The Girl of His Dreams Page 2

  Then Pat moved in with Floyd. They all said it wasn’t going to be any different. The three of them were going to be like one family. They all worked together. It was supposed to be the same even after Floyd and Pat got married, but it never was. Now, Floyd and Pat were the family. They ran the farm. They made the decisions.

  Then the babies started coming, first Alice and then Benjamin, and the house got crowded. Sophie didn’t care. She loved the babies. And now another baby was coming … and they didn’t have room for her anymore.

  Jupiter walked with Sophie all the way to the crossroads, his big, hot body a comfort. He ran ahead, then came back. “Jupiter, Jupiter.” His ears perked up each time she said his name. At the crossroads, at Park’s Chevron station, she sat on her suitcase with Jupiter between her knees. She hugged him and kissed his cool nose.

  Cathy Parks was at the station window, watching Sophie. She and Cathy had been best friends when they were little. They lived close, only a mile separated their houses, and they were the same age. In fifth grade, Cathy stopped sitting with her. One of the other girls made sure Sophie knew exactly why. “Cathy says you’re from an ignorant family and you smell like a cow flop.”

  Floyd’s car came off their road, trailing a cloud of dust. He circled the gas pumps and pulled up in front of her. Jupiter stood up, his tail banging into Sophie’s leg.

  “What did you run off for?” Floyd said. “I said I’d take you.”

  Take her? She didn’t want to be taken. She was leaving. She made circles and arrows in the dirt with a stick. She wished he hadn’t come. Everything that had to be said had been said at the house.

  “Come on, Soph.” Floyd had two ways of talking to her. One was ordering her around like she was two years old, and the other was wheedling, like he was two years old. This was wheedling time. “Come on, Soph, you’re not going away mad, are you?”

  She looked up and smiled, gave him all the smile she had, the smile he always said was wider than a barn door.

  “How are you fixed for money, Soph?”

  “I have enough,” she said.

  He insisted on pushing a roll of bills into her hand. “You have any trouble, anybody bothers you … I don’t know what you’re going down there for. You could stay here with us.”

  “Where? In the garage?”

  “What’s wrong with that? I said I’d fix it up.”

  Then she did something childish, couldn’t help herself. She stuck out her tongue.

  On the bus, she caught a glimpse of Floyd turning up their road. She looked at the wad of bills he’d given her. A lot of money, more cash than he could afford to part with. As soon as she could, she’d pay him back.

  The bus went past Hefner’s vegetable stand, closed now, and the B&B Diner, with a row of pickups parked out in front. After that, the sprawling brick Central School, and then it was just fields.

  Sophie took out her sandwich, but left it unopened in her lap. She was going. She was glad to be going and sorry she was leaving. When would she be back? Would she be back? She was leaving the place she’d never left before, the only home she’d ever known.

  Four

  That same morning, Willis was late starting his run. He had to hustle if he was going to get to work on time. Come into work late once, and they looked at you. The second time you got a warning, and the third time it was the gate. He took a shortcut home along Butternut Creek. Just off Hamilton Parkway, he noticed what he thought was a plastic Clorox bottle near the water. But then it moved, and he thought it was a bird. A gull, maybe. There were a lot of gulls around the city. But it wasn’t a bird. It was a plastic bag, and it was moving.

  He scrambled down the embankment. The top of the bag was wired shut. He opened it gingerly. Inside there was a puppy with its legs wired together. The wires had cut right down to the bone. The dog’s eyes were shut and it smelled awful. As he squatted there, a little sick and unsure of what to do, the puppy opened a large, bloodshot eye and looked straight at him. It must have been in a lot of pain, but it didn’t make a sound.

  It was nasty taking the wires off the dog’s legs. Willis wet a piece of newspaper in the stream and washed off the worst of the mess. Then he cupped water in his hands for the dog to drink. There was nothing else he could do for it. “Sorry, pup,” he said, and the dog lifted its head and smiled at him. The damned dog was dying and smiling.

  What was he supposed to do now? He looked around for something to cover it with. He wasn’t the SPCA. If he took the dog home, it would die on him. What was he going to do with a dead dog? But he had to do something. He couldn’t just sit here looking at it. He had to get to work. So he wrapped the dog in newspaper and took it home.

