T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

When she turned round, both the Strikers were there, as if they’d floated in out of the ether. As far as she could see, they hadn’t aged at all. Their skin was flawless, they held themselves as stiff and erect as the Ituri carvings they’d picked up on their trip to Africa and they tried hard to make small talk and avoid any appearance of briskness. In Mrs. Striker’s arms— Call me Gretchen, please —was an Afghan pup, and after the initial exchange of pleasantries, Nisha, her hand extended to rub the silk of the ears and feel the wet probe of the tiny snout on her wrist, began to get the idea. She restrained herself from asking after Admiral. “Is this his pup?” she asked instead. “Is this little Admiral?”

The Strikers exchanged a glance. The husband hadn’t said, Call me Cliff, hadn’t said much of anything, but now his lips compressed. “Didn’t you read about it in the papers?”

There was an awkward pause. The pup began to squirm. “Admiral passed,” Gretchen breathed. “It was an accident. We had him — well, we were in the park, the dog park… you know, the one where the dogs run free? You used to take him there, you remember, up off Sycamore? Well, you know how exuberant he was…”

“You really didn’t read about it?” There was incredulity in the husband’s voice.

“Well, I–I was away at college and then I took the first job I could find. Back here, I mean. Because of my mother. She’s been sick.”

Neither of them commented on this, not even to be polite.

“It was all over the press,” the husband said, and he sounded offended now. He adjusted his oversized glasses and cocked his head to look down at her in a way that brought the past rushing back. “ Newsweek did a story, USA Today —we were on Good Morning America, both of us.”

She was at a loss, the three of them standing there, the dog taking its spiked dentition to the underside of her wrist now, just the way Admiral used to when he was a pup. “For what?” she was about to say, when Gretchen came to the rescue.

“This is little Admiral. Admiral II, actually,” she said, ruffling the blond shag over the pup’s eyes.

The husband looked past her, out the window and into the yard, an ironic grin pressed to his lips. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said, “and it’s too bad he wasn’t a cat.”

Gretchen gave him a sharp look. “You make a joke of it,” she said, her eyes suddenly filling, “but it was worth every penny and you know it.” She mustered a long-suffering smile for Nisha. “Cats are simpler — their eggs are more mature at ovulation than dogs’ are.”

“I can get you a cat for thirty-two thou.”

“Oh, Cliff, stop. Stop it.”

He moved to his wife and put an arm round her shoulders. “But we didn’t want to clone a cat, did we, honey?” He bent his face to the dog’s, touched noses with him and let his voice rise to a falsetto, “Did we now, Admiral? Did we?”

—

At seven-thirty the next morning, Nisha pulled up in front of the Strikers’ house and let her car wheeze and shudder a moment before killing the engine. She flicked the radio back on to catch the last fading chorus of a tune she liked, singing along with the sexy low rasp of the lead vocalist, feeling good about things — or better anyway. The Strikers were giving her twenty-five dollars an hour, plus the same dental and health care package they offered the staff at their law firm, which was a whole solid towering brick wall of improvement over what she’d been making as a waitress at Johnny’s Rib Shack, sans health care, sans dental and sans any tip she could remember above ten percent over the pre-tax total because the people who came out to gnaw ribs were just plain cheap and no two ways about it. When she stepped out of the car, there was Gretchen coming down the front steps of the house with the pup in her arms, just as she had nine years ago when Nisha was a high school freshman taking on what she assumed was going to be a breeze of a summer job.

Nisha took the initiative of punching in the code herself and slipping through the gate to hustle up the walk and save Gretchen the trouble, because Gretchen was in a hurry, always in a hurry. She was dressed in a navy-blue suit with a double string of pearls and an antique silver pin in the shape of a bounding borzoi that seemed eerily familiar — it might have been the exact ensemble she’d been wearing when Nisha had told her she’d be quitting to go off to college. I’m sorry, Mrs. Striker, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to work for you and Mr. Striker, she’d said, hardly able to contain the swell of her heart, but I’m going to college. On a scholarship. She’d had the acceptance letter in her hand to show her, thinking how proud of her Mrs. Striker would be, how she’d take her in her arms for a hug and congratulate her, but the first thing she’d said was, What about Admiral?

As Gretchen closed on her now, the pup wriggling in her arms, Nisha could see her smile flutter and die. No doubt she was already envisioning the cream-leather interior of her BMW (a 750i in Don’t-Even-Think-About-It Black) and the commute to the office and whatever was going down there, court sessions, the piles of documents, contention at every turn. Mr. Striker — Nisha would never be able to call him Cliff, even if she lived to be eighty, but then he’d have to be a hundred and ten and probably wouldn’t hear her anyway — was already gone, in his matching Beemer, his and hers. Gretchen didn’t say good morning or hi or how are you? or thanks for coming, but just enfolded her in the umbrella of her perfume and handed her the dog. Which went immediately heavy in Nisha’s arms, fighting for the ground with four flailing paws and the little white ghoul’s teeth that fastened on the top button of her jacket. Nisha held on. Gave Gretchen a big grateful-for-the-job-and-the-health-care smile, no worries, no worries at all.

“Those jeans,” Gretchen said, narrowing her eyes. “Are they new?”

The dog squirming, squirming. “I, well — I’m going to set him down a minute, okay?”

“Of course, of course. Do what you do, what you normally do.” An impatient wave. “Or what you used to do, I mean.”

They both watched as the pup fell back on its haunches, rolled briefly in the grass and sprang up to clutch Nisha’s right leg in a clumsy embrace. “I just couldn’t find any of my old jeans — my mother probably threw them all out long ago. Plus”—a laugh—“I don’t think I could fit into them anymore.” She gave Gretchen a moment to ruminate on the deeper implications here — time passing, adolescents grown into womanhood, flesh expanding, that sort of thing — then gently pushed the dog down and murmured, “But I am wearing — right here, under the jacket? — this T-shirt I know I used to wear back then.”

Nothing. Gretchen just stood there, looking distracted.

“It’s been washed, of course, and sitting in the back of the top drawer of my dresser where my mother left it, so I don’t know if there’ll be any scent or anything, but I’m sure I used to wear it because Tupac really used to drive my engine back then, if you know what I mean.” She gave it a beat. “But hey, we were all fourteen once, huh?”

Gretchen made no sign that she’d heard her — either that or she denied the proposition outright. “You’re going to be all right with this, aren’t you?” she said, looking her in the eye. “Is there anything we didn’t cover?”

The afternoon before, during her interview — but it wasn’t really an interview because the Strikers had already made up their minds and if she’d refused them they would have kept raising the hourly till she capitulated — the two of them, Gretchen and Cliff, had positioned themselves on either side of her and leaned into the bar over caramel-colored scotches and a platter of ebi and maguro sushi to explain the situation. Just so that she was clear on it. “You know what cloning is, right?” Gretchen said. “Or what it involves? You remember Dolly?”