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  “Fortunately I know where my mom keeps the tequila,” she said, and plunked down a bottle and two short glasses.

  I said nothing. I stumbled over what I even had up my sleeve to say. Not much, so I was hoping she’d figure it out on her own.

  A second later, she got there. “Oh. What am I saying? You’re just a kid. What’re you, like, fifteen, sixteen years old?”

  “Fourteen,” I said.

  She poured herself what looked to me like a very large serving of tequila. Then she poured just a splash into the other glass. My glass, I supposed. A couple of tablespoons.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “That little bit won’t kill you.”

  I just stared at it. I was still petting the boy dog’s head.

  “Ever had a drink?” she asked me.

  “I had half a beer once at a party.”

  “This is nothing like that. This stuff’ll blow the back of your head off.”

  I watched her down the whole drink as if it were a shot, then slam the empty glass onto the boards of the porch.

  I was thinking I liked the fact that my head had a back to it. You know. Intact and all. But she looked over at me expectantly, so I sipped at it. It felt like drinking liquid fire.

  “That’s not how you do it,” she said. “You toss it down all at once.”

  I did as she said—I think because I generally did what grown-ups said. I hadn’t yet learned that I had a right to refuse. Or not fully, anyway. I guess I knew I could, but it was so desperately uncomfortable that I usually didn’t.

  It made me cough violently, and my eyes watered. I couldn’t stop blinking and coughing.

  She poured herself another glass. I thought it was strange how we weren’t talking about her mother.

  I sat quietly for a minute while she downed her second tequila—just stared off into the woods and watched the breeze move the dappled sunlight around. For that minute, everything felt nearly normal again.

  Next thing I knew she was grabbing me by two big handfuls of my shirt. Suddenly. Almost violently. I was seized by panic, but I didn’t try to get away, except in my head. My fight-or-flight reflex got stuck in the middle on “freeze.”

  “You have to do something for me,” she said, her voice intense and full of distress. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll do it!”

  The alcohol had obviously gone quickly to her head. Mine had kicked in a little bit, too. My arm and leg muscles felt tingly, my belly hot. Then again, it was hard to know how much of that was fear.

  “I don’t even know what it is yet,” I said.

  Which was brave under the circumstances. Even faced with that kind of pressure, I was not about to promise to do something until I knew what I was promising. I took promises seriously, even then. All these years later, even more so. That seemed to override my tendency to do as adults commanded.

  “Tell her you won’t take the dogs.”

  “Take the dogs? I was never going to take the dogs. Did she think I was trying to steal her dogs?”

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no.” Her words had begun to slur. “You’re not getting what I’m saying. You’re not getting it right at all. Tell her that if anything happens to her, you won’t take them. Or take care of them.”

  “Um . . . ,” I said. And then, because I was extremely uncomfortable, “Could you please let go of my shirt?”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  She unclenched her fists and let go. Smoothed out the places she had wrinkled. Or tried to, anyway.

  I breathed for what felt like the first time in ages.

  “I couldn’t take the dogs if I wanted to. My parents wouldn’t let me have them.”

  “Good! Tell her that. Promise me you’ll tell her that.”

  “Why?”

  “If you use your head, you’ll know.”

  I stared off into the woods for a minute, but nothing came to me. Maybe because I was still shaken.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I have no idea.”

  “The dogs need her. They would have no one else to take care of them. If you wouldn’t, I mean. So that’s her reason to stay. Get it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”

  “You sound like you don’t.”

  She was probably right about that. I probably sounded like I didn’t get it. Because my head was still so full of the parts of the thing I didn’t understand. I was wondering if the lady, her mom, had almost left the planet accidentally or purposely, and, if purposely, why the dogs hadn’t held her here. And also I was wondering why she didn’t have more reasons to stay than just that.

  “I just think it’s too bad,” I said.

  “Damn straight. Nearly everything is.”

  She was slurring badly now. But she still poured herself a third full glass. She poured a little more in my glass, but I pretended not to notice.

  “Wait,” she said, staring at the side of my face. I could see it in my peripheral vision. “Which part?”

  “The part about how the dogs are her only reason.”

  She didn’t answer straight away. Just sighed noisily.

  We sat quietly for a minute or two. I was wanting to make a break for it and go home. But for the moment I was rooted to the spot.

  “I don’t know why she stayed in this damn town,” she said. Wistfully, as though staring at a pitiful situation I couldn’t see. “Nobody knows why. Everybody thought it made sense to go far away. Well . . . everybody except her, I guess. She could have started over where nobody knew her. What was keeping her in this town, I don’t know. Instead she had to live like this.”

  She swung one wild arm back toward the cabin.

  “What’s wrong with this town?” I asked. A bit defensively. After all, this was my town.

  “People are crap, that’s what’s wrong with it. They don’t let her forget. They say exactly the wrong thing. They ask these rude, stupid, intrusive questions without stopping to consider how they make her feel, how they bring it all crashing back. And that she’s heard them a thousand times before. They whisper behind her back, and I mean to this very day.”