  In the apartment, he put the dog in the bathtub on an old rug. “I’ve got to go to work. If I don’t see you again, I’m sorry.” He left a pan of water next to it.

  On Spring Street, near the plant, he stopped to buy a sub at the diner, then grabbed a paper at the newsstand and dashed down the stairs to the underground tunnel that led to the plant. He got there just as the warning whistle blew. He punched in two minutes late. Late enough for a dirty look, but not late enough for a reprimand.

  Five

  Sophie stood outside the bus station. The street was an ant heap of smoking, honking, snorting cars and buses. She edged past a line of yellow cabs. “Cab, miss?” A fat man grabbed her suitcase. She pulled it free. Another cabbie had the door open and reached for her arm. “Going up to the college? Cab, miss? Miss! Miss!”

  Sophie kept moving. She was going to sock the next guy who tried to grab her. When the light changed, she crossed the street. People, more people, so many people on the street, rushing in and out of buildings. Everyone going somewhere, everything in motion.

  She was in motion, too, but where was she going? Where would she stay tonight? When she looked up, the buildings leaned and threatened and made her dizzy. She stopped. People glanced at her. Someone elbowed her aside. Her suitcase banged into a woman. “Excuse me,” Sophie said. “Can you tell me where—?”

  The woman darted around her. A man trying to get around her stepped one way, then the other. “Excuse me,” Sophie said. It was like a dance. Step left, step right, then he rushed past her. Nobody had any time for her.

  She fell. She didn’t know how it happened. One minute she was standing and the next she was down on the sidewalk. A man offered her his hand and started to haul her up. “Don’t!” She felt humiliated. She didn’t need any help.

  She escaped down a side street. For a while she stood against a building, the suitcase behind her, catching her breath. Across the street, there was a supermarket, the week’s specials posted in the windows. She crossed the street and went in. The market was bigger and more crowded than the one at home, but it looked friendly and familiar.

  She maneuvered her suitcase down the aisles, picked up a package of sandwich cremes and went looking for the dairy case. A woman with a baby in a shopping cart and another child in tow nudged Sophie. “Reach me that half gallon of milk, honey.”

  “This one?” Sophie handed her the carton. The woman took it, then ran after her little girl, who had disappeared around the corner. The baby in the cart looked at Sophie, then squeezed its eyes shut and howled. “Come on, baby,” Sophie said. She bent over so she wouldn’t look so big and frightening. “Don’t be afraid. Your mommy is coming right back.”

  A moment later, the woman returned, dragging her little girl by the hand. She popped her into the shopping cart next to the baby. “Now you stay there, Jessie.” Jessie reached out and pulled down a display of paper towels.

  “Look what you did!” her mother said. Paper towels spilled across the aisle. Sophie helped the mother pick them up and restack them.

  “Look what you made this nice girl do, Jessie! Thank you,” she said to Sophie. “That’s the last time I take you shopping with me, Jessie.” She pointed to Sophie’s suitcase. “That’s what I ought to do. Pack a suitcase and leave. You hear that, Jes
sie? You’re driving me crazy.” She turned to Sophie. “You don’t have any kids yet, do you? Don’t.”

  She wore a pink jacket and white sneakers. Her hair was parted in the middle and caught in two braids. She looked too young to have kids of her own. Jessie had braids just like her mother’s.

  “I like babies,” Sophie said. “My sister-in-law has two, a boy and a girl. Alice and Benjamin. She’s going to have another one any day now.” She was relieved to have someone to talk to. She was talking too much. “They want a boy, but I’m hoping for another girl.”

  “Don’t hope for a Jessie if you want your sister-in-law to stay sane.” She straightened Jessie’s collar.

  “I’m new here,” Sophie said. “I just got here. I’m Sophie Browne.” She put her hand on the shopping cart. “Do you know where I can find a place to live?”

  “Don’t you know anybody?”

  “I know you,” Sophie said hopefully.

