Whippoorwill Read online

  “He’s been good about learning. He’s smart, don’t you think?”

  “Smart enough.”

  “Do you have your driver’s license?” Danny asked as we watched him. It didn’t have anything to do with what we were doing.

  “Sure. Why?”

  “How come you never drive anywhere?”

  “I do. Dad’s fussy about his truck, but he lets me take it if I need it. It eats gas, though, so that’s probably why you don’t see me driving around much.”

  “I didn’t think you drove for some reason. Do you know how to drive a stick?”

  “No. Dad’s truck is automatic.”

  We called Wally to us. This time we made him walk with us around the court, doing sits and down-stays. After two laps we let him free again. Meanwhile, the night had grown colder and storm clouds wandered in from the west. The lights on the tennis court became hazy with mist. A couple kids came and started riding their skateboards on the basketball court. They set up jumps and a low rail for tricks. The sounds of the skateboards fascinated Wally. He ran to one side of the court and watched through the chainlink. He whined to go play. We used the boys as a distraction and we made him come away, sit, then release again. He went right back to watching the boys.

  “I think that’s about enough for one night,” I said after a few more turns. “He made progress.”

  “He came no problem those last couple times before the boys showed up.”

  “You want to call him?”

  He did and Wally came reluctantly. Danny hooked him to the regular lead. Wally danced around a little, but eventually he realized he needed to be serious. We walked him back to Danny’s car. Danny got him in the back seat. We climbed in afterward.

  “I’m going to teach you to drive a stick,” Danny said. “We have to go past Shop ’n Save anyway. It’s the best parking lot for learning.”

  “We don’t have to do that now, Danny.”

  “I’d like to. It’s not hard.”

  “I’ll wreck your car.”

  “No, you won’t. It’s just learning the pedals. It’s no big deal.”

  I looked at him as he started up the car. Part of me liked him. Part of me felt flattered at the attention he gave me. But then I looked over and saw those sideburns, and watched his face watch mine for signs of approval, and I wondered what was going on. I couldn’t point my finger at anything, because he had been nice to me, nice to Wally, and I appreciated him for that. I admired his kindness to Wally, but when he had showed up at the screened door to our kitchen the moment after Dad left, I had glimpsed a neediness that wasn’t attractive. It made me tied up to think about it.

  He drove us to Shop ’n Save and slid out of the driver’s seat and encouraged me to slip into it. The parking lot was nearly empty. Wally thought we were getting out when we changed seats, and for a while all I could see in the rearview mirror was his big, bony head. His tongue hung out of his mouth. I had to pull the seat up and adjust the mirrors, and Danny helped me, cheering me on, all the time talking about the feeling of a clutch and accelerator.

  “You want them to meet midway,” he said, using his hands as two pedals to demonstrate. “It’s like riding a bike. When you first look at a bike, you think, No way that I can sit on those skinny tires and coast down a hill. But you do it without thinking about it once you learn. Shifting is the same way.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be. All you have to do is step on the brake to make us stop. You should push in on the clutch, too.”

  A small rain began. I took a deep breath. Danny talked some more. I felt jumpy. The weird thing was, it was kind of thrilling to be in the car with him, with a boy, and sitting behind the wheel of a powerful engine. I wanted to learn to drive a shift. I always had. And Danny was being nice, and I felt myself float back into a different attitude about him, a warmer one, and he was being gentle and soft-spoken. He was a good teacher. And when I tried to edge the car away from a stop the first time, and stalled, and started again, and stalled, he didn’t get angry. He was patient and calm in his approach, and I realized he was a natural teacher, really. That was why he was so good with Wally and so good with me, and when I got the car going up to about twenty and shifted into second, he nodded as he if he had accomplished something and he knuckle-bumped me. It was fun, I admit it.

  Plus, the car had power. It had a big, meaty-sounding engine, and we drove around in circles, my feet learning, the rain on the pavement smelling good, and Danny hopped out after a while and ran into Shop ’n Save and came out with two sodas and some Fritos. He urged me to go out of the parking lot, and I drove a couple of blocks, starting and stopping, and I did okay. Wally watched everything from the back seat and ate any Fritos we dropped.

