“Good,” I said.
When I’d left Matt, Josh was the one who went into the city and got the rest of my things: my clothes, my photo albums, my favorite books and movies. He was the one who brought everything to me in Rhode Island, helped me begin to settle in there. And he didn’t ask me any questions. Not then. He didn’t make any judgments. He just stayed with me until I told him it was okay for him to go. One way or the other, who was I to judge him now?
“Hey,” Grace said, “Could you grab me the peanut butter out of the fridge?” she said. “I need to grease the pan a little.”
“You can use peanut butter? In a frying pan?” I said.
“Well, we’re out of oil, and we’re not doing the weekly market run until tomorrow. So I’m thinking it’s either that or the non-sticky glue,” she said, shrugging.
“My choice?” I said.
She nodded. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”
After we finished preparing, Grace and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table. We had matching monster sandwiches on our plates, oversize scoops of sweet potato fries. Through large bites, Grace explained to me that even though she was only sixteen, she had already finished high school—Elizabeth had let her skip first and eighth grade—and was University of Rhode Island bound in the fall. She was going to study marine biology there. She was accepted into the honors program to do it. She was given a scholarship to do whatever she wanted.
“I’m just commuting for now, though,” she said. “I’m not sold yet on the whole college and academics thing.”
“Yeah, I can tell you must be pretty lousy at it.” I smiled at her.
She shrugged. “No, I guess I want to go. I just feel like I’m a better learner outside of school, you know? I know that sounds stupid, but I think I’ll learn more around here or heading to the ocean. But my mom says I need the degree, and I know she’s right.”
I picked up my sandwich, nodding, but also trying not to be too vehement about it. I didn’t want to undermine what Elizabeth had instilled in her, but I did totally understand what she was saying. I was someone who was pretty lousy at school. I did what I could to get by. But my goal was never really to learn anything that they wanted me to learn. In fact, as soon as I was supposed to learn something, I spent all my time trying to figure out something else. The immigration paper I was supposed to write in high school turned into my quest to understand elevator construction. My freshman-year foray into Pavlovian psychology turned into a quest to learn about ballroom dancing in China. I could only look into things well when someone wanted me looking at something else.
This reminded me of what I was supposed to be learning now, what lessons I was hoping to be taking from the wives. I was so stuck on wanting to see one particular thing from them, I was a little worried I was missing it, what I was really supposed to be learning.
I turned and looked at Grace. “You know, if commuting gets tough or something, you’re welcome to stay at my place. I live right near URI,” I said. “Like fifteen minutes away, tops.”
“Yeah?” she said, nodding at me in a way that told me she already knew that. Josh must have told her. I fiddled with my sandwich, trying not to think about what else he must have told her. Trying—even harder—not to worry about how he was doing right now. What was or wasn’t being decided.
Grace put her sandwich down too, blushing a little. “I’m a little nervous about meeting friends, and stuff. Maybe you can show me what people do around there for fun.”
“Oh, I would, but I don’t have any.”
“Fun?”
“People.”
She smiled, and then stood up and started cleaning the table. “You know,” she said, “your brother used to joke with me that if we never talked about school, we wouldn’t have to go back. To just ignore it when anyone said I needed to do something to get ready.”
I had been standing up to help her, but I stopped, mid-stand, just froze there. And I must have started looking at her funny, which may have scared her, but probably because she thought she’d broken our deal to not discuss them. She hadn’t broken the deal, though—or at least it didn’t matter to me anymore. How could I explain to her that, in ways I wasn’t entirely ready for, different things were starting to?
I tried to recover, quickly, saying the absolute first thing that came to my mind. “So I noticed the lake,” I said, pointing in its imagined direction. “It looks a little like wrapping paper from a distance. You know, that shiny kind. I’m always wrapping it wrong, putting the shine on the inside. Does it look like that close up?”
“Maybe a little,” she said, and started to laugh, which let me know it didn’t. “But we could go sit by it, if you’d like. Pick up a couple of the dogs and bring them with.”
“Not the big dogs,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Or . . . you know what? Let’s just go.”
The pamphlet Grace had handed me in the house explained that in every litter of bullmastiffs, there was the alpha dog—usually the firstborn, always the main protector—that the other baby pups tried to stay near, cuddle into, and ultimately emulate. Then there was the runt. The runt was essentially the alpha dog’s opposite: smaller, weaker, the scaredy-cat of all its brothers and sisters. Ironically, it was the one that was often considered the most aggressive dog because it was more prone to bite. It was prone to try to prove how tough it was.
It didn’t matter that I read this on the way to the paddocks. When we got there, I was drawn to the littlest dog in the litter anyway. Hannibal. Apparently, his name hadn’t predisposed him to prowess. Grace, on the other hand, let out Sam, the biggest dog. The alpha. Hannibal had all of Sam’s features: same chocolate skin, same heavy jowls—all of it just much smaller.
This might be why—despite all evidence to the contrary—I thought it was a good idea to reach straight into his pen and pick Hannibal up myself. Before Grace could stop me, or reach over and control the situation, my new pal Hanny rewarded me by digging in—teeth first—to take a nice-size chunk of skin off my wrist.
“Oh, my gosh,” I said, dropping him to the ground. “He bit me.”
Grace raced over to survey the damage. I turned my wrist over to show her. Right by my wrist bone—where skin used to be—I expected to see a small, red
moon. But there was really just a tiny scratch.