“Don’t worry about him. He’s prob’ly innocent as pie. Hell, he runs titty sites, he can’t be all bad.”
“You know how lucky you are you gotta wife lets you look at them titty sites on the Internet?”
“Oh, yeah, I know how lucky I am. And you know the only titties I really want are yours.”
Twelve
Kendra held Dexter in her arms and danced around in circles with him as a music video played on TV. When she finally stopped, she was a little dizzy, and she laughed.
“You like that, Dexter?” she said. She hoped she hadn’t made the little dog dizzy – she hadn’t meant to do that. She put him down and he immediately rose up on his hind legs and began pawing at her shins. “Hey, I got an idea,” Kendra said.
She left the living room and went to her bedroom and to the closet. She had a box of balls on the floor of her closet. In it was the multicolored ball she’d been bouncing earlier that day. There were also smaller balls, and much smaller balls. She found one small enough for Dexter to be able to pick it up with his little mouth, then left her bedroom.
“Oh, no, Dexter!” Kendra shouted when she found the little dog urinating on the kitchen floor.
He stopped and scurried away, whining.
She went to him and shouted, “No! No, bad boy, Dexter, bad boy!” as she wagged a finger at him.
Dexter quivered and whined and lowered his head and tucked his skinny little tail between his legs.
Kendra went back and cleaned up the little puddle with paper towels. She hoped she was doing this right – she had no idea how to house train a dog. She was simply doing what made sense to her.
She went back to the living room, where Dexter was still huddling at the foot of the recliner.
“I’m sorry, Dexter,” Kendra said as she sat down beside him, “but you gotta learn that’s a no-no. You wanna play fetch?” She showed him the ball and he took some interest. She threw the ball into the kitchen and Dexter darted away after it, little toenails clicketing on the kitchen floor. He went to the ball and playfully knocked it around on the kitchen floor. But he didn’t bring it back, no matter how much Kendra called him.
She got up, went to the kitchen, snatched up the ball, then returned to the recliner. Dexter never took his eyes from the ball and followed her all the way. She threw the ball and Dexter shot off after it. Again, he did not bring it back, even though she called him.
Kendra occupied herself with this activity for about half an hour before suddenly, out of nowhere, Dexter picked up the ball and brought it back to her, dropped it in her lap, as if he’d known how to do it all along, but hadn’t wanted to.
“You little poop!” she said. “You been playin’ with me all along, huh?”
For another fifteen minutes, Kendra tossed the ball and Dexter brought it back. She was endlessly entertained by the way he ran, by the way he trotted back with the ball in his mouth, head held high. By the way his whole back-end waggled as he eagerly waited for her to throw the ball.
She threw it too hard and a little too far to the left. The ball bounced around in the kitchen sink. Dexter ran into the kitchen and stopped, body rigid, and looked around for the ball. It was nowhere to be seen, so he lowered his head and began to sniff around for it.
Kendra got up and took the ball from the sink, and dropped it. Dexter snapped at it as it bounced in the air a few times before coming lower, and lower, and lower, until Dexter finally caught it in his little mouth. Head high again, he trotted away.
Kendra leaned her hips back on the edge of the kitchen counter and thought about how lucky she was. Because she was real happy. She was starting to get some independence in her life. She’d been alone in the trailer for about ninety minutes – for the first time in her life. And she had a little doggy all her own, for the first time in her life. It was a day of first times.
But so far, Kendra had done nothing naughty, nothing to make her feel good, to somehow scratch her naughty itch. There had to be something she could do without getting caught – but with just enough risk of getting caught to make it exciting.
For one thing, Mommy had made her take off the bikini top and put on a T-shirt with her shorts. So Kendra went to her room and took off the T-shirt and put the bikini top back on, then put the plaid shirt over it, left it open, the way she’d worn it that morning.
Kendra was pouring herself a glass of ice-cold lemonade when she heard the piercing squeak of the mailman’s brakes. She could hear them all the way there from the trailer park’s entrance, where the mail truck stopped at the bank of mailboxes.
“Hey, Dexie,” she said with enthusiasm, “you wanna go get the mail?”
Because of her tone, the dog got excited and began hopping up and down.
“You’re not gonna run away from me soon as we get out there, are you, Dex?” she said.
The dog continued to hop, throwing in a piercing little bark now and then.
Just to be sure, she picked Dexter up in her arms and then went outside, then she held him up in front of her. “Now, you can’t run away, you hear me, Dexter? You have to stay with me. Okay?”
Dexter licked her face and she giggled. She put him down on the ground and he ran circles around her feet.
The shade helped keep the trailer park cooler than it would have been without it, but it was not immune from the baking summer heat, not even in the shade. A hot breeze whispered secrets in the trees overhead as Kendra headed for the trailer park’s entrance.
Dexter ran ahead of her, and Kendra called, “Dexter! Come back here!” She slapped her bare thigh and made kissing sounds with her lips. The little dog turned around and hurried back, then fell into step beside her, trotting to keep up.
Country music came from one of the trailers. It always seemed to play in the trailer park, all day long. From another trailer came the angry sound of talk radio. Kendra heard a sound ahead and to her left and saw the door open on unit five, the new trailer. A man came out holding a tall glass and a magazine in one hand. He closed the screen door behind him, then sat down on the top porch step, took a sip of his drink and put the glass next to him on the porch.
Kendra kept glancing at him, wondering who he was, what he was like, where he’d come from, and what had brought him to Riverside Mobile Home Park.
Suddenly, he looked up. Then he did a double-take. Then he stared openly at her.
She glanced at him again and again, and each time, his stare was fixed on her, lips slightly parted. Kendra began to feel the jittery sensation of self-consciousness creep up on her. She wondered if there was something wrong with her – did she look funny, was that why he was staring at her?
She told herself to stop looking at him, then maybe he would ignore her. She felt her back stiffen as she walked by him. One more glance – he was still watching her from the porch and she stiffened even more as she walked out of his line of sight.
Kendra never knew what it meant when someone stared at her, and it always made her uncomfortable. It seemed people stared at her a lot. Was it because she was slow – could they tell by looking at her? Was she ugly? Funny-looking? She couldn’t understand it. Like she told Mommy, everyone was a little mean at one time or another.
She walked on, nearing the park’s entrance and exit, the two lanes separated by the giant oak. The row of twenty mailboxes was on the left just outside the entrance.
Kendra glanced back over her shoulder and almost tripped over her own feet when she saw that man standing out in the road now, watching her from behind, arms folded across his chest. She spun back around and faced front, frowning now. She picked up her pace a little, then darted to the left, again out of his line of sight, behind the grey cinder block wall that ran behind the mailboxes. There was another wall just like it on the other side of the exit, but that one had big words on it: RIVERSIDE MOBILE HOME PARK. She went down the row of mailboxes to theirs. She opened it, reached in and removed the mail – mostly junk mail, and a couple bills – then closed the U-shaped door of the mailbox. Kendra hated the look she saw in Mommy’s eyes whenever she got a new bill.