Not wanting to eavesdrop any longer than he has, he closes the curtain and goes into the bathroom to wash his hands. For a moment, he has difficulty recognizing the face in the mirror over the sink that answers his troubled glance.
Perhaps ten minutes later, Sara enters the room alone, reporting that she has left the dog in the car because of the No Pets Allowed sign they hadn’t noticed before.
“Did you get some sleep?” she asks, pulling off her boots. “I stayed out for awhile so as not to wake you.”
Lying on her back, eyes flickering shut, the whisper of a snore in counterpoint to the indeterminate hum of the room, the trainer is apparently asleep before the biographer can frame an answer to her question.
A few hours later, the weather has quieted sufficiently for them to return to the road. Unaccompanied in front this time around — Sara and Wizard shoulder to shoulder in the backseat — Leo feels deserted. A sadness he hasn’t acknowledged in months, perhaps since the dog entered his life, holds him in its sway.
Could they have missed a turn? They have been driving a while now — he has lost track of the time — and the passing scene, what he can make of it from the badly lit road he has been following slavishly, seems unfamiliar.
“Are we lost?” Sara asks him.
“I don’t see how,” he says. “We haven’t left the route we started on.”
“Whizzer is getting anxious,” she says. “He senses something’s wrong.”
They are approaching a restaurant called The Helden Inn on their right and Leo wonders out loud if it might be a good idea to stop for a bite. “What do you think?” he says.
to no one in particular.
“If that’s what you want to do,” Sara says. “I can’t speak for everyone but I suspect we’re all a bit peckish.”
There are an impressive number of vehicles, mostly high-end SUV’s in the restaurant lot, which suggests, given the deterrence of the weather, a devoted local following. “I think we may have lucked out,” he says to Sara.”
Sara calls his attention to a sign on the parking lot side of the Inn rising out of the white ground, which offers the modest recommendation, “Just Good Food,” the remark in quotes, the speaker unattributed. Underneath the quote in smaller letters it says, Pets and Children Welcome. “I think that’s funny,” she says.
Leo parks the Forester at the far end of the lot — he feels fortunate to find a space in the crowd of vehicles — and they have to wade, Wizard in Sara’s arms, through several inches of slush to reach the Inn.
As they find their way inside, an elderly couple, oddly costumed (the old man in lederhosen, the woman in frilly blouse and apron), seem to be waiting for them (or someone) in the cavernous foyer. “Do you have reservations?” the woman asks, her broad smile welcoming them.
“We don’t,” Leo says. “Is that a problem?”
“There are only problems if we make them problems,” the woman says, her accent vaguely foreign, the smile seemingly frozen on her face. “We’ll do our best to take care of you. Please to follow.”
She leads them into a spacious dining room — 13 tables by Leo’s quick count — in which surprisingly there is only one other diner, a fat man in a three-piece suit, at the far side of the room, working at what appears to be an elaborate cream-filled desert.
Leo dries Wizard off with his rumpled cloth napkin while Sara inspects her menu. “There isn’t anything here I can eat,” she says. “I don’t eat meat.”
“What about a salad?” Leo says. “They must have salads.”
“The truth is,” Sara says, “—and I hope you won’t mention this to anyone, okay? — though I don’t eat meat, I don’t really like salads.”
Wizard, who seems to have grown during the difficult trip, barks from under the table at some unseen menace.
The proprietress, her perpetual smile a kind of rictus, returns with a basket of sliced rye bread and three glasses of water. She seems poised to take their order when someone or something whistles from the kitchen and she hurries off.
Coming out from under the table, Wizard has taken residence on one of the padded chairs, accomplishing the feat with an impressive jump.
The fat man on the other side of the room lifts his head languorously from his dessert long enough to clap.
When Leo has a chance to go through the menu, which is several pages long, he has a greater appreciation of Sara’s concern. The Helden Inn is celebrating something called Carnivore Days and all or virtually all of the dishes offered have some kind of animal meat as its base. Even under “Starters.” Leo can find nothing that seems like a green salad. Under the Carnivore Days Specials, there is a quote in italics as a kind of epigraph:
“The carnivore loves his animals so much he is willing to eat them.”
— THE MANAGEMENT
“If you don’t want to stay,” he whispers to Sara, who has been negotiating a slice of stale bread, “I’m willing to leave.”
His offer seems in equal measure to puzzle and please her. “Leo, wouldn’t it be rude to just walk out after they’ve gone to all this trouble on our behalf? I was actually thinking of ordering my first burger in about six years. Did you notice that they have a puma burger on the menu?” She smiles self-deprecatingly, almost seductively. “I’ve been known to compromise in emergencies.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he notices that the suited fat man has fallen asleep face down in his desert. Sara, intent on the menu’s extended narrative, seems not to notice.
An odd muffled cry sounds from behind one of the walls.
Wondering, and not for the first time, where the people from the parked cars have gone, Leo takes a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and leaves it under the white enamel matching salt-and-pepper shakers. “That should pay for the service,” he says. “Did you notice that they actually have a ‘Bow Wow Burger’ on the menu?”
“They don’t?” she says, rising from her chair.
Sara is in the process of putting the puppy under her jacket when the proprietress, her smile unaltered, returns with a tray of unidentifiable appetizers. “I apologize for the delay,” she says. “The help isn’t always what you want.”
Leo is about to offer an explanation for their abrupt departure, but instead takes Sara’s hand and heads to the door that leads to the cavernous foyer.
The old man in the lederhosen is standing by the register as they hurry past him. “Come visit us again,” he says in an uninflected voice. “And don’t forget to drive safely.”
Since almost all the vehicles in the lot are covered with some residue of the weather, it is hard to determine in the dark which car is theirs.
In his hurry to get going, Leo, using the sleeve of his coat, clears off the front window of the wrong Forester.
A Lexus SUV, pulling out from the row behind them, startles them with its horn. The driver, who could be the younger sister of the proprietress, rolls down a window and offers them a ride.
In the chaos of the moment, Leo is tempted to accept, but Sara who is clearing off another car, says, “Wait a second. I think I found ours.”
They pile into the Forester Sara has cleared, though Leo is not at all sure it is the one that had brought them there.
This time, Sara drives while Leo and Wizard sit next to each other in the back, a larger space between them than the one Leo observed between Sara and the puppy when he was at the wheel.
Still he is pleased to be alone with his charge without other responsibilities and he reaches out awkwardly to rub the puppy’s head. Closing his eyes, Wizard accepts Leo’s homage. When, after awhile, Leo reclaims his hand, Wizard turns to look at him, the dog’s wise face making unspoken judgments, seeing though to the very bottom of the biographer.