Alpha Dog (16 page)

“But . . . what about
him
?” I looked at Seamus, who was hunkered down beside me, looking kind of hungover and depressed.

“What about him?” she asked.

“I can’t just leave him like this.”

“Well, don’t leave him out here, that’s for sure. Just put him in your room. He’ll be okay.”

I bit my lip. “Are you sure?”

“He’ll be fine. Trust me.”

When we returned two and a half hours later, Mrs. Krantz met us on the landing.

Christine saw her first. After griping about the service elevator being out of order and how climbing the stairs made her head throb, she suddenly stopped in mid-complaint and broke into one of her blissed-out smiles. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Krantz,” she said in her Disney princess voice.

“Afternoon, girls,” Mrs. Krantz called. I could tell by her clipped tone that something was really wrong.

Christine didn’t seem to pick up on it, though. “How’s your arm?” she went on, as if trying for extra credit.

“It’s fine, dear. Thank you.” Mrs. Krantz turned toward me, her expression instantly grim. “Katie, may I speak with you a moment?”

My limbs turned to icicles. “Uh . . . sure.”

“Here, give me your bag, Katie. I’ll wait for you inside,” Christine said, her pitch all hush-hush and her face so solemn it made me want to punch her. I was really getting tired of this whole good-renter, bad-renter routine she thought we were playing.

“Thanks,” I muttered, enjoying her slight wince as I handed over my bulging Co-op Bookstore sack.

Mrs. Krantz smiled benignly and waited until Christine shut the door behind her. Then she pushed her glasses up her nose and cleared her throat. “I’m afraid we had a little . . . incident while you were gone.”

“An incident?” I repeated. “What kind of an incident?” I could guess what kind. A Seamus-related one, I was sure. But I wanted to play this as innocent as possible.

“Soon after you girls left, your dog began howling nonstop. Such loud, anguished cries.” She touched her hand to heart for some reason, as if to demonstrate the drama of it all. “It really upset poor Mrs. B.”

Dammit!
I knew I shouldn’t have left him. He was still so freaked out and I abandoned him.

“I’m really sorry.” I paused, listening. “But . . . how did you get him to stop?”

She fiddled with her eyeglass chain. “Well, I have to admit, after the little ruckus this morning, I was too afraid to go near him. But luckily Matthew showed up.”

“Matthew? You mean Matt?”

She nodded, smiling. “Such a sweet young man. He offered to take your dog and keep him quiet until you came home. So we let ourselves in and got him. I hope you don’t mind.”

“You mean . . . Seamus is over at Matt’s?”

She nodded again, her glasses slipping to the tip of her nose. “Yes. He’s there now. I just wanted you to know.”

“Thanks.”

Mrs. Krantz headed into her condo. “Oh, and Katie?” she added, pausing on the threshold.

“Yes?”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet. But you have to know, this cannot happen again.”

“I understand. Thanks.”

After she shut her door, I began pacing the landing. My mind was so stockpiled with stress, I didn’t know what to think. Obviously things were not working. And I was beginning to wonder if even Seamus would be happier elsewhere. But if I took him back to the shelter, he’d be finished. Gone. Mrs. Krantz would let me keep him if he behaved. Only I couldn’t put him on the balcony or he might chase her precious devil-spawn cat. I couldn’t let him roam the apartment or he would chew and ingest various things. And thanks to this latest development, it seemed I couldn’t leave him in my room either.

Basically, I was screwed.
Seamus
was screwed.

Now Matt was involved. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hated me for this, having to take in an animal he loathed so much. It would be like me having to babysit that spoiled brat Mrs. B.

I shut my eyes and tried to stuff all my panic and frustration into some impenetrable part of me. The process was near impossible—like trying to close a huge, virtual suitcase crammed full of ugly clothes. Eventually my breathing steadied enough for me to approach Matt’s door.

Brace yourself. He’s going to be mad,
I thought as I knocked.

Matt opened up, took one look at me and smiled. “You’re back,” he remarked. “Come in.”