  “A lot of good that’ll do you. What’d you say your name is? Sophie Browne? Cute. My name’s Brenda Leonard. Listen, Sophie, wait for me by the checkout—I’ll be done in a minute. I have an idea for you.”

  Sophie sat in the window, eating her cookies. She was calm now, sitting here waiting for Brenda. She was lucky to have found her.

  When Brenda came through the checkout counter, she said, “Put your suitcase in the bottom of the cart.” She had the groceries and the kids in the basket. “We’ll wheel it home. This place I’m going to show you, it’s in my building. You’re not afraid of a little hard work, are you?”

  Sophie helped push the wagon up the hill. Jessie put her hand on Sophie’s hand.

  “Take your hand off Sophie!” Brenda said.

  “No,” Sophie said. “She can leave it there.”

  “She’s going to get you dirty.”

  “I’m used to it,” Sophie said.

  “Good. Let me tell you about this place. It’s no palace. The people who lived there before were pigs. Wait’ll you see the bathtub. The crud is an inch thick. Unbelievable. I don’t think they ever cleaned it, and the landlord, he’ll never do it. He asked me to do it. I said no way. I mop the halls and I take out the garbage, and he gives me a break on my rent, but I’m not cleaning other people’s filth. But if you want it, you can probably get it cheap.”

  Brenda’s building was off the street. A paved parking lot separated it from a tall apartment house. Brenda unlocked the outside door, then went and got the keys for the empty apartment. It was on the second floor, two rooms and a windowless bath, plus a tiny kitchen. It was filthy, littered with papers and garbage, a layer of grease and grime over everything. The windows were so dirty Sophie couldn’t see out. The first thing she did was throw open a window.

  What she liked immediately was the tree outside the window, its trunk scarred from hooks and clothesline pulleys. The sticky, fat buds were just beginning to open. It made her feel at home. “I’ll take it,” she said. The cleanup didn’t scare her.

  “Let me call the landlord. He’ll want a month’s rent in advance.”

  “I don’t have a job yet. Do you think he’ll take a down payment?”

  “When I tell him you’re going to clean this dump up … that’s worth more than a month’s rent. He ought to pay you. I’m going to tell him that. You hold on to your money till you get a job. Maybe my husband’ll have an idea. Martin drives a cab, so he hears about a lot of stuff. And I’ll tell the landlord he’s got to pay for the paint if he wants you to paint this place. Whatever you do, you’re doing him a favor, don’t forget that.”

  After Brenda settled things with the landlord, she lent Sophie a broom, a mop and a pail, and a box of cleanser. Sophie left her suitcase downstairs in Brenda’s apartment and went to work. It took her a couple of hours just to carry out all the garbage. Then she washed the windows and scraped the grease off the sills. She brought her suitcase up and put her little china animals on the clean sills and tried to imagine where she would set plants and where she would put a table and chairs. She started to feel happy.

  Brenda invited her to supper. While Brenda cooked, Sophie bathed the baby, Violet, and fed her. Martin, Brenda’s husband, said he thought Sophie ought to try for a job in a store or a factory. He was a skinny man with a long neck and a gimpy leg.

  “She lived on a farm,” Brenda said. “She likes the outdoors.”

  “Where’s she going to get a job outside? Girls work inside, in stores and offices and that sort of place.”

  “Not every single one,” Brenda said. “There’s got to be one exception. There’s got to be one girl who’s working outside.”

  “Yeah, crossing guards by schools.”

  “That’s no money. What about construction? I see girls working there.”

  “Politics. You’ve got to know somebody.”

  That night Sophie wrapped up in a couple of blankets that Brenda lent her and slept on the floor in her apartment. Light came in from the street. She rolled her jacket for a pillow and lay on her back. She saw her tree, heard traffic noises, sometimes a siren in the distance. At moments she heard the wind, then voices inside the house.

  For almost her whole life she’d slept in the same room, at the head of the stairs in her parents’ house. She knew every crack on the walls, every stain on the ceiling, the way the light came through the windows, and in spring how the lilac bush shadowed her whole room.

  She turned one way and then the other. She didn’t think she’d ever fall asleep or get used to all these sounds. The things that had happened to her today kept passing through her mind. This morning she had been on the farm and now she was here.

