Free The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter

everything, and she does have a point. She’s pretty hard to fight with when she has a point.”
    “She gave me her word.”
    “Yeah, well. Your sister does that,” he said with a sigh.
    “Harold, I’ve got to have that dog. Kathryn left me and I’m a wreck.”
    “You sound like a wreck, I agree with you about that. But listen, Bradley, the kids have gone all crazy about that animal, and I don’t think I can return him to you. It’s not all that easy, taking a pet away from children.” He waited. “You don’t have kids. You don’t know about how kids scream at you. I mean, they really scream at you. They know how. It’s like their job.”
    I heard a sound from someone who was presumably in the barber chair.
    “What’s that?”
    “Oh,” Harold said, “that’s my customer. Guy named Saul. He says I should return the dog.”
    “He’s right. A deal is a deal.” I waited. “There’s honor at stake here.”
    “There is? Whose honor?”
    In the background, I could hear the customer named Saul saying, “ Your honor, Harold.”
    “Listen,” Harold said, “it’s a busy morning and I have to go.”
    “Harold, you and Agatha promised —”
    “Good-bye, Bradley. I’m sorry. I truly am.”
    And he hung up on me.
     
    I HAD NEVER REPOSSESSED a dog before. But that was what I would have to do. First I had to go down to Jitters for several hours to supervise and manage the staffing and work on the books. Also, we were still training Chloé — she’d left Dr. Enchilada’s, as I said, to do bookkeeping for us at the main downtown Jitters. But by two in the afternoon I thought everything was under control in the place, the customers jabbering away on their caffeine highs, spraying bagel crumbs in every direction, and so I changed clothes in the back room and hopped in my car and headed up toward Five Oaks. I had taken along Bradley’s old leash, some Milk Bones and kibble, a bowl for water, and some squeak toys, including a squeak cat I thought he’d like to chew on.
    The trouble was that I had lingered over a bit too much caffeine myself, with the result that my nerves were on fire, and I was pulled over and ticketed on I-75 just north of Bay City for driving eighty-five miles an hour. Mr. Toad is a fast driver, I’ll admit that right now. The patrolman was a squat, bullet-headed youth with a mean and forthright expression of contempt. When I pulled out my wallet from my sport coat, several nuggets of dog kibble cascaded out. The cop, seeing this, intensified his expression of scorn. His face looked as if it had been made of concrete.
    “Officer, everyone was driving that speed,” I said, sounding authoritative, like a war correspondent. “We all were. I don’t see why you singled me out.”
    “Sir?” he said. Even his voice sounded concretelike. “Let me ask you a question. Have you ever gone hunting? Up north?”
    “Hunting? Once or twice. But I don’t see what —”
    “ — Duck hunting?”
    “No. Maybe once.”
    “Well,” he said, “if you’ve gone duck hunting, and you were there in the marshes, let’s say in the early morning, you know, at first light? When you aimed your gun, would you shoot at the individual duck, or would you shoot at the whole flock? You’d aim at one of them, wouldn’t you? That’s what I did. I aimed at you. And it seems I landed you.”
    So he opened his book and wrote out the ticket. But I explained to him as he wrote that I had been in a hurry to get a dog, my dog, and I explained about my wife leaving me — the caffeine still had me in its grip — but he seemed quite unsympathetic, and unmoved, and certainly not about to eat the ticket on my behalf. He was a callow youth with a simple idea of lawbreaking and had suffered no setbacks in the wars of love. He wore no wedding ring, I noticed. He said to me, after I had finished my presentation, “Things will go very ill for you if you are caught speeding again soon.” Where do they find phrases like