“It’s just you,” I say. “Go work. I get the feeling Eric will be a lot more comfortable giving me the thing without you around.”
Anders laughs, shakes his head, and jogs off.
I look at Dalton. “In all seriousness. I’m fine with waiting.”
“No, it’s not something that should wait. It’s just…” He rakes his hair back and sighs. “Fucking lousy timing. Shoulda waited until spring, but I got ahead of myself, and fuck, I probably shouldn’t have gotten it at all without telling you.”
“Eric? Babble never helps. Even profanity-laden babble. What you’re saying is that you’ve bought me a gift and you’re not sure it’s appropriate.”
“Yeah.”
“Then give it to me now, or just tell me I’ll get it later.”
He resumes walking but changes direction, and soon we’re at Petra’s place. He raps on the door, and when she answers, he says, “I’m here to pick up that … thing.”
She grins. “Ah, right. The thing.” She leans against the doorpost, blocking our view inside. “Sorry, Sheriff. I’ve misplaced the thing. You’ll have to come by another time. Maybe next week? I’ll have found it by then.”
He shakes his head.
“Fine.” She looks at me. “I’m keeping your thing, Casey. You wouldn’t want it, so I’m doing you a favor.”
There’s a noise from in her apartment. It sounds like …
“Is … that a whine?” I say.
“Wine? Not here. Try the Red Lion.”
She starts to close the door. Dalton catches it and ushers me through.
“Private property, Sheriff,” Petra says.
“It’s Rockton,” I say. “There is no private property.” I try to brush past her, following the faint sound of whining, but Dalton catches my arm and says, “Remember you said we should consider getting animals again? Working animals.”
My smile grows to a grin.
“A working animal,” he says. “Not a pet. We can’t have pets here. But she needs a master, someone to train her and live with her so—”
I’m already past him and down the hall. The whining comes from Petra’s bedroom. When I throw open the door, a blur of black fur zooms over and stops short when it realizes I’m a stranger.
I see it, and I let out the kind of noise I’ve never let out in my life, the kind girls in school would make over new shoes or a hot guy, and I’d roll my eyes and think, Seriously?
I make that noise.
Behind me, Petra’s laughing, and I’m dimly aware that I’m totally ruining my rep, but I don’t care. I’m on the floor with this giant mop of black fur in vaguely puppy shape. It’s on my lap, wriggling and whining as if it doesn’t care that it’s never seen me before in its life—I am its new best friend.
It’s a black puppy with a streak of white on one ear, and as it licks my face, I spot a black tongue. I stop, my arms still around it, and I turn to Dalton, and I can barely get the words out. “It’s a—You got me a—”
That’s all I can manage, and I swear I’m going to cry. I never cry. Certainly not happy tears. I’ve never even been sure those are a real thing, but that’s what wells up now.
When I was young, my parents once had to attend a conference just after they’d fired our latest nanny for letting me go inside the corner store alone. My sister went with them to the conference—she was ten and knew how to comport herself in public, a skill I would never master. I stayed with my aunt, whom I barely knew.
My father had been estranged from his family ever since he decided to marry “that Vietnamese girl”—my mother was half Chinese, half Filipino. There’d apparently been some reconciliation after my sister was born. Then I came along and, well, the difference between me and April is that she can pass for white and I cannot, and I guess something was said, and the upshot is that I don’t remember ever meeting my paternal grandparents.
But my father’s younger sister wanted a place in our lives. So, with a laundry list of rules, my parents let me stay with her while they attended the conference. My aunt promptly threw out their list—at the top of which was “no dogs”—and introduced me to her boyfriend … and his Newfoundland.
My six-year-old self fell in love with that dog the way it had never fallen in love with a person. And she loved me back with the kind of unconditional love only an animal can truly give. When my parents came to get me, I was reading in the backyard, using the dog as a pillow. They saw me lying on a dog bigger than me, and …
I never saw my aunt again. Instead, I got a solid week of dog-attack photos. I didn’t care. In years to come, I might forget weekends with men who passed through my life, but I never forgot the one I spent with that dog. I told Dalton about it when the subject of pets arose in conversation, and now I see this puppy’s black tongue, and …
“You bought me a Newfoundland puppy.”
Petra murmurs something about needing to run an errand. Then she’s gone, and Dalton’s just standing there, this look on his face that I can’t quite read. I adjust to sit, with the puppy on my lap, and I say, “I know it’s a working dog. I just … It’s a surprise.”
“A good surprise?”
He asks that in all honesty, and I have to laugh, shaking my head. I grin at him, and he stops moving, and there’s that look again, the one I can’t decipher.