Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt Read Free Book Online

green, blue, white duds?—was eating lunch off the step-on scale. She had made a plate out of the hamburger’s wrapping—but to eat in the same room where dogs sneezed and cat parings black as a mechanic’s flicked into space and landed on the step-on scale, where even now the assistant was craning to catch the mayonnaise leaking from one side of a hamburger so big it had to be a Whopper. The vet they had found was unsanitary. At the checkout station, desultory biscuits decomposed in a jar—shit. What was he doing here with the dog in his arms, handing the dog over, when he really wanted to be talked out of it or into it, but the fucking vet, the one who belonged in Montana braining trout with rocks, was in a rush and he jabbed the sedative needle in and the dog yelped and then yielded up himself.
    Why didn’t Ned turn away from, take the dog away from, but he walked out and for a moment, yes, a moment, he was free!
    Now, days later, what he couldn’t quell was the horror of his turning away from a messenger, surely a god in disguise—the old lady who had stopped him on the street just as he had turned away from the dog groomer’s and decided on the vet, the old lady approached and in a voice full of tears asked, “May I pet your dog, please?” She said to the blind dog, “Oh, I had one like you.” She said, “Oh, so wonderful. Aren’t they wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful?”
    “He’s blind,” Ned said.
    “Oh,” she said with a shrug, “that happens.”
    “He’s also deaf.”
    The old lady said, “But he can feel, can’t he?”
    *
    “Who?” he asked.
    Phoebe held up a finger and spoke into the phone in her soberest voice about looking at the Schumacher. Ned didn’t know what would be looked at, but he wasn’t interested enough to ask was it a faucet or a couch?
    “It never ceases to amaze me that people live like this,” he said when he had Phoebe’s full attention.
    She wondered that he had never been to the apartment before. “Are you sure?” She swiveled in her chair and inventoried her in-home office. “Doesn’t any of this look familiar?”
    He started to say, “Aside from the mess, but no. No,” he said, and then he saw the familiar photograph of the cottage on the bluff overlooking the Menemsha Harbor. “Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. Sea glass in the soap dish and Phoebe’s dormered bedroom, close, churchy, hot. “I remember.”
    “I should hope so,” Phoebe said. “I’m going in July—we are.” She said, “Now, what can I do for you, sir?”
    “For starters?”
    “For starters,” Phoebe said, “I’m very much my own woman today.”
    “No clients?”
    “Not today. Not unless I decide to see the Schumacher—patterns,” she said, “material.”
    “See me,” he said. “I put the dog down today.”
    They had the afternoon to themselves and could, given overcast weather, guiltlessly cavort through most of it. How better to spend the time? For years, he had been impersonating a disciplined writer, putting off pleasure until the cocktail hour—so why not now run his hand along her check, touch her collar bone, her breast . . . ?
    “Why’d you stop?” Phoebe asked.
    “I go about my business so glumly.”
    “This isn’t getting you down,” she said and her merry expression when she tugged at him made him smile.
    When had Isabel stopped smiling?
    *
    Back at the White Street loft he saw Isabel sitting on the floor next to the shih tzu’s empty crate.
    The empty crate brought back the anguish of that morning, the empty crate and the fleecy bedding, the tin bowl of water, the water slopped onto the floor as if someone had just been drinking from the bowl, as if the dog were still with them and not, as Ned remembered, remembered all too easily and readily, not a helpless animal on his side, wide-eyed—that blue marble Ned had seen for the one and only time—not an animal relieved. Relieved? Who would wish to be relieved of his aches, small and large, if it