  And when Danny kissed me at the end of the night, parked in his driveway, I kissed him back. Then I kissed Wally, said good night, and ran back to my house, crazy nervous in my stomach, but happy, too, and my feet still felt the gauge of the pedals in my toes, and I was glad Dad wasn’t home, glad to have the house empty, glad to have time to think.

  Ten

  IN A LOT of old movies, there’s a scene where a girl comes back from a date and she presses herself against the door as soon as it closes, and she heaves a big sigh, happy to be alive, happy to be in love, completely transported by what had just occurred. Then sometimes she pretends to dance, holding the pretend guy in her arms, and she swirls around her bedroom or apartment, and it’s all glorious and hopeful and corny as anything.

  I didn’t feel that way.

  But I did feel good, or curious about what was going on, and I kind of liked kissing Danny. His lips had been thin and even, not wet or sloppy at all, and his shoulders had been good when I put my hands on them.

  But Danny Stewart? I was kissing Danny Stewart?

  I went up to my bedroom and I hurried to get into bed. I didn’t want to talk about the whole situation with anyone. I used my laptop and got on Netflix, an old Dexter episode, and I watched and tried not to think or worry or do anything but follow the story.

  Later Dad came in, his bike bouncing sound everywhere, and I listened to him toss his keys on the kitchen counter, then open the fridge. I had started to close my computer, because he might look in and I didn’t want to have a late-night talk, when a text from Danny popped onto my phone. It said he’d had a nice time, did I want to go for a ride tomorrow? I wrote back maybe, then put the phone on my bedside table and pushed down in the covers.

  I felt strange and tired. Just under my eyelids, I saw Wally. He ran around the tennis court and he lifted his head over and over, and it was part dream, part falling asleep, then it was all sleep. My body jerked a couple times and woke me, and once, late at night, I heard Wally the old way, out on his chain, his sighing painful and soft. Bugs were probably gnawing on him because the mosquitoes were already out, and I fell asleep thinking how one thing pushed into another and started things you couldn’t predict. It was all a big domino set, sitting up and ready to be tipped over, only each junction took off in about a thousand different directions, and you couldn’t know which trunk of the tree was yours. My dominoes ran next to Danny’s dominoes for the time being, and Wally’s dominoes ran between us, and I sensed we were heading for a new junction, but I had no idea what that would be.

  Wally took to his training. It amazed me how fast he understood what he needed to learn. The weather improved week by week and we trained Wally every day after school or whenever we could grab an hour. Then one Saturday it rained right from first light and the sun never shook free of the clouds. It got cold, too, and you felt for a minute like the earth had decided to reverse itself and we were heading back to winter. I stayed in bed later than I usually do, enjoying the warmth, and when I came downstairs, Dad had the Jøtul wood stove roaring in the kitchen. He loves the Jøtul and whenever it’s going he always hovers around it, making sure it’s properly fed, then damped down, then fed again. He burns a lot of junk wood in it, from a guy he know
s over in Piermont, a contractor who always has pine two-by-four butts and odd pieces of molding, then Dad plunks in a hunk or two of solid oak and stands back with this mighty look as if he had conquered the universe. Mom used to laugh when he did it, and called him a lumberjack, and he would say, Building a fire is both creation and destruction, which would get her laughing even harder.

  I wasn’t awake more than an hour when Danny showed up. He knocked on the back door and Dad let him inside. Danny carried a big paper bag of groceries and wore a hopeful look on his face that made me both annoyed and sorry for him. The needy side of him bothered me, I’m not sure why, and I didn’t like him showing up whenever he had a notion. Besides, I was still in my pajama bottoms and a fleece, and I hadn’t even glanced in a mirror.

  “I thought maybe we could bake up some biscuits for Wally,” he said. “They’d be a whole lot cheaper, like you said. I got brewer’s yeast.”

  “Now that’s an idea,” Dad said. “Come on in and put the bag down.”

