Free Dog Bless You by Neil S. Plakcy

“We’re cutting out early today, Rochester,”
I said. I grabbed his leash, and he hopped up from his place by the French
doors. It was a sunny hot day, and summer-school students crowded the lawns and
pathways, tanning and throwing Frisbees. Most of the girls wore bikini tops and
short shorts, while the boys wore Eastern T-shirts and football shirts and
board shorts that hung down from their waists.
    I tried to remember what it had been like to be so
young and carefree, to know that I had my parents to fall back on in case of
emergency. Then Rochester squatted next to an ivied wall and let out a stream
of diarrhea.
    “Yuck. Guess feeding you that burger at lunch wasn’t a
good idea.”
    I had nothing with me to clean up after him, and I
wouldn’t have been able to get much of the liquid gunk up anyway, so I just
tugged him away and kept my head down, hoping no one had noticed. When we got
back to the BMW I used a baby wipe to clean Rochester’s butt.
    When he was all minty fresh, I put the windows down and
we cruised slowly down the River Road, in and out of the shade of weeping
willows and stately maples. Butterflies flew in lazy circles among the daisies
and black-eyed Susans by the river’s edge. Just like the summers of my
childhood. The big difference was that I was the dad now, responsible for
myself and my furry son. And once again, I wished I had my father there to ask
his advice—about Friar Lake, about Rochester, even about my relationship with
Lili.
    Decorating wasn’t one of my strengths. My townhouse
looked pretty much the way it had when I inherited it, with bits and pieces of
the furniture I’d grown up with. I remembered when my parents bought the oil
painting of red and yellow sunflowers that hung over the sofa, at a charity
auction at our synagogue. The two wing chairs flanking the sofa had belonged to
my grandparents, and my mother had them reupholstered when she inherited them.
My father had rewired the antique torchiere lamp in the corner.
    The worries I had about my ability to handle the new
job were jumbled together with Lili’s comments and memories of my father. He
was an engineer and a home handyman, comfortable tossing around all those terms
Joe had been using. I was a clumsy kid, and my dad didn’t like me hanging
around his basement workshop too much; he was afraid I’d impale myself on a
drill, or cut off some body part with one of his sharp saws. I never did, but I
banged myself up in a dozen other ways.
    After my mom died, while I was living in California
with Mary, my father sold our family house and moved to River Bend. He needed
to downsize, he told me then. “Too much crap in the house,” I remembered him
saying. He asked if I wanted anything, and I told him that my memories were
enough.
    Now, I wondered what had happened to all his tools.
Throughout my childhood my mom, dad and I spent Sunday afternoons at the flea
market in Lambertville. My mother collected Lenox china, Boehm porcelain birds,
and a host of other knickknacks. I looked through boxes of books, often paperbacks
with the covers ripped off that retailed for a dime or a quarter.
    My father always had an eye out for tools. He’d walk up
to a flea market table full of wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers and other
ordinary stuff, and pick out the strange one in the bunch. He’d hold it up and
ask the guy behind the table, “What does this do?”
    Usually the owner would say something like, “Damned if
I know.”
    “How much do you want for it?” my dad would ask. If the
price was right, he’d buy it and add it to his collection. Any time something
broke around the house, or I needed my bike adjusted or a toy fixed, my dad had
the tool and the skill to handle the repair.
    I didn’t talk to him much about my criminal case, and I
don’t think he ever quite understood what the state of California was punishing
me for doing. While I was in prison I shut down every emotion, focused only on
living day to day, and when