Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

Skyler had been his birth dog. His father had brought the tiny six-week-old pup home when August had been out of the hospital less than a week. It was something that August’s father said his own father had done for him. He thought that it was good for a boy to have a dog to grow up with. And, against August’s mother’s objections, he’d put the soft, pug-faced shepherd mix in the crib with August—“to get acquainted,” he said. “A boy with a dog is healthier, more active.” And it seemed true. August had been a particularly sturdy baby, a bright, energetic boy who grew up with a shaggy, tongue-lolling, good-natured four-legged shadow.

At twelve, Skyler had been in remarkably good shape, a little stiff in the mornings but by noon harassing the barn cats like a dog half his age. But then, one day after school, August didn’t see him anywhere in the barn or the yard. He went to the equipment shed and found him stretched out on his side with a greenish-blue froth discoloring his grayed muzzle. He’d chewed through a gallon jug of antifreeze that August’s father kept under the workbench.

August and his father had carted the body up to the hill and taken turns with the pickax and shovel. When they’d finished they stood and regarded the cairn of rocks they’d stacked over the raw earth to keep the skunks out.

“I guess twelve is as good an age as any,” his father had said. At the time, August thought he was talking about the dog. Later, he thought maybe his father had meant that twelve was as good an age as any for a boy to lose a thing he loved for the first time.

August watched the sky in the west become washed in dusky, pink-tinged clouds. Unbidden came the thought of Lisa, the crimson in her cheeks that spread like a hot infection down her neck and shoulders and back and arms, all the way to her legs. That this was the case wasn’t mere supposition. He’d seen it.

It had been an early-dismissal day the previous fall. August, off the bus and out of his school clothes, eating a piece of cake from the new house, wandered down to the barn, the air sharp with the acrid tang of the oak leaves his father had been burning in the front yard. The pile smoldered; there was no one around. Skyler slept in the shade of a stock tank. The cows were yoked up in their stanchions. The whole barn was full of the low rumble of suction, the automatic milkers chugging away.

And then, through the open doorway of the grain room, there was his father, thrusting behind Lisa, who was bent over a hay bale, her cheek and forearms pressed down into the cut ends of the hay. Their overalls were around their legs like shed exoskeletons, as if they were insects emerging, their conjoined bodies larval, soft and mottled. August saw the flush of Lisa then, the creeping red that extended all the way down her back to her thick thighs and her spread calves. She had her underwear pulled down around her knees, and its brilliant lacy pinkness was a glaring insult to the honest, flyspecked gray and manure-brown of the barn.

On his way out, August turned the barn radio up as loud as it would go. Golf , Paul Harvey was saying, is a game in which you yell “Fore,” shoot six, and write down five .

At the dinner table, Lisa and August’s father each had a beer. Lisa cut a lime wedge and jammed it down the neck of her bottle, and August’s father said, what the hell, he might try it like that too. They smiled at each other and clinked their bottles together and drank, and August watched the lime wedges bobbing in the bottles like floats in a level held on a surface that was out of true. When they’d finished eating, August’s father leaned back in his chair and belched mightily, his rough, callused fingers shredding the paper napkin as he wiped taco juice from his hands.

“Best meal I’ve had in a while. Thanks, Lisa.”

Lisa smiled and said, “You’re welcome, Darwin. I’m glad you liked it.”

“I got three cats today,” August said to break up their stupid smiling competition. “I did it with a wrench. Right in the head. They never knew what happened.” Out of the corner of his eye he could see Lisa wrinkle her nose slightly.

His father finished his beer and piled his fork and knife and napkin on his plate. He was a large man; all his joints seemed too big—hard, knobby wrists and knuckles, his hands darkened from the sun up to the point where his shirt cuffs lay. He was forty-five years old and still had a full head of hair, dark brown, just starting to gray at the temples. In the cold months, he liked to wear a bright silk cowboy scarf knotted around his neck. He smiled at women often, and, August noticed, women often smiled back. His mother used to say that for a guy with manure on his boots he could be fairly charming.

“Come on, now, Augie. I gave you a job and I appreciate you getting right down to it. But there’s barn talk and there’s house talk. I’m sure Lisa wouldn’t mind a little house talk now. How about you clear the table and clean up the dishes. And why don’t you thank Lisa for making that delicious meal? She worked all day and then came up to do that for us.”

“Thanks,” August said, and scooted his chair back loudly. He stacked the dishes into a precarious pile and carried them off to the kitchen. He ran the water until steam rose and squirted in soap until the bubbles grew in great tumorous mounds, and then he did the dishes. Clanking plate against plate, banging pot against pot, running the water unnecessarily, making as much noise as possible to cover the low murmur of Lisa and his father talking in the next room.

Through the kitchen window he could see the murky green cast of the yard light, the hulking form of the barn, and, farther out, the long, low shape of the old house, completely dark. When his father came in to get two more beers, August didn’t turn around to look at him. He stood next to August at the sink and took the tops off the bottles. He nudged August with an elbow, and August scrubbed at a pan, ignoring him.

“How’s your mother?”

August shrugged.

“I’m not going to run her down, Augie, but she’s not a woman that will ever give you her true mind. You know what I mean?”

August shrugged.

“She’s been disappointed her whole life, probably came out of the womb that way. You don’t disappoint her, I know that, but everything else does—me included, always have, always will. She never learned to hold herself accountable. That’s the way her parents allowed her to grow up. She’s very smart and she thinks she sees things I don’t see, but she’s wrong, I’ll tell you that. I see plenty. You hear me?”

August swirled a cup in the dishwater and didn’t say anything. His father slapped him on the back of the head.

“I said, you hear me?”

“Yeah. I hear you.” August looked straight ahead out the window.

“Okay, then.” He reached into the dishwater, came up with a handful of suds, and smeared them on August’s cheek. “You’re all right,” he said. “When you think it’s time, you let me know and we’ll go find you a pup.”

In the morning, the smells of toast and coffee and bacon pulled August from his bed before the sun had even hit the east-facing window. He clumped down the stairs into the kitchen and sat at the table, rubbing his eyes. Lisa stood at the stove, making eggs. Her feet were bare and she had on the gray long underwear she wore under her barn overalls. They were made for men and were tight around her hips, and when she bent over to get the butter out of the refrigerator August could see the faint lines of her panties curving across her full rear.

“Would you like coffee, August?” August nodded, and she put a steaming mug in front of him. “I figure you like it black, like your dad does?”