Year of the Dog by Shelby Hearon Page A

I’d been working for the gas company. I liked driving a truck and being out of the office. I thought about UPS but that looked like too much work. Dad said, Go back to school. Today’s world, you got to get a degree. He was right; you want to get off hourly, you got to get the piece of paper.”
    â€œI know about that,” I told him. “In high school, I worked at the pharmacy back home doing the same thing I do now mostly, but now they’ve got a name for what I do, and they’re holding my place till I get back.”
    â€œThat’s a field for women these days, I see that.” He took another look at me, hefted his pants. “How about the dude comes around here? He oughta get you a better place. He can afford it.”
    â€œHe’s a high school teacher.”
    â€œYeah, right. Rich kids can do that, they can grow these little beard jobs and dress like street people. Roland and me see them coming up here all the time from Connecticut, looking like vagrants, except they’ve got these clean fingernails and custom haircuts. You look, you’ll see what I mean. Passing joints in their Doc Martens and showing off ten years of orthodontics.”
    I shook my head. That wasn’t James; he didn’t know James. I said, “I guess in the South, it’s the other way around—runaways dress up to look like Country Club even if they’re stealing to eat.”
    â€œWe figured you was from down there. Roland said Alabama, he knew a girl came from Alabama.”
    â€œSouth Carolina.”
    â€œI grew up in New Hampshire. I’m not proud of that, but I did. My dad moved here and he had the right idea. Roland, he says he’s from New York. But I tell him that’s New York, Ontario, maybe.”
    â€œWe better go,” I said, gently giving good dog’s leash a tug. I’d been standing talking longer than I should have.
    â€œTell your pup I used the Boys’ Room and not to worry.” He held out his hand, big as a slab of ham, rough as sandpaper. “Larry.”
    â€œJaney.”
    â€œJaney. I got that. Remember, you get into trouble, you pound on your ceiling with a broom handle and we’ll be right down. Though I doubt you’ll be getting anything you can’t manage, from the teacher. ”
    After he went up the outside stairs, and Beulah and I went in, I sat a while at the kitchen table, hugging my shoulders, Good Dog by my chair. My folks had left a message on my cell, but I needed to think about the backyard encounter. What I couldn’t get out of my head was that here I’d talked to this scruffy guy, someone tacky enough to piss right out there in the yard in broad daylight—and I’d learned more about him and his life in ten minutes than I had about James in nearly four months.

19
    MOM SAID WHEN they called back, “You think your daddy and I are down here listening to Ricky Skaggs and watching football while you’re up there not answering our calls, no way to find you, should there be an emergency. At our age.”
    â€œMom.” I turned off Reba McEntire singing “Right or Wrong,” and tucked my feet under me on the sofa. “You’re fifty years old. You’re the age of movie stars.”
    â€œYou’re soft-soaping me.”
    Daddy got into the conversation. “You having brought it to our attention that you are seeing this young man we don’t have proper information on, calls for us to have a look for ourselves. I’m no prude, your mother can tell you that, I am not, but this is not yesterday, this is today, and a girl has to think about is she rushing into something.”
    â€œDaddy.”
    â€œTalbot,” Mom interceded. “We have spent the last six months devoutly praying that our daughter puts past events behind her, most especially the recent past, that being exactly what she is doing.”
    Not able to grasp what they were trying to tell me, I