“Thanks,” I said, disarmed by his good mood and (as always) his cuteness.

I headed into his condo, which had the exact same layout as ours only more guy-like. He had modular, comfy-looking furniture, all in different shades of brown—whereas our décor was more little-old-lady, circa mid-1980s, with a heavy wiener dog motif.

Seamus was lying on the rug, gnawing on something white and floppy. He saw me and immediately ran over, his tail a wagging blur.

“Hey, fella,” I said, picking him up. It felt good to be greeted so warmly—although I wondered if he would still love me if his canine brain could fathom what a loser I was.

“Have a seat,” Matt said. He scurried about, picking up books and stacks of dirty dishes. It was then I noticed how messy the place was.

“Oh no. Did Seamus . . . ?” I gestured helplessly at the papers and Starbucks cups strewn about the carpet.

Matt looked confused for a second, then started laughing—a deep, musical laugh that reverberated through me. It was like Kinky’s bass cranked up to eleven, only better. “You think Seamus did this?” he asked, chuckling. “No. This is all me. I’m a pathological slob.
Slob-a-noid maximus
I think is the clinical term.”

“Good,” I said, letting out my breath. “I mean, I’m glad he wasn’t a big problem. Or was he?”

“No, he was no trouble,” he said, tossing a pile of clothes and other debris into the linen closet. “He just got a little . . . chewy. That’s all.” He walked over and picked up the white thing Seamus had been munching on: a mangled athletic sock.

I sucked in my breath. “I’m so sorry!”

Again Matt laughed, and again my insides hummed. “Don’t worry about it.
I
made half of these holes.” He gestured to an empty spot he’d cleared on the couch. “Sit down for a sec.”

“Okay.” As soon as I settled onto the couch, Seamus struggled in my arms, trying to get at the sock dangling from Matt’s right hand. “Uh-uh,” I said to Seamus. “You’ve chomped on enough stuff today.”

“It’s okay,” Matt said. “Let him go for it. I don’t mind.”

I released Seamus and Matt tossed the sock into the air. Seamus caught it and ran to the far corner, where he proceeded to whirl about, play-growling and flailing the sock as if it were a stray rattlesnake.

“Keep it. It’s yours,” Matt called out to him. He kept his gaze on Seamus as he lowered himself into a fudge-colored recliner. Gradually his features slackened into the usual bummed-out expression he wore around us.

Guilt shot through me as I thought about how difficult these last two hours must have been for him—how he must have been battling his dog hatred the entire time. Mrs. Krantz was right. He was extremely nice. And it was thoughtful of him to hide it all from me.

“I really, really appreciate your taking him in,” I said, leaning forward. “Especially with . . . you know . . . the way you feel and all.”

His eyebrows disappeared beneath his hair. “What do you mean? How do I feel?”

It was cute how surprised and slightly worried he looked. He seemed almost embarrassed that I’d picked up on this aversion of his. “It’s okay,” I said. “I could tell the first time I saw you that you don’t like dogs. No big deal.”

“Don’t like dogs?” he repeated. For a while he just looked at me as if I were speaking in code. Then suddenly, a bemused smile stole its way across his face. “Ohhh. No. You’ve got it all wrong. I love dogs.”

“You do?” It was my turn to stare at him suspiciously.

“Yeah. It’s just that . . .” He pressed his hands together and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You see, I had a dog. A golden retriever named Jessie. Had her for ten years. She, um, died two months ago.” He said all this in a strained tone, as if hurling the words from deep within him.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. I sat there, completely riveted, battling an overwhelming urge to touch his face and try to smooth away the sad cracks on his brow.

“I found a lump on her belly,” he went on, gazing down at the carpet. “It was cancer. The vet did everything, but . . . after a while it was clear nothing was helping. So we . . . so I . . . stopped her suffering.” His voice petered out at the end.

