A Private State: Stories by Charlotte Bacon Read Free Book Online

trusting herself to speak, and headed out to the parking lot. The light today was lovely, even for heading off to post notices of a lost and ragged dog in malls built on land that once belonged to dairy farms. It occurred to her today those old fields might have been such a violent green thanks to some pesticide people liked to use back then.
At a bagel bakery where she taped a sign, the cashier asked what had happened. Lillian said her dog was gone. The signs were in case he didn't find his way back.
"You mean he's going to come home all by himself?" Lillian saw the girl's tag said her name was Kris.
"I know it sounds odd," said Lillian, "but they have a tremendous instinct for it."
"In their little dog hearts they just know?"
It was true, Lillian protested. As a girl, she'd had a dog who walked twenty miles along a highway to come back to her. She'd forgotten this 'til she told Kris, but it had actually only been five.
"Loyalty," said Kris, seeming impressed. "That's wild. But why would he leave?"
"Someone took him," Lillian said, "right from the yard."
"Hmm," said Kris. She had a shock of goldfinch yellow hair

 

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that came, as people used to say, from the bottle. A dab of cream cheese partially masked the K on her name tag. Duncan rarely just wandered off, Lillian explained. Perhaps a child who'd seen him decided to take him home. When the parents saw the posters, they'd return the dog. This was one of the stories Lillian told herself under the comforter last night. It sounded even thinner in fluorescent light, lox and hazelnut in the air.
Kris picked up a plastic knife and smoothed the surface of a bucket of margarine. "You have too much respect upon the world: they lose it that do buy it with much care," she said to the knife, clearly quoting. It had to be Shakespeare, but all Lillian could do was smile and hope she looked knowing and appreciative. Kris loaded some day-old bagels in a sack. "Here," she said, thrusting the bag into Lillian's arms. ''I hope my instincts are wrong."
That evening, Lillian told Owen "I put up signs all day, I found out our taxes pay for a road-kill officer, I plugged in that answering machine and nothing." They were in the kitchen, and though it was late, neither had eaten. Lillian dusted some web from the machine, which had once belonged to the boys. "You're sweet, but our dance cards aren't that full," she'd said and waved the contraption away as if it were a wasp, the same gesture she'd used to reject microwaves and computers, also offered secondhand. Today, she'd rescued the machine from the attic and spent an hour deciphering instructions before the red eye began to blink.
Well launched on a bottle of Soave, Lillian rambled about Jim P. and Kris, the quoting girl, the false intimacy of nametags. Rooting in a cupboard, Owen came across the bagels. "Shakespeare?" he said and looked inside the bag. "What are these doing here?" he asked, holding up a poppy-studded roll. Owen and Lillian had moved from New York at a time when bagels were still ethnic food. Their breakfasts were white toast, bacon, black coffee, a meal from another century.
"The quoting girl gave them to me. Do you recognize this?

 

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There was something about having too much respect for the world and losing it."
Owen chewed some bagel. " Merchant of Venice " he said after a minute. "You have too much respect upon the world: they lose it that do buy it with much care. Hah!" he said, pleased. "Why was a girl in a bakery quoting Shakespeare?" Luck
"I don't know," Lillian said. She was abruptly exhausted. She was thinking that she would die if she couldn't scratch the roll of skin on Duncan's neck soon. That Owen and some sad girl at a mall were probably the last two Americans to soothe themselves with great, old books. That more shells had fallen in Bosnia today. She'd read the headlines in spite of herself. Picking up the paper from the stoop, she'd also seen Emma's owner crossing the street, gray in the face,