  I had no choice in the matter. I excused myself and went upstairs to get dressed—jeans and a hooded sweatshirt from the local university, Plymouth State, where Mom had graduated, then brushed my hair and stuck it in a clip on top of my head—and by the time I got back downstairs, Danny and Dad had the ingredients spread out on the counter. It was beyond strange. They were both into it, I saw. Dad loved a project, but I had no idea what to make of Danny standing next to him. He had gone overboard on the groceries, and even brought a box of doughnuts from Dunkin’, and it felt a little like he was buying his way into the kitchen. I don’t know. For a second I regretted everything about getting involved with him, especially kissing him, then Dad started telling him all about the Jøtul stove, how many BTUs it produced, at what setting it burned best or longest, and it felt like I had landed on a different planet.

  Danny didn’t look at me. Not eye to eye. He kept his eyes away so that I wouldn’t be able to catch them and by a look tell him to go away. He figured as long as our eyes didn’t meet, he was safe to hang out in our kitchen and be part of something. It was his way of getting off his pole to find his own Daily Growler, I knew that, but it didn’t make it any better.

  Here was the other thing I realized: They expected me to make the biscuits. No one said anything, of course, but I could tell they thought as a girl I would have divine baking powers, powers that mere mortal men could never hope to possess, and it made me feel shaky in my hands to know how they saw me. Part of me liked the idea that I was in charge, and another part felt the sexism of it, but the rain kept falling and we were all there and the wood stove made it warm and friendly feeling. It felt neighborly, honestly, which was not a feeling I associated with our whippoorwill community. People didn’t simply drop in and bake cookies together around that part of New Hampshire, but here we were doing it.

  I washed my hands at the sink and looked out. Dad opened the Jøtul and put more wood in it. The rain churned everything brown and pockmarked, and as I turned off the water in the sink, I told Danny he should go grab Wally and bring him inside.

  “In here?” Danny asked.

  “Well, he’s got to come in sometime. He was in here before for a few minutes, right? We can close off the door to the rest of the house, and if he has an accident, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. You should walk him first, though, to see if he needs to go.”

  “That would be so cool if he could be in here,” he said.

  “You don’t think he’ll go crazy?” Dad asked, closing up the stove with a solid clump.

  “Hard to know,” I said. “Everything’s new to him.”

  Danny headed out. I watched him through the window, not sure what my stomach was trying to say to me. Dad lifted out a strawberry-frosted doughnut and carried it to the sink and ate it in about two bites. Some of the crumbs from the doughnut lodged in his beard, and I had to make a motion to clue him in so he would whisk them out.

  We both watched Danny. I’m not positive why, but it seemed like we both needed to do that. Danny let Wally off the pole and prevented him from jumping. Then he walked Wally to an abandoned lupine garden at the back of the yard and Wally did his business. Danny praised him afterward, which was advice straight from My Pack. Always take a dog to the same spot, and always praise him afterward. Don’t play or joke around about it. Make the dog understand this is his time to do what he needs to do.

  Afterward, though, he slapped his thigh and got Wally running and they splashed through the backyard toward our door. I handed my dad a dishtowel and told him to give it to Danny so he could wipe Wally down before he came inside. “Paws, too,” I said.

  I don’t know why, but standing at the window and watching those two men do what I told them to do made the house feel more like mine than it ever had before. My mom always said a woman is at the center of everything, and for the first time I knew what she meant.

  I told Danny not to let Wally off his leash when he brought him through the door. It was huge for Wally to be inside, I could tell. He sort of trembled inside his skin, overjoyed, and his nose took in every molecule that it could. When he first came in, I went over and squatted down in front of him and petted him. I whispered in his ear that he could stay inside, could be part of our pack, if he would only mind. His eyes jerked around to see everything, his tongue out, his knotty head following his nose. He needed a while to acclimate. I made Danny put him in a down-stay and sit in the chair while I figured out the recipe.

  Dad and Danny talked about cars, engines, a few people they knew in common. Dad didn’t often have people over, except Jebby, and I saw that he liked it, sort of. He liked the idea of us all hanging out together, doing something wholesome, and it made me smile to think what people would say about the big bad biker guy who cooked dog biscuits with his kid and neighbor.

  About a half-hour into it, when I had the first batch of biscuits mixed and ready for the oven, Danny asked if he could let Wally off the leash. All kinds of crazy scenarios went through my head, most of them involving Wally going insane around the kitchen, but he had settled down and looked pretty calm. I nodded.

