Laura Caldwell - The Dog Park

“I miss him,” he said again.

“I know,” I said again.

We chatted for a few minutes about some clients who had recently retained me again to outfit them for a wedding, about the magazine editors I’d had lunch with last week who’d promised work, about a good friend of Sebastian’s who had sold a book, about Sebastian’s family.

It would be the last normal conversation we would have for a long time. If I had known it, I might have thought to couch what I told him next. “The national news is going to run it.”

“What?” A distinctive snip to his voice that I knew meant displeasure.

“Baxter’s video.”

“What national news program?”

I wasn’t sure. I told him a producer had called.

“What was his name?”

I looked at the stack of cut up, old index cards that I used for notes in the kitchen. I read off the person’s name.

“Jesus, are you serious?” Sebastian said. “I know that guy. Does he know Baxter is my dog?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t mention it because it didn’t seem like you’d want people to know that.”

He exhaled in a short burst, as if through clenched teeth. “I have to go.” He hung up.

Yet an hour later, he was knocking at the door of my condo.

I peered through the keyhole and saw him. This is my condo, I thought. Mine.

Of course, Sebastian knew the doorman, who had simply let him up. Still, the building staff also knew we were divorced. It annoyed me that they would give him free reign, without so much as a warning call to me, even if it was to tell me he was elevator-bound.

I glanced down at what I was wearing—yoga clothes for a class I planned to attend—gray pants, a thin, hot-pink top. I reached back and pulled my hair over one shoulder, smoothing the front and tucking the other side behind my ear. It occurred to me only as I was in the middle of the action that I was doing it because that was how Sebastian liked it.

But he definitely wasn’t in the mood to appreciate my hair.

He strode inside. “Hi.” He stopped suddenly, as if realizing in that instant he didn’t live there anymore.

“Hi?” I tried to keep the irritation from my voice, but it was hard.

“Where’s Baxter?”

“He’s playing at Daisy’s house.”

Sebastian looked a little blank.

“You know Daisy,” I said. “From the dog park.”

“I didn’t know they had play dates,” he said.

“Usually when one of us has to work. Maureen came and got him after we got off the phone.”

Sebastian nodded. “Well, I just wanted to tell you, in person, that I got ahold of him.”

“Who?”

“Paul.” The national news producer. I opened my mouth, but Sebastian kept talking. “They’re not going to run it.”

9

After Sebastian spoke those words—They’re not going to run it—I spun around and marched to our bedroom. I mean, my bedroom!

“Hey, Jess,” I heard Sebastian say, still in the kitchen.

I kept walking, breathed in deep, then again and again. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t let Sebastian make me sad or angry anymore.

I stepped into the bedroom and closed the door. I inhaled slowly. I was alive without him, I reminded myself.

After a minute I opened the door and, trying to tone down the marching, walked back to the kitchen. Sebastian sat on one of our kitchen chairs (my kitchen chairs), a leg crossed, ankle resting on the knee. He looked at me with a confused, maybe a little scared, expression. I couldn’t read him like I used to.

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Get the producer to cancel the piece on Baxter.”

“Because it’s not news.”

“What do you care if your dog is on a news program?” I asked. “Even if it’s not ‘news’?”

“I happen to be a journalist who works in real news and I don’t want anyone associating me with the dog video.”

“Are you embarrassed by Baxter?”

“Of course not. Jesus.”

“By me?”

A scoff.

“Well, then what? Do you think that some source in Pakistan won’t give you information if he knows your dog is in a video?”

He said nothing.

“Will the army not let you embed with some troop?”

Sebastian scowled.

“Hey, just show them that he saved a kid.” I shook my head. “Do you even care that the video makes people happy?”

“I’m not here to make people happy.”

“Well, what if your ex-wife is expanding her business because of being on these programs? Would that make you even a little happy? What if she wanted to make people happy?”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to show you something.” My breath was still short. I hadn’t shown anyone, or even talked to anyone, about what I’d been up to this past week—staying up past midnight and getting up at five to work again.

I gestured at him to follow me. He stood. I walked him into the office.

Where Sebastian’s desk used to be, a long folding table now resided. On the closest end was my sewing machine in front of a chair. In the middle was an empty space where I stood when I flipped through magazines, searching for inspiration, but rarely having to do so for very long.

I walked toward the far end of the folding table, Sebastian following me. There lay piles (organized by color) of plain, inexpensive dog collars and leashes, along with rolls of ribbon and small plastic boxes of embellishments.

I explained to Sebastian how people had been contacting me since the day of the video. “At first,” I told him, “they wanted to order the Superdog collar or leash, sometimes both. It took me hardly any time to make them. Then things started expanding.”

“Expanding how?” Sebastian stood with his hands behind his back, bent over my materials as if he were in a museum studying a display case.

I held up a few sheets of paper with print on them. “These are all the orders I have to fill in the next week.”

Sebastian scanned the first page, then the next. “There are at least forty.”

“I know. And I bet when I check my email, I’ll have another five or ten.”

He looked at me over the sheet. “Do you have a website?”

“Not for this. I have that static one for my styling business. People have been tracking me down through that. Like I said, first, they wanted the Superdog stuff. Now they’re putting in their own ideas. It’s like I take their idea, track down the materials and make it.”

“Wow,” Sebastian said. “That’s amazing.”

“Thanks. It’s not technically that hard. The tough part is keeping track of everything and responding to everyone and then getting it shipped. But it’s fun and creative, and now I’m starting to get all these ideas about designs for other dogwear and accessories.”

“Dogwear?”

“I’m coining a new term. And no, I don’t want your opinion on it.”

He smiled, but barely. “Can I sit down?”

I waved my arm at the room and slightly shrugged like, I can’t stop you.

Sebastian took the order sheet and sat on a light blue chair that had been his grandmother’s. He’d never liked it, so I got to keep it. He didn’t look at the order form, though. At first, his eyes roamed the office, maybe taking note of the loss of him in that room. The rest of his family’s handed-down furniture was in his new apartment in Roscoe Village. Whenever I visited him there, I felt a little jealous, because the neighborhood was charming. There were wine shops and restaurants and boutiques of all kinds, and people strolled happily with their kids or their partners.

As Sebastian kept assessing the office, I wondered if he was noticing the things I’d added—like a painting of a ballerina I bought in New York when I was twenty-four and which Sebastian had found too feminine. It now hung in the spot that had once held Sebastian’s framed map of Colonial America.