure his dignity was stripped away, too. I felt personally violated. I didn’t know him, but he was a fellow human being.
I drifted to sleep and dreamed that Christy was running on the beach throwing chunks of bread to the seagulls, laughing into the sky as they swooped down to catch them in their beaks. Her hair was almost white in the sunshine, and it bounced on her shoulders from a ponytail high on the back of her head. I was thinking I’d let her play until all the bread was gone and then call her into the shade so she wouldn’t burn.
I woke up without knowing I was awake, with the edges of the dream blending with the sounds of the gulls and the surf. I lay there for a moment with my eyes shut before I realized it had just been a dream.
Those of us who’ve lost loved ones to terrorists or religious fanatics or doped-up drivers or some other senseless violence ask, “Why? Why? Why?” But after a while, the question becomes “Why not?” Why should we get to have our loved ones around us when people all over the world are keening the loss of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, lovers? So many people dying for so little reason.
Todd and Christy were killed when a ninety-year-old man slammed his Cadillac into them in a Publix parking lot. If I say it fast like that, I can keep my voice even, but just.
Todd and I had talked on the phone before he left to pick Christy up at day care. “We need some milk and Cheerios,” I said. “I think we’re out of orange juice, too.”
“Christy and I will get it on our way home,” he said. “See you a little after six.”
For the rest of my life, I’ll play that conversation over and over in my head, wishing I could rewind it and do it over, wishing I had said, I love you, my darling, and I always will, wishing I had told him how safe he made me feel, how protected and cherished.
He and Christy were both killed instantly. Todd was thirty. Christy was three.
The man who hit them said he had accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake. He felt terrible about it. His son came to see me after the funeral and told me his father was a good man who had resisted giving up his independence even after macular degeneration had robbed him of most of his sight. Florida allows people to renew their driver’s license over the phone, so he had just kept driving in spite of his family’s objections. The son said he had taken the car away from his father after the accident, and that his father had wept every day since it happened. From grief and guilt, he said, not just because he couldn’t drive. As if that made us even.
For a long time I was so consumed by anger that it almost destroyed me. Anger at the state for allowing people to renew their driver’s license without an eye exam. Anger at a man for continuing to drive after his vision and reflexes were shot. Anger at his family for not taking his car away sooner. In the end, forgiveness came not because I stopped feeling the gash of bitterness, but because I was exhausted by it. My anger has settled down from a flaming roar to a dull simmer now, like a volcano that seems calm but may erupt when you least expect it. It’s the volcanic part that’s the problem, the part I can’t control—especially if I see somebody abusing a child or a pet. Then I go totally apeshit, and there’s no telling what I’ll do.
I got up feeling flushed and swollen and went inside and stood in front of the open refrigerator and glugged an entire bottle of cold water. I carried another bottle to my closet office, and put in a call to Lieutenant Guidry. He wasn’t in, so I left my number. Then I called Shuga Reasnor.
She answered the phone on the first ring, and her voice had that mix of desperation and annoyance that people get when they’ve been hovering around a phone for a long time hoping it would ring.
I said, “It’s Dixie Hemingway, Ms. Reasnor. I just wanted to ask you something. Do you know Dr. Coffey?”
She waited so long to answer that I thought for a moment she might have laid the phone down and walked away. Then she said, “Why do you ask?”
“I saw him in the Village Diner, and I asked him if he knew where Marilee might have gone. I thought since they were engaged, he might have some idea. He got very angry. Wouldn’t even talk to me. It seemed odd.”
“He’s odd. He’s mean and he’s odd. Stay away from him. Don’t talk to him about Marilee.”
“Do you think he’s dangerous? Do you think he might have been the one who killed the man in Marilee’s house? Jealous, maybe?”
“Gerald Coffey’s too big a coward to kill anybody. He might hire somebody to do it, but he wouldn’t do it himself.”
“But you think he might do that? Hire somebody?”
“I didn’t say that. I just said he didn’t have the balls to kill anybody himself.”
“If you think of anything that the Sheriff’s Department ought to know about Dr. Coffey, I hope you’ll tell them.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that.”
We said our goodbyes and hung up. I knew she wasn’t going to tell Guidry about Coffey. Shuga Reasnor didn’t sound like a woman anxious to help in the investigation. In fact, she sounded like a woman with something to hide.
I spent the next hour attending to business. I called the people who wanted to know my rates, which is twenty dollars a day to make a morning and afternoon visit. If they want a sitter in the house overnight, it’s forty dollars. For twenty-four-hour care, the fee is sixty dollars. Most pets are accustomed to being home by themselves during the day, but I have a crew of retirees who do sleepovers and round-the-clock care.
All my fees are spelled out in a contract I have my clients sign, along with our respective responsibilities. If a pet becomes ill and needs medical care when the owners are gone, I pay for it. If some disaster happens that causes water to be shut off or the pet to have to be evacuated, I supply whatever is needed, including new quarters. When the owners return, they reimburse me for my expenses. Taking on the care of a beloved pet while its owners are away is like taking on the care of a child. I have to trust the owners, and they have to trust me.
The first woman said she had found somebody else, and the next one slammed down the phone when I told her my rates, as if I’d said something obscene. The other woman said she thought they were extremely reasonable.
Everything is relative. I made an appointment to stop by the approving woman’s house to meet her cat and get the pertinent information, then spent the rest of the hour entering the morning’s visits into my client records.
I keep meticulous records, recording the date and time I arrived, the time I left, and what I did while I was there, along with notes about anything a pet needed or did that was out of the ordinary. If a pet has a medical condition that requires medications or vitamins or treatments, that’s recorded. I have the history of illnesses, injuries, and pregnancies, along with the dates of all immunizations, the number on the animal’s ID tag, and whether it’s been declawed, spayed, or neutered. I know each pet’s preferences in food, toys, TV programs, and music. I’m probably too compulsive about keeping all that information, but I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Someday it might be important to know precisely when I gave a bath or a vitamin or a prescription medication.