  “Don’t make a big deal of it, though,” I said. “Just reach and pet him and then simply unclip him. If we turn it into a big deal, he’ll react.”

  “He might go after the biscuits,” Dad said.

  “And he might rub up against the Jøtul,” I said, which was another thought I had. “But what can you do? He can’t live on a pole all his life.”

  Danny was clever about it. He didn’t let him off right away, because Wally had perked up with the sound of our voices. Besides, Wally knew we were discussing him. Then a little later, when I had put the first cookie sheet in the oven, Danny reached down and unclipped Wally’s leash. Wally didn’t move or show any sign that he knew he had been freed. Dad picked out another doughnut and carried it over to the table across from Danny. He tried to be casual, just a guy and his doughnut, but his movement made Wally’s head swivel and a string of drool slip out of the side of his mouth.

  “At some point,” I said, deliberately keeping my voice level, “you should just get up and move around, Danny. Just don’t pay any attention to him.”

  “He’s being really good,” Dad said, the doughnut going down his chute.

  “He’s a nice dog,” I said. “A really nice dog.”

  “I got to hand it to you two,” Dad said. “I thought that dog was unreachable.”

  “It was all Clair’s doing,” Danny said. “I never would have seen him that way if she hadn’t taken an interest.”

  I blushed and fanned myself with a dishtowel, pretending it was the stove that made me color. Before I could say anything or do anything, someone climbed up the back steps and knocked on the door. Wally freaked, but not in a bad way. He got to his feet and let out a bark, and that bark was so loud, it made the saucepan hanging over the stove tong like a bell catching a vibration.

  Eleven

  IT WAS HOLLY.

  She peeked in the w
indow and tried to see, but the window had fogged and she couldn’t seem to figure out what was going on inside. I wasn’t madly in love with Danny or anything, and it wasn’t completely out of the ordinary for her to stop by, but the combination of Holly and Danny and my dad and Wally made it hard to breathe.

  “It’s Holly,” Dad said, stating the obvious.

  Danny slipped the lead back on Wally as I went to the door. I pulled it open and put my eyes on her, telling her the best way I could to be cool about whatever she saw inside. She nodded, sort of, and then turned and said her brother had brought her by, he was on his way to the hardware store for their mother, and she thought—Holly this was, not her mom—that she would duck in and see me.

  “Should I go with him?” Holly asked, her eyes busy on mine trying to read the situation.

  “No, it’s fine,” I said, opening the door wider.

  “Good golly, it’s Miss Holly,” Dad said, using a phrase he always used whenever Holly showed up.

  “You sure?” Holly asked me. “If you’re busy . . .”

  I grabbed her arm and dragged her inside. With her trailing arm she signaled to her brother to take off without her.

  “You two know each other, don’t you?” I asked Holly and Danny.

  “I recognize you,” Danny said. “And this is Wally.”

  “Hiya, Wally,” Holly said, bending down to pet him. “Where did you come from?”

  “Danny’s dad got him about two months ago,” I said. “We’ve been training him.”

  “Neat,” she said, squatting and looking around at the counter full of baking ingredients. “It smells awesome in here. What are you baking?”

  “Dog biscuits,” Danny said.

  That was the only line of conversation for a while. Holly took off her jacket and hung it on a hook beside the door while Danny introduced her to some of the things Wally could do. Dad watched and resisted the temptation to eat a third doughnut. I baked and kind of liked what was going on. Since Mom died, these were by far the most human voices the house had experienced. I imagined the walls sucking in the noise, storing it for some sadder day, the old drywall trembling at the freshness of something it hardly remembered. When I looked at Dad, he smiled too, happy to have young people collecting in his kitchen. It struck me that maybe he had dreamed something like this once upon a time: family and friends and warmth and food and maybe even a good, friendly dog. Danny seemed to like it too, because he put Wally through his paces, showing him off with silent commands, and he looked kind of cute as he did it, his weirdo sideburns très Johnny Cash. I opened and closed the oven door and made Danny take a bite of a biscuit to test it for Wally. Everyone laughed and the rain fell hard on the roof and life seemed fairly easy when you all put your shoulders together and pushed.