Found
By Katie Runde
When we wake up, it is too quiet, even for a Sunday. Our dog, Sammy, has escaped into the interstates and cornfields and strip malls of Iowa sometime in the middle of the night. He will suffocate in the August heat, be run over by a semi and left to rot, be taken in by evil twin boys who will ride him around the yard and tease him until he cries.
Sammy is a couple-with-no-kids-dog, part chocolate lab, part friendly and wild mix, used to lavish attention and secret treats and long walks. We give him what he wants.
Aaron stands at the kitchen counter scanning the backyard like he scans the basketball court at the tiny college where he is an assistant coach. He paces back and forth, tripping over a loose tile under the sink and cursing under his breath. He has the compact stance of a point guard, and I can see the skin under the freckles on his back redden even though we have left the air conditioning turned way down in the night.
“You’re the one who left the back door open,” I say, slamming it. “You always leave that door so it just opens if you push on it.”
“I left the door open? Well, if you had taken him for a walk, I wouldn’t have had to let him out at midnight,” he says. He jingles his keys like he always does when he thinks I’m taking too long to get ready to go somewhere.
“Maybe the idiot dog wanted out of here,” I say, stuffing the eggshells and milk cartons down into the trash, looking away from him.
“Now the dog is an idiot? ” he says. He pulls on the shorts from his pile of dirty clothes and goes out in the car to search for Sammy without me, leaving the garage door open, letting hot air seep in to the rest of the house.
The last time Sammy got lost, we got lost trying to find him. We had just moved here so that Aaron could get a paying college coaching job two years ago. I found the third in a string of paying jobs that were all good enough for now. My last job was as a receptionist at a hair salon, and I let the girls dye my hair deep red and then black with little caramel streaks. The streaks are half grown out now, and I work in the office of the humanities department at the college, filing and making appointments for students to see their advisors.
“Iowa?” I asked Aaron, standing in the doorway to our tiny apartment in Philadelphia. He was just back from his interview at this tiny college, his arms full of Chinese take-out and a bag full of shorts and tee-shirts with the college logo stamped all over them. His tie was loose around his neck.
“It’s only temporary,” he said. “You know, pay your dues for a few years.” He held up a shirt he picked out for me and spread out the food all over the coffee table.
“What am I supposed to do in Iowa?” I asked. He was already staring at his laptop screen while he ate, looking for a place to rent near the college.
I found the bottle of Jim Beam hidden on the corner shelf in our basement, behind the case of motor oil, three days ago. When Aaron has been gone looking for Sammy a few minutes, I go down and find it again, the level three inches lower than yesterday.
At his one year anniversary AA meeting, Aaron told his story: beer cans piled high in a high school friend’s yard, college weekends that stretched into the middle of the next week, vomit down his tux at his brother’s wedding, losing his way in the Dallas airport, a disorderly conduct ticket on his thirtieth birthday. His lovely wife, coming to pick him up at the bar hours after she had fallen asleep. And now, one bottle in the basement.
Aaron is gone all morning and will not pick up his phone, so I drink cold coffee and scan our street for Sammy, for Aaron’s car to come around the corner. I leave the TV on with the sound low so I will hear if my phone rings,leaf through an old furniture catalog, turn on the dryer. There is nothing to do but wait.
When we adopted Sammy, there were so many dogs in the shelter, but we both stopped in front of Sammy’s cage and watched him watching us with his dark, tired eyes. He seemed to already know us, tilting his head and lifting his ear a quarter of an inch. Aaron squeezed my hand, squatting down to see Sammy at eye level.
“What do you think?” he asked, looking back up at me. “This guy?”
I wasn’t sure I even wanted a dog, but it felt like I had found something familiar and I would miss Sammy forever if we walked out of the shelter without him.
“This guy,” I said.
At home waiting for Aaron to find Sammy, I am still in my pajamas at one o’clock when my sister Lisa calls from Chicago. I tell her about finding the Jim Beam, even though she is usually too blunt with her advice.