  I allowed a silence to fall. In case there was more. There didn’t seem to be more.

  “I feel like I’m missing something,” I said.

  She stared at the side of my face again. I didn’t dare look over, but I could tell.

  “Oh,” she said, drawing the word out long. “You don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “That’s right. Of course you don’t. You’re fourteen. You weren’t even born yet. Well, that’ll be nice. You can come see her when she gets home, and you’ll be the only person in her life who doesn’t know who she is. She’ll like that.”

  I took that to mean she wasn’t going to tell me.

  “I should go,” I said.

  I moved the boy dog’s head off my leg and stood. Stared down at the daughter for a moment. The drunken daughter.

  “You’re not going to try to drive back to the hospital, are you?” I asked.

  No reply.

  I looked around for a car—which was silly, because if there had been one, I would have seen it long before that—but I saw only the pickup truck that was always there. That had been there since I’d stumbled on the place.

  “Are you even driving?” I asked at last. Because so far she wasn’t answering.

  “Yeah,” she said, the word muddy with effects of tequila. “I got a rental car parked out on the River Road. But don’t worry. I’ll sleep it off in the cabin before I go anywhere.”

  And with that, she disappeared inside.

  I didn’t run home, because that little bit of alcohol had made me feel shaky. But I definitely got myself home. I think I can honestly say that a big part of me was still unable to process what had just happened.

  Chapter Four

  The Lady

  When I got out to the cabin the following morning, everything had changed. And I knew it immediately.

  The dogs were no longer moping on the
porch. They had been in their doghouse, but they heard me coming as I trotted down the hill, and they came spilling out. Pouring out, I guess I should say. Just like the old days.

  I put on the gas and they ran with me.

  Somewhere in the back of my head I knew that must mean the lady was home. But I put it out of my mind again because I had missed this so much. I had needed this so much. I think the dogs had missed it, too. They ran with their mouths open and their tongues lolling out. It looked for all the world like they were grinning widely.

  Then I started to worry about what the daughter had said: that her mother had seen me running off with the dogs. I wondered if she had seen me that morning. Probably not, I figured, because she was likely still confined to bed. But the thought continued to nag at me. And, as I think I’ve said before, I couldn’t run through those woods and think any real thoughts at the same time. That was the whole point of doing the thing.

  I slowed to a jog and then stopped.

  When the dogs noticed, they came back and bounded around me in circles, hoping I’d go on.

  “We better go back,” I said.

  They were clearly disappointed. But they did as I asked.

  I could feel their tails hitting the backs of my thighs as I knocked on the door.

  “Mrs. Dinsmore?” I called.

  I pressed my face close to the edge of the door. The edge that would have opened in if she could have gotten up and opened it. As if it would increase my chances of being heard through solid oak. Then I raised my volume a few notches, realizing that would be more helpful.

  “You don’t have to get up, Mrs. Dinsmore. Don’t get up for me, okay? Because I know you’re still probably feeling pretty bad. It’s just me, Lucas Painter. You know, the guy who was coming to see the dogs? I just wanted you to know I was feeding them while you were gone. They weren’t eating, actually, but I made sure they had it there if they wanted it. And I made sure they had water. They did drink a little water. And I came back at sundown and locked the food up in the shed so it wouldn’t draw raccoons or coyotes or whatever. I didn’t want the dogs getting into it with the wildlife. Anyway . . . I just wanted to say I’m glad you’re—”

  I got no further than that.

  The door swung open.

  In front of me stood the lady whose life I had saved. Zoe Dinsmore. She was not tall, but built big and solid—a little overweight but not huge. Just built like a tank. Her face was creased and set hard. Maybe against me, or maybe it had been that way before I was even born. Her expression made her daughter look like a happy, friendly elf in comparison.

  I took a step back.

  She just stood there in the open doorway, taking me in. Sizing me up, from the look of it. She was wearing a blue checkered nightgown that came up high around her neck in a ruffle. It didn’t seem to suit her at all. She was not a frilly woman, to put it mildly.

  After a second or two of staring at me in silence she nodded a couple of times. Not approvingly. More as though she had resigned herself to taking me as I came, disappointing though she seemed to find me.

  Or maybe I was reading too much in. Maybe it was life in general that kept falling short of her expectations, and maybe I was only getting the brunt of her disapproval because I happened to be standing in her line of vision.

  She opened her mouth and spoke, and I heard her voice for the first time. It was gravelly and deep, as though something had happened to her throat. Or maybe it was the voice of a woman who’d been drinking hard for years. It was impossible for me to know.

  “Would you take the dogs if anything happened to me?”

  My head spun with her words, and I remembered the promise I’d made to her daughter. How could I forget it?

  “I can’t,” I said. “I couldn’t if I wanted to. My parents would never let me have even one small dog.”

  “Maybe you could come here and take care of them.”