  She dozed off, but woke when she heard voices again. A man and a woman were arguing. It sounded like they were in the apartment with her. The woman yelled. There were footsteps, things falling. The woman’s voice went on and on. A door slammed and then it slammed again.

  Sophie thought of the farm, of the sky, of the silence of the night, and the way all the sounds blended together—the wind, the animals, the pigeons under the eaves. Night sounds that spread over her like a blanket. Sometimes Jupiter barked at a skunk nosing in the grass. But in the morning he was always on her bed, lying across her legs. She missed his weight now.

  Six

  It was dark that day when Willis got home from work. The shades were still down from the morning. The dog was lying in the bathtub on its side, almost exactly as he’d left it in the morning. It didn’t look like a dog at all. It looked like a piece of fur somebody had tossed aside. It was only when Willis knelt down that he saw its side fluttering.

  The dog opened its eyes, raised its head, tried to move toward him. Its eyes closed and then opened again. Willis watched the dog for a while. It was a she. A female. Her helplessness made him remember the nights he’d sat watching his father, sitting against the wall, too drunk to stand and too drunk to sleep.

  What had he gotten himself into with this dog? He didn’t want her. His mother had never allowed a dog into their apartment. She had his father. That was enough trouble. Willis didn’t need trouble, either.

  “What’re you going to do?” he asked the dog. “Are you going to die? If you’re going to die, I’m taking you back where I found you. You can’t die here.” The dog just lay there. She looked like something dead already. It made him angry. “Get up. Come on! Or I’m taking you back.”

  He got a hand under the dog and propped her up. “Now you look like a dog. Stay that way.” But the moment he took his hand away, the dog sagged down again.

  What a mess. He’d made a stupid mistake, bringing home a dying dog. People would laugh if they knew. He’d really let himself be suckered by this poor, big-eyed puppy stuff.

  In the kitchen, he ate a piece of cold pizza. He poured some of his soda into a saucer and shared it with the dog. She managed to lap some of it up. Then she was down again, and her eyes shut. Her tail moved once. The rest of her looked dead again. He covered her with newspaper. Tomorrow, he’d get rid of he
r.

  He washed up and went out. On the corner there was a pizza joint that he liked. It was a family place, where he could sit and watch TV while he ate. He ordered a plate of ravioli, then flipped channels till he found a sports program, replays of great moments in sports history.

  He shook cheese on his ravioli and watched the race between Zola Budd and Mary Decker. The schoolgirl and the veteran. Zola was another barefooted runner like Aaron Hill. Willis was for Zola, the newcomer, the underdog, the come-from-behind challenger. Mary Decker had had her day—now it was Zola’s time.

  When Zola took the lead, Willis had his face right up against the TV. “Hold that inside position. Hold it, Zola!” Mary Decker was crowding her. “Don’t give way, Zola! Go! Go! Go!”

  For a while they ran stride for stride, and then—even knowing it was coming he couldn’t believe it when it happened. First, the two runners, shoulder to shoulder, moving with the precision of geared wheels, and then chaos. Mary going down, Zola fighting to keep her balance. Zola ran on, but you could tell the heart was out of her. Willis didn’t want her to give up. “It’s not your fault, Zola. Go! Run! Win!”

  In the middle of the night the dog started whimpering and woke him. He staggered into the bathroom and brought her some water. Toward morning, he dreamed about Zola Budd. They were training together, both of them running barefoot, bare shoulder to bare shoulder, her stride matching his stride, step for step, so smooth they hardly touched the ground. The two of them flowing on and on, their heels rising and falling, light as Ping-Pong balls.

  The next day at work, he was tired. He stayed out of the foreman’s way, but Miholic came looking for him. He had a job for Willis on the shipping platform. “I want you to neat up the joint, Pierce. Stack the skids. Sweep up. Get this place so we can see the floor again.”

  Willis got the broom and shovel and went to work. He moved the big stuff off the floor first, the boxes, pallets and lumber. His mind was on the work mostly, but he noticed that every time the air compressor kicked off and its steady, regular rhythm stopped, he thought of the dog.