Free What He's Poised to Do: Stories by Ben Greenman Page B

that?” said my mother, puffing on a cigarette. “Your father wants to prove that a lawyer can do more than lawyering. I’m pretty sure he can’t.” And sure enough, within three months, the dog—a small schnauzer beloved by my sister and my father, despised by my mother, and, for me, an object lesson in indifference—was gone through a corner of the fence where the slats flexed enough to permit its passage. “Where is Goosey?” Jill said, in a voice loaded up with tragic tones she had learned from the television. She did this all the time. It was difficult to take her seriously. “Where is my little dog Goosey?”
    “I am so sorry,” said my father. The grief in his voice was real.
    2.
     
    Since both my parents worked late, our dinners were prepared by a cook, a tall, thin woman named Catherine who was planning to open her own restaurant and who was, my mother told us, attempting to trick my father into becoming an angel. “That’s a kind of investor,” she said, as if there were any confusion. “I think he should think long and hard before he makes that kind of decision.” She was one to talk. When my mother had been in charge of the cooking, dinner was a roll of the dice, both random and risky. We could have pizza four nights in a row, and then not see it again for a month. We could have fried chicken every other night for two months and then lose it for the better part of a year. It made for an unstable relationship with food. With Catherine, we entered into a regimen of strict rotation: chicken, pork, fish, pasta, beef. Each day of the week partnered with a certain entrée. “It’s to help me learn what I need to know,” Catherine said, her eyes glazing over as she drifted into thoughts of her future restaurant, which she was going to call the Hungry Cat. Fridays were for experiments; she tried tagines, pastry shells, exotic meats. One Friday, she served something she called “a Bull in the Grass,” which consisted of a filet mignon served over a bed of spinach and topped with sautéed onions and mushrooms. Midway through the meal, I leaned over to Jill and said, “Why doesn’t she call this ‘a Goose in the Grass’?” My mother laughed. Jill burst into tears. My father said my name once sternly—it was also his own name—and then he said nothing. Had I not been so pleased with my own joke I might have noticed the way he stared at Catherine.
    3.
     
    My mother and Catherine didn’t get along, and I wasn’t sure why.
    Certainly, my mother wasn’t uncomfortable with the idea of having servants. She had grown up wealthy; her father was a prominent businessman back on Earth. Have I mentioned that we were no longer living on Earth? When gravity and oxygen were first introduced to the moon, the United States government arranged for the transfer of more than 25,000 Americans to Alpha Settlement. No one liked the name, so the government promised that after a year the residents could vote on a new name. That first year, while my parents were busy getting used to their new lives, meeting the neighbors, and fixing up the house—that was the year my father built the fence—Jill and I spent all our time thinking of names for Alpha Settlement.
    As befits a self-serious fourteen-year-old, I favored dignified, slightly artificial names: Luna Village, Tranquility Hills. Jill, twelve, wanted a name that made her laugh: “Moonesota,” she said, or “Moontana,” or “Moonte Carlo.” My mother and I indulged her names with weak smiles and encouraging nods. My father loved them. He was constantly asking Jill to think of new ones or, better yet, to make a list of all the ones she had thought of to date. One day he came home from work, and she rushed at him with open arms. “Daddy,” she said. “I thought of three more today: Vermoont! Green Cheese City! Moonesota!” She was beginning to repeat herself, but normally that would have made no difference to my father. Normally, he would have stood next to