Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

“A service station,” Rose suggested. She took a roll of gauze from a drawer.

“Oh, never,” Macon said. He sat where she pointed, in a chair at the kitchen table. He propped his crutches in the corner. “Edward alone in some Exxon? He’d be wretched.”

Rose swabbed Mercurochrome on his hand. It looked bruised; each puncture mark was puffing and turning blue.

“He’s used to sleeping with me,” Macon told her. “He’s never been alone in his life.”

Besides, Edward wasn’t a bad dog at heart — only a little unruly. He was sympathetic and he cared about Macon and plodded after him wherever he went. There was a furrowed W on his forehead that gave him a look of concern. His large, pointed, velvety ears seemed more expressive than other dogs’ ears; when he was happy they stuck straight out at either side of his head like airplane wings. His smell was unexpectedly pleasant — the sweetish smell a favorite sweater takes on when it’s been folded away in a drawer unwashed.

And he’d been Ethan’s.

Once upon a time Ethan had brushed him, bathed him, wrestled on the floor with him; and when Edward stopped to paw at one ear Ethan would ask, with the soberest courtesy, “Oh, may I scratch that for you?” The two of them watched daily at the window for the afternoon paper, and the instant it arrived Ethan sent Edward bounding out to fetch it — hind legs meeting front legs, heels kicking up joyfully. Edward would pause after he got the paper in his mouth and look around him, as if hoping to be noticed, and then he’d swagger back all bustling and self-important and pause again at the front hall mirror to admire the figure he cut. “Conceited,” Ethan would say fondly. Ethan picked up a tennis ball to throw and Edward grew so excited that he wagged his whole hind end. Ethan took Edward outside with a soccer ball and when Edward got carried away — tearing about and shouldering the ball into a hedge and growling ferociously — Ethan’s laugh rang out so high and clear, such a buoyant sound floating through the air on a summer evening.

“I just can’t,” Macon said.

There was a silence.

Rose wrapped gauze around his hand, so gently he hardly felt it. She tucked the end under and reached for a roll of adhesive tape. Then she said, “Maybe we could send him to obedience school.”

“Obedience school is for minor things — walking to heel and things,” Porter told her. “What we have here is major.”

“It is not!” Macon said. “It’s really nothing at all. Why, the woman at the Meow-Bow got on wonderfully with him.”

“Meow-Bow?”

“Where I boarded him when I went to England. She was just crazy about him. She wanted me to let her train him.”

“So call her, why don’t you.”

“Maybe I will,” Macon said.

He wouldn’t, of course. The woman had struck him as bizarre. But there was no sense going into that now.

On Sunday morning Edward tore the screen door, trying to get at an elderly neighbor who’d stopped by to borrow a wrench. On Sunday afternoon he sprang at Porter to keep him from leaving on an errand. Porter had to creep out the rear when Edward wasn’t watching. “This is undignified,” Porter told Macon. “When are you going to call the Kit-Kat or whatever it is?”

Macon explained that on Sundays the Meow-Bow would surely be closed.

Monday morning, when Edward went for a walk with Rose, he lunged at a passing jogger and yanked Rose off her feet. She came home with a scraped knee. She said, “Have you called the Meow-Bow yet?”

“Not quite,” Macon said.

“Macon,” Rose said. Her voice was very quiet. “Tell me something.”

“What’s that, Rose?”

“Can you explain why you’re letting things go on this way?”

No, he couldn’t, and that was the truth. It was getting so he was baffling even to himself. He felt infuriated by Edward’s misdeeds, but somehow he viewed them as visitations of fate. There was nothing he could do about them. When Edward approached him later with a mangled belt of Porter’s trailing from his mouth, all Macon said was, “Oh, Edward…”

He was sitting on the couch at the time, having been snagged by an especially outrageous moment in Rose’s soap opera. Rose looked over at him. Her expression was odd. It wasn’t disapproving; it was more like… He cast about for the word. Resigned. That was it. She looked at him the way she would look at, say, some hopeless wreck of a man wandering drugged on a downtown street. After all, she seemed to be thinking, there was probably not much that you could do for such a person.

“Meow-Bow Animal Hospital.”

“Is, ah, Muriel there, please?”

“Hold on a minute.”

He waited, braced against a cabinet. (He was using the pantry telephone.) He heard two women discussing Fluffball Cohen’s rabies shot. Then Muriel picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Yes, this is Macon Leary. I don’t know if you remember me or—”

“Oh, Macon! Hi there! How’s Edward doing?”

“Well, he’s getting worse.”

She tsk-tsked.

“He’s been attacking right and left. Snarling, biting, chewing things—”

“Did your neighbor tell you I came looking for you?”

“What? Yes, he did.”

“I was right on your street, running an errand. I make a little extra money running errands. George, it’s called. Don’t you think that’s cute?”

“Excuse me?”

“George. It’s the name of my company. I stuck a flyer under your door. Let George do it, it says, and then it lists all the prices: meeting planes, chauffeuring, courier service, shopping… Gift shopping’s most expensive because for that I have to use my own taste. Didn’t you get my flyer? I really stopped by just to visit, though. But your neighbor said you hadn’t been around.”

“No, I broke my leg,” Macon said.

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“And I couldn’t manage alone of course, so—”

“You should have called George.”

“George who?”

“George my company! The one I was just telling you about.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then you wouldn’t have had to leave that nice house. I liked your house. Is that where you lived when you were married, too?”

“Well, yes.”

“I’m surprised she agreed to give it up.”

“The point is,” Macon said, “I’m really at the end of my rope with Edward here, and I was wondering if you might be able to help me.”

“Sure I can help!”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Macon said.

“I can do anything,” Muriel told him. “Search and alert, search and rescue, bombs, narcotics—”

“Narcotics?”

“Guard training, attack training, poison-proofing, kennelosis—”

“Wait, I don’t even know what some of those things are,” Macon said.

“I can even teach split personality.”

“What’s split personality?”

“Where your dog is, like, nice to you but kills all others.”

“You know, I think I may be over my head here,” Macon said.

“No, no! Don’t say that!”

“But this is just the simplest problem. His only fault is, he wants to protect me.”

“You can take protection too far,” Muriel told him.

Macon tried a little joke. “ ‘It’s a jungle out there,’ he’s saying. That’s what he’s trying to say. ‘I know better than you do, Macon.’ ”

“Oh?” Muriel said. “You let him call you by your first name?”

“Well—”

“He needs to learn respect,” she said. “Five or six times a week I’ll come out, for however long it takes. I’ll start with the basics; you always do that: sitting, heeling. My charge is five dollars a lesson. You’re getting a bargain. Most I charge ten.”