I wanted to say
I’m sorry
again, but I couldn’t. I felt almost too heavy for speech. The phrase wasn’t good enough anyway—it was way too skimpy to truly impart how I felt. All I could do was stare at him and feel his heartbreak.

Ever so slowly, Matt seemed to particle-beam back to the present. His gaze lifted and he shifted awkwardly in his seat, rubbing his hands as if cold.

“Anyhow, that’s probably why I seemed so out of it around Seamus,” he explained. “It just, you know, reminded me.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “I imagine.”

He turned and looked at Seamus, who was chomping merrily on the toe of the sock as he held it between his front paws. I studied Matt as he watched my dog, wondering how I could have misunderstood him all those times.

It’s his eyes,
I decided. Those sleepy, hooded eyes. They made him appear brooding when he was simply thinking—or remembering.

Seamus caught Matt looking at him and dropped the sock, his ears pricking like perfectly folded cloth napkins. Springing to his feet, he ran forward and leaped onto the coffee table, surfing on a piece of paper and knocking an assortment of pens, notebooks and Styrofoam cups to the floor.

“Down!” Matt shouted.

Seamus instantly hopped to the floor, his ears flattening against his head and his body bowed with guilt. He seemed totally taken aback by Matt’s reaction. Even I had to fight the urge to hit the carpet.

“Sorry,” Matt said, grinning awkwardly. “Force of habit.”

“It’s okay.” I reached for Seamus, thinking I should comfort him. I really didn’t want him to dislike Matt, especially now that I’d discovered Matt
didn’t
dislike him. But to my surprise Seamus walked over to Matt and licked his hand. Matt’s lips curved into a grin, and he bent down to scratch Seamus on the head. “You can crash here anytime you want, little guy,” he said sort of wistfully.

A Christmas bulb pinged on inside my head. “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing tomorrow morning?”

“I’ve got a class and then a couple of hours of rat holding. Why?”

“Damn!” I slumped back against the cushions. “It’s nothing. I just need to figure out something to do with Seamus.”

“What do you mean?”

I proceeded to fill him in on almost everything: my impulse decision to adopt Seamus, his wild behavior, my lack of sleep, my promise to Christine not to let him run loose, his skirmishes with Mrs. B, and my promise to Mrs. Krantz to keep him away from them. The entire time I babbled, Matt sat and listened patiently, stroking the long fluffy fur on Seamus’s ears.

“So I can’t keep him on the terrace. And now, apparently, I can’t leave him in my room either,” I concluded, having worked up to a full whine.

Matt sat back in his seat. “Maybe you could try what I used to do with Jessie.”

“What’s that?”

“Leave the radio on.”

“Huh?” Matt struck me as a smart guy, but it seemed that adding music would only make Seamus howl louder.

“Seriously,” he went on, chuckling at my reaction. “Set it on one of those morning talk programs. It always calmed my dog. I think the sound of voices made her feel less lonely.”

“Really?” Maybe he was on to something. After all, Seamus hadn’t howled when the party was going on, and our place had been full of yammering people. Of course, maybe he had and I just didn’t hear it over all the noise.

“You know, it just might work.” I nodded slowly. “Yeah. I’ll give it a shot. Thanks.”

“No prob.”

We sat there grinning at each other for an immeasurable moment. Gradually, I could feel the skin on my face begin to sizzle. Just when my hair seemed ready to catch fire, I mustered my strength and turned away.

“Come on, Seamus,” I called, standing. “Let’s go.”

Seamus rose up and glanced from me to Matt, stamping his paws and whimpering slightly.

“Go on,” Matt said, giving him a gentle nudge.

Seamus gave him a wide-eyed, soulful look—the one I thought he only gave me—and scurried over to my feet. I scooped him into my arms and headed for the door.

“Thanks again,” I said. “For everything.”

Matt got to his feet and shoved his hands into the pockets of his baggy shorts. “Not a problem. I guess I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah. See ya.”

As I opened the door and stepped out onto the landing, Seamus started to whine. Clearly he was reluctant to leave Matt.

He wasn’t the only one.