Free Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) by Joy Williams Page B

was the poor old soul’s dog, Donna thought, the gray machine, somehow operative again, resuming its purpose. She
knew
. But it sounded so real, so remarkably real, and the disorder she felt was so remarkably real as well that she hesitated. She could not go forward. Then, she couldn’t go back.

SUBSTANCE
     
    W ALTER GOT THE SILK pajamas clearly worn. Dianne got the candlesticks. Tim got the two lilac bushes, one French purple, the other white—an alarming gift, lilacs being so evocative of the depth and dumbness of death’s kingdom that they made Tim cry. They were large and had to be removed with a backhoe, which did not please the landlord, who didn’t get anything, although he didn’t have to return the last month’s deposit either. Lucretia got the Manhattan glasses. They were delicate, with a scroll of flowers etched just beneath the rim. There were four of them. Andrew got the wristwatch. Betsy got the barbells. Jack got a fairly useless silver bowl. Angus got the photo basket whose contents he kindly shared. Louise got the dog.
    Louise would have preferred anything to the dog, right down to the barbells. Nothing would have pleased her even more. It was believed that the animal had been witness to the suicide. The dog had either seen the enactment or come intothe room shortly afterwards. He might have been in the kitchen eating his chow or he might have been sitting on the porch, taking in the entire performance. He was a quiet, medium-size dog. He wasn’t one of those dogs who would have run for help. He wasn’t one of those dogs who would have attempted to prevent the removal of the body from the house.
    Louise took the dog immediately to a kennel and boarded it. She couldn’t imagine why she, of all people, had been given the dog. But in the note Elliot had left he had clearly stated,
And to Louise my dog, Broom
. The worst of it was that none of them remembered Elliot’s having a dog. They had never seen it before, but now suddenly there was a dog in the picture.
    “He said he was thinking of getting a dog sometime,” Jack said.
    “But wouldn’t he have said ‘I got a dog’? He never said that,” Dianne said.
    “He must have just gotten it. Maybe he got it the day before. Or even that morning, maybe,” Angus said.
    This alarmed Louise.
    “I’m sure he never thought you’d keep it,” Lucretia said.
    This alarmed her even more.
    “Oh, I don’t know!” Lucretia said. “I just wanted to make you feel better.”
    Louise was racking up expenses at the kennel. The dog weighed under thirty-five pounds but that still meant eleven dollars a day. If he had weighed between fifty and a hundred, it would have been fourteen dollars, and after that it went up again. Louise didn’t have all that much money. She worked at a florist’s and sometimes at an auto-glass tinting establishment, cutting and ironing on the darkest film allowable by law, which at twenty percent was less than most people wanted butall they were going to get. Her own car had confetti glitter on the rear window. It was like fireworks going off in the darkness of her glass.
    She was sitting alone in a bar one evening after work worrying about the money it was costing to board the dog, who had been at the kennel for a week and a half. Louise had her friends, of course, and she saw them practically constantly, but sometimes she liked to be alone. Occasionally, she even took trips by herself, accompanied only by strangers, cruises or camping trips to difficult places where she was invariably lonely and misunderstood. These trips reminded her of last evenings, one of those last evenings which occur over and over in one’s life, and she thought of them as good training. She had learned a lot from them. More than enough by now, probably.
    In the bar was a long fish tank which served as a wall separating the restaurant beyond. Louise had never been in this place before and would not select it again. She didn’t like to look at the fish,