  “No,” I said. And I was surprised by the firmness I heard in my own voice. “No, they would hate that. It would kill them to have to live out here all alone. You should’ve seen them while you were in the hospital. It would’ve broken your heart. They were miserable. They wouldn’t eat. They would hardly even pick up their own heads. You can’t do that to them. They need you.”

  I paused, and braved a look at her face to see how my very direct words were settling in.

  For what seemed like a long time she said nothing.

  Then she croaked a simple statement into my face.

  “You’re not as helpful as I’d hoped you’d be.”

  She opened the door wider and invited the dogs inside with a sweep of her arm, and they happily accepted the invitation.

  She started to swing the door closed, but I stopped it. And her. Stepped forward and stopped the door with my hand, and stopped her from slamming it with my words. It was unlike me. But she had dug down and found what anger I had.

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “I don’t understand how you can say a thing like that to me. I saved your life.”

  She leaned in closer, through the half-open doorway. Leaned in until her nose was only three or four inches from mine. I thought I smelled tequila on her breath.

  “I didn’t. Want it. Saved.” Her deep voice came out eerily calm, with tiny groups of words forming their own weighted sentences.

  Then she slammed the door and set the poorly aligned dead bolt.

  I walked home. What else could I do?

  That was my first meeting with the infamous Zoe Dinsmore. It was also the day my curiosity tipped, and I couldn’t stop wondering how she had gotten so infamous.

  I broke Connor loose from his house the best way I knew how. Really the only way I knew how by then. I offered to buy him an ice cream.

  There was this place on Main Street. That’s actually what it was called—the Place. It was about seven blocks from his house. They made a treat he couldn’t resist. It was a sugar cone with that swirly soft-serve vanilla, spiraled up all pretty and then dipped in a vat of melted chocolate that hardened immediately into a candy shell. And you had to start eating it right away to keep it from melting, so he couldn’t even ask to sit in his room while I brought it to him.

  We stepped out of his house, and I saw him squint up into the sun. Maybe I was exaggerating the situation in my head, but he reminded me of a vampire. I wondered when he’d last gone outdoors. I think school had been out for four days.

  While we walked to the Place I told him about my experiences of the past twenty-four hours. Both with the lady and her daughter.

  He didn’t say much. Once he made a little noise in his throat and then said, “That’s weird.”

  We turned the corner onto Main Street, and I saw the ice cream place at the end of the block. I was surprised we’d gotten there so fast. I guess I’d told the story in more detail than I’d realized.

  “So . . . ,” I said, “. . . you don’t know anything about what happened. Do you?”

  “Tell me the lady’s name again?”

  “Zoe Dinsmore.”

  “No. Can’t say that rings a bell.”

  That was honestly the way Connor talked. At age fourteen. I guess that helps explain why we had no real friends except each other.

  “But her daughter said people bring it up to her to this day. Like everybody knows about it, whatever it is. So if everybody knows about it . . . why don’t we know about it?”

  He answered with no hesitation at all. As though the answer had been fully formed in him all along and just waiting to burst out.

  “We’re kids. People keep stuff from kids. They think we’re supposed to stay all pure or something until we grow up, and nothing should upset us. So they whisper about bad stuff behind our backs so we don’t get upset. But it’s so totally useless, because then at the same time they’re always doing stuff that’s really upsetting.”

  “Wow,” I said. Surprised by how much he knew and how well he could put it into words. “That’s so . . . true.”


  We stepped into the shop together.

  “What’re you getting?” he asked. He seemed happy enough to change the subject. He was staring up at the menu board behind the counter, but I had no idea why, because he always got the same thing. “I know you know what I’m getting.”

  “I’m getting the chocolate ice cream with the chocolate coating.”

  “That’s a lot of chocolate,” he said.

  “You don’t say that like it’s a good thing.”

  We waited in a short line.

  When we had been handed our cones and I’d paid for them, he did something that disappointed me.

  He headed for the door.

  “I thought we were going to sit here and eat them,” I said.

  He shook his head and looked down at the black and white squares of linoleum. The way his mother would have, if she’d been there.

  “I should get back.”

  So I resigned myself to our eating them on the way home. I knew I’d have to spit out what I wanted to say fast, because I only had seven blocks to get it all covered.

  “So, how do you find out a thing like that?” I asked as we walked away from the shop.

  “I’m not sure.” He took a bite of his ice cream as if it helped him think. Then he added, “You could ask your parents.”

  “Nah.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was three when we moved here, remember? And this happened before I was born.”

  “They still might’ve heard about it.”

  “Maybe. But there’s another thing. I don’t want my mom to know I’ve been out in those woods. She’d be really mad.”

  “What does she have against the woods?”

  “She thinks I’ll get lost in there.”

  “Oh. Did you ever?”

  “Once. For a little bit. But then I came out on the River Road, and then I knew where I was again.”

  We walked in silence for half a block. I ate my chocolate ice cream, wondering why anyone would get vanilla when they could get chocolate. I thought he was out of suggestions, which was disappointing. I wasn’t sure which way to go with this thing. I needed somebody’s help, and Connor was pretty much my whole set of options.