Page 31 of Bounced!

And that was the trouble with the man.

I never could tell.

Chapter 11

Dante

Iopened one eye to fifty pounds of greyhound looming over me like a gray gargoyle who’d learned the word “bladder.”

“All right,” I said. “All right.”

He backed off the bed with the dignity of a fainting couch, all elbows and apology, and stood by the door doing the small anxious dance that meant his situation had turned urgent in the last ninety seconds. He conducted his business in the yard with the grave concentration of a man signing a mortgage, then trotted back inside and went straight back to sleep, which was his other and truer vocation. A retired racing greyhound ran perhaps four minutes a day. Dosty reserved the remaining twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes for lying in inconvenient places, looking wronged.

I made tea, woke my beast long enough to feed him, then gave the kitchen its ten minutes of scrubbing, the good ten, before the day got any ideas.

My place wasn’t large and didn’t need to be. There were books on every wall, shelved by a system only I used and couldn’t have explained to you if you paid me. A good chair sat by the window next to a record player I used more than I’d admit. On the sill, a jade plant that had survived three years of my care glared at me with what I could only assume was spite.

By the door, where I saw it each time I went in and out, was a photograph of my mother at forty, mid-laugh, head thrown back. It was the only way anyone had ever managed to photograph Vernell Pierce, in motion, utterly delighted and halfway to the next thing. I smiled and stroked her cheek through the glass pane.

As if feeling that touch, my phone rang at 7:52.

I knew who it was before I looked. My mother had that psychic sense about my touch, and I’d inherited some small measure of it, feeling her warmth radiating from Atlanta like a newly formed sun. She’d have risen at five, attended the early service, come home, watched her recording of Friday’s “stories” she refused to watch live, and decided her son had gone too long unsupervised.

“Morning, Mama.”

“Reverend Coleman asked after you.”

Not “Hello,” never “Hello.” Vernell didn’t waste a syllable on the runway when she could be airborne.

“That right?”

“Second Sunday in a row. That man stood right there in the vestibule and asked me, ‘How’s your Dante?’ He asked it in front of Deborah and the whole usher board. I had to stand there and make something up, Dante, because what am I going to tell that man? That I don’t know? That my own son’s down in Florida, and I couldn’t tell the Reverend the last time he sat in a pew?”

“I’ve been busy, Mama.”

“Jesus was busy. He made time.” She took a beat, satisfied with the landing. “You go to church down there at all?”

“There’s a church down the street.”

“That’s not what I asked, and you know it. That’s the answer of a man walking past a church on his way to somewhere worse.” I heard her settle in, a chair, a cup, the sound of a woman with her whole morning free and one son to spend it on. “You praying, at least? Tell me you’re praying.”

“I’m praying, Mama,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie, depending on what you counted as prayer.

“Mm.”

She let the “mm” sit there. The “mm” had its doubts. It always did.

“Deborah says hello. You remember her. Her grandbaby just started walking, Dante. Walking. On his own two feet, in a little outfit. She showed the whole choir. We nearly missed the second hymn.” She took a breath. “I don’t have any pictures to show anybody.”

“You have pictures of Dostoyevsky.”

“I am not standing up in front of the Missionary Circle showing them a dog.”

“He’s very handsome.”

“He looks like a coatrack somebody starved.”

Dosty lifted his head, hearing himself discussed. I turned so he wouldn’t see me smile.