Free Solos by Kitty Burns Florey Page B

off with his breakfast.
    The phone books went way back to when, bored one rainy day while visiting his grandmother, he opened the Rochester directory and discovered there were fourteen Meads in it, and only one was his grandmother. Then he found eighty-seven Smiths and almost as many Diazes and Rodriguezes and Cohens and Chins. He was entranced. Now he had the Manhattan phone book. It was a revelation, a brave new world. Incredibly, it contained over a thousand pages of names. Five pages of Smiths! Four of Rodriguezes! People named Leszek Zymerloshaj and Ping Me Ming and Lillian Lux and Sable Brown! He liked chanting the names of all fifty-one Meads: “Amber, Beth, Bruce, Charles, Charles, Chatwin, Elaine, Eugene,” he would say to his dog. “Gerard, John, John, John, John B., John F., Jonathan, Karen, Kevin,” and Phoebe would look at him with bright eyes, wagging tail, and single-minded attention.
    He acquired Phoebe when the Estradas’ dog Connie had puppies the previous June. He had missed seeing them being born. When Jessica Estrada stood on her front porch that morning screeching to the world, “Hey everybody! Come on over! The puppies are coming,” Summer was in the shower, and Marcus was still in bed with the covers over his head, memorizing a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson as a present for her birthday. “Windy Nights,” it was called—inadequately, Marcus thought—and it contained the lines:
    By, on the highway, low and loud ,
    By at the gallop goes he .
    By at the gallop he goes, and then
    By he comes back at the gallop again .
    Marcus mumbled the lines over and over to himself, enjoying the way they began to sound exactly like what they were describing. (He didn’t yet know the word onomatopoeia , though when he learned there was an actual Greek word for what the poem did, he was thrilled.) After he recited the poem and Summer had applauded and hugged him, they went over to see the puppies, four of them: two mostly black, one mostly white, one spotted.
    Summer was immediately entranced, and flopped down on the floor beside their basket, crooning to Connie at eye level about the beauty of her babies. Jessica Estrada told Marcus excitedly about the birth, how they came out slimy and had to be cleaned up by Connie, who not only licked off all the crud but ate a big pile of what looked like guts, something called the afterbirth, that also came out of her thing. Marcus was glad he’d been under the covers when it happened.
    All the puppies but the white one, which the Estradas named Queso, were available for adoption, and when Summer decided she had to have one, Marcus was thunderstruck. He had always longed for a pet, but assumed they were too odd to have one. But Summer said a puppy born on her twenty-ninth birthday would be the most perfect present she could give herself, and before she could change her mind, Marcus made a case for the spotted black-and-white, floppy-eared female. Summer agreed immediately. She wanted to name the puppy Gemini, after her sign, but Marcus persuaded her in favor of Phoebe, the name of the imaginary sister he invented years ago. He loved it that Phoebe was pronounced nothing like the way it looked. So different from most names, which were perfectly straightforward. “It’s like a magic word, it’s as if Marcus was pronounced Magoo or something like that,” he explained to Summer, and she chuckled and ruffled his hair and gave in.
    One thing he liked about Phoebe (one thing of many) was that if you ever did anything so crazy as to shave off her hair and sort it into two piles, one black and one white, the piles would be the same size. Not that she was symmetrical. Just that, if you studied her closely, her allotment of black and white fur, however randomly scattered across her compact puppy body, seemed equal. This he noticed as soon as he picked her out of Connie’s litter. He also liked that Phoebe enjoyed hearing