Year of the Dog by Shelby Hearon Page B

digressed into the breathtaking spectacle of the fall leaves in Vermont. “You can’t believe the colors. Or the thousands of busloads of tourists from all over the country who come.”
    â€œDid your mother mention we are getting up before breakfast to catch a plane to see you and what your winter looks like? We used to, when I was courting your mother, drive over to the Blue Ridge Mountains to see snow. My understanding is, we won’t have far to drive to see it when we land in Vermont. You’ll find us a place to stay, now, where we don’t have to worry about your unsavory types and vagrants.”
    â€œYou’re coming—here? When are you talking about? Mom?”
    â€œYou are forgetting your manners, Miss,” Mom reprimanded me. “The response a daughter should make is being full of joy at the idea of her parents buying plane tickets two months in advance in order to cover half the length of the United States of America.”
    I stretched out on the sofa and put a pillow on my chest. Lay me out cold. “December?”
    â€œIn time to do our Christmas shopping.”

A Mounting Problem

20
    JAMES AND I had worked it out so that I could have a run along the bike path at the Dog Park while he walked his bike and Beulah, and then he could ride ahead and wait for us at the wooden bridge that led into his neighborhood while I walked her, taking her off the path at the water’s edge, letting her watch the ducks, standing still if they swam close to shore.
    Today, he thought we should introduce her to a romp in the leaves, and suggested he park his bike and we’d hike back into the thick stand of hardwoods between the path and the rocky lakeshore. I had her on a long leash, and let her wade through the piles of orange and rust and yellow which came almost to her tummy, though now she’d blossomed into a coltish dog, no longer really a puppy. I had on a heavy sweater and jeans, and so did James, essential under the cornflower-blue October sky. We sort of leaned our shoulders together, watching her. She loved the crunch of the leaves and the surprise of wading through something which rustled and rose around her. Once she snapped at a bright red maple leaf; once she rooted her face down in a leaf-drift till only her shoulders showed. I took half a roll of film. I’d tried to resist the camera—not wanting to get too sentimental about her. But I had a couple of photos of her as a brand new puppy, markers of our first week, and now these would be ones I could stick in letters to my folks and Mr. Sturgis.
    Or sit and look at in my old age.
    â€œDid you used to do this when you were a kid, bury yourself in leaves?” I asked James, thinking how grand it must be to grow up watching the hardwoods transform themselves from season to season. In films you saw parents burning pyramids of leaves in backyards filled with children.
    â€œDon’t start that stuff,” he said, locking his hands behind his head and lowering his chin to his chest.
    What stuff? Couldn’t I even ask anything as ordinary and sociable as that? Even people on the Witness Protection Program must have worked out answers to did they play in fall leaves. Even the guys upstairs would have come up with something that had to do with their young delinquent days. “Jeez,” I said, not wanting to get into a fight on this particular perfect afternoon. “I just had nostalgia for growing up here, which I didn’t do, is all. Can’t you ever just give me some kid story? You had braces or you fell out of a tree or you got a ten-speed or your feet grew two sizes in one year?” These arguments were the nearest I came to missing the males back home, any ordinary one of which could’ve come up with ten thousand memories of his boyhood in a flat minute.
    â€œI told you about the study-abroad program.” He located a frown.
    â€œYou did,” I agreed. Slipping Beulah’s