Read Online The Dog Year by Ann Wertz Garvin - Free Book Online

the mind,” she told Lucy. But Lucy was more interested in watching her mother paint a thin, perfect line on her eyelid, finishing with a flourish that floated up like a cat’s tail. She watched her mother wrestle herself into a bra that cupped her breasts like the fluted foam packaging of the Asian pears in the grocery. She listened to her mother bemoan the ravages of aging, childbirth, and menopause. Her mother’s behavior contradicted her words, and her father’s gazes confirmed them. Beauty was important.
    Sitting on the couch now with her brother, Lucy considered this new information, that her mother had engaged in petty theft, and said, “Well it’s true then: The fruit doesn’t fall far from the nut.”
    â€œI think that in our family, I’m the fruit and you’re the nut. Mom was probably just bored.”
    â€œYou think my propensity for stealing is genetic?”
    â€œWell, if it is, then Mom’s the link. You didn’t get it from Dad. Remember when he got audited? The IRS ended up owing him.”
    Theodore Peterman, Lucy and Charles’s father, lived every day of his life at the intersection of Atticus Finch from
To Kill a Mockingbird
and George Bailey from
It’s a Wonderful Life
. He shoveled his neighbor’s sidewalks in the winter, mowed beyond his lot line in the summer, and overtipped every harried waitress or bellboy he ever came in contact with. Where their mother worked the angles, their father operated as straight as an airport runway, and when the IRS cut him a check for $12.43, he framed it and mounted it on the family photo wall, next to school pictures and family portraits. Twelve dollars and forty-three cents, glorified in a glass-covered dime-store frame. “Benjamin Franklin would approve,” he said, nailing it in place.
    â€œClearly you got Dad’s genes, Charlie.”
    Phong turned to Lucy then. “All this nostalgia is nice,” he said. “But more important, Lucy, what are you going to do?”
    â€œI’m going to attend the minimal number of therapy sessions they’ve mandated, and then get back to work. I’m going to get over my anxiety and clean out this room. I’m going to . . .” She stopped and considered what would be next on the list. “Well, I don’t know what else.”
    Charles said, “Try and meet new people. Work through the grief and loss from Richard’s death. Move out of the guest room and back into the bedroom. Think about doing something other than just working all the time.”
    Lucy shoved a bag of unopened chocolate away and said, “You just don’t understand, Charlie. I don’t want any of those things. I want Richard. I want to have his baby. I want to talk about our jobs together and hold his hand. I don’t want a new life. I want my old one.” She put her head back on the couch and two tears raced each other to the tip of her chin.
    Phong said, “It is going to get better, Lucy, but you know what they say: Sometimes it’s gotta get worse before it gets better.”
    Lucy sighed. She thought about Stewart from frozen foods. “Blue flies are coming,” she said.

7
Lose It and Live Again
    I n the U. S. of A., if you wake one morning and need confirmation that the lump in your breast, newly discovered in the shower, is only a non-cancerous fibroid and not cancer, or if you decide that you could leave your abusive husband if only you were able to talk to someone with letters after his name, you can call a clinic and wait, for what could be months, for an appointment. But if you are a plastic surgeon with sticky fingers, you are shoved, against your will, to the head of the line. Getting in to see a particular physician at a health-care clinic is like trying to train a cat to come: It will only come to you on its own time. In Lucy’s unfortunate case,
its
own time was a week, and the clinic was housed in