“So, did you tell him this time about finding it?” she asks. I can hear traffic in the background and it makes me feel like I am in some kind of hurry, too. I try not to sound like I’m going to cry. Lisa is younger, but gorgeous younger. Successful city younger.
“What if we never find Sammy, and it’s my fault?” I ask. I am so lonely sometimes in this house and this town that I want to develop a drinking problem just so I can have some friends to see in the evenings at meetings, too.
“Sammy knows what’s good for him, ” Lisa says, and then she has to go to in to work on a Sunday.
That evening, our fight about idiot dogs and doors too far away to mention, we go back out again to look for Sammy together. The parking lots are all empty, deserted in the Sunday evening heat. We burn an entire tank of gas, driving up and down every street, through four parks and all the way out to the lake, then back across the strip that cuts the town in half with Applebees and Jiffy Lubes and asphalt.
When we moved here, I missed being able to walk everywhere. I missed good restaurants and Yuengling beer and winters where it snows a little, but never gets the deep, bone cold it gets out here. I felt claustrophobic because we couldn’t drive to Sea Isle for the weekend or take the train to New York or get a direct flight to anywhere. I felt like I was always waiting for something and running out of time.
“Sammy, here Sammy,” we say over and over, our throats raw. Aaron pulls into a parking spot, in the massive shadow of Kohl’s, and the sun sinks away, dragging the persistent haze down with it.
As we finally turn around for home, I look down at my flip flops, the chipped toenail polish and calluses on my heels, the tiny hairs growing and sticking out from my skin, the goosebumps forming up and down my leg from the blower. Aaron’s big hands grip the steering wheel, and I remember him on a hundred other nights, holding off a charge down the court from the Seton Hall offense, blocking shot after shot and wearing down their best players. I remember the first time he picked me up for a real date, a way off-campus Italian restaurant we had to borrow his roommate’s old Saturn to drive to. I remember him giving me a pep talk before final exams, looking me in the eye in the florescent light of the library saying, “You will crush this thing.”
We stop at a red light where the sensor is broken, so we sit for four or five minutes. I feel older now than I was when we got to this town, older than I was this morning when I thought Sammy was sleeping on the screen porch and Aaron breathed evenly next to me.
Right now, I should say I love him and I will help him. I should apologize for the timing, with Sammy who knows where, but I should tell him quietly what I have found. I should try to remember that what I love, finding him working into the night on plays, finding the place between his arm and his shoulder early in the morning, the way he looks at me when he catches me singing Motown songs while I do laundry, the way he stood behind me at my dad’s funeral, the way he will argues about politics with Republicans and the way he tells stories waving his hands around like crazy. I try and cry a little and the blower keeps making my toes so cold. These are not thoughts suppressed by logic or memory.
“I know you still drink,” I say, moving the door lock up and down, the air vents in and out. “And I know it’s not your fault, and I know you haven’t been going to your meetings.”
I feel every pothole while Aaron drives in silence, staring straight ahead and speeding through yellow lights. Maybe nothing will unravel if he tells me I don’t have to worry, that it’s too late to talk about this but we will when it’s light and it’s not so hot. I’ll make us omelets and bacon for breakfast and Sammy will come back to us, and we will finally paint the front porch. My mother will fly in for the weekend in September, and while we finish a pie from the bakery and a pot of coffee, and she will ask us when she’s getting some grand kids. We won’t be lonely, and even if we stay in this town forever I will feel homesick less and less.
The next morning, Aaron answers my questions with one-word answers and then goes to work without saying goodbye. I go to work without any makeup on and come home late without calling. Aaron says he’s not hungry for dinner, and I don’t eat any. One afternoon later that week, while Aaron is away, I pack a bag and drive two exits away on the interstate, and then turn around and come home again.
Sammy finds his way home, too, a few days later, barking in the front yard like he had only been out for a minute. After all our searching and yelling, there he is slobbering and wanting in. He gets lost again in the fall and we finally build a fence so big we don’t think he’ll ever get out.