If You Only Knew
Page 64

Of course I can hurry. I’m from New York. Speeding is the pace of my people. “Hang in there,” I say, but he’s crooning to the dog, who’s still jerking, telling him what a good friend he is, asking him not to die, not to leave him.
There’s a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Loki is old. I don’t know how long that breed, whatever Loki is, is expected to live, but I find myself saying a little prayer that Leo doesn’t lose him just yet. He loves that dog so much.
“It’s on Manchester Road,” Leo says tersely, and I glance in the rearview mirror. His face is so tragic, his eyes wide and unspeakably sad, and I can tell he’s trying not to panic. It’s a raw, horrible thing to see.
“I think I know the place,” I say. A long time ago, Rachel hit a cat, and she and I drove the poor beastie to this same place. The cat made it, and Rachel visited him every day until he was adopted.
“Can you go any faster?” he asks, and his voice breaks a little. So does my heart.
I push the gas pedal a little harder.
When we pull into the parking lot, Leo barely waits for the car to stop fully, just gets out and runs inside. I run in after him. “I’m Leo Killian,” he says to one of the women behind the counter. “I called.”
“Come on back,” she says, and Leo goes ahead. I start to follow, but the other woman stops me.
“We need some information,” she says, handing me a clipboard.
“I...I just drove him here. I don’t know too much.”
“Well, maybe you can get it started, anyway,” she says. “Name, address, that kind of thing.”
I want to go back with Leo. “Can it wait?”
“No,” she says. “We need a guarantee of payment and some basic information.”
“Fine.” I grab the clipboard, turn around to sit down. There’s a woman there with a cockatoo, and something about her makes me freeze. At first I don’t recognize her.
Then I do.
It’s Dorothy.
My father’s Dorothy is here.
Twenty-two years older, but I know it. My gut knows it. My face throbs as the blood rushes upward, and all I can think is It’s her, it’s her, it’s her. Blond hair, black roots, still so pretty.
“Hi,” she says, and of course she doesn’t recognize me. I was her boss’s kid. She worked for him for three months. She saw me maybe five times, and I was eleven years old.
“Hi,” I say, sitting down.
Her bird makes a croaking noise. That in itself is so weird—Dorothy, my father’s mistress, has an exotic bird as a pet.
“His name is Perry,” she tells me.
“Oh. Um, he’s beautiful.”
“He started pulling out some feathers. I just wanted to be on the safe side, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong with your dog?”
“Uh...he had a seizure.” I glance at the clipboard and start filling in what I can—Leo’s name, address; Loki’s age: fifteen; breed: Australian shepherd/mutt. But my heart is racing, and my face is hot. First of all, Leo may be in there, saying a final goodbye to his dog.
And secondly, Dorothy’s here.
I bolt up to the counter. “Can I go back there?”
“He’s already doing a little better,” the woman says. “Seizures aren’t uncommon in older dogs. We’ll have you go back in a few minutes, okay?”
“Okay. Thank you.”
I go back to my chair. Dorothy smiles. “He’s a cute dog,” she says, very nicely.
Shit.
I should tell her who I am. I could ask her why he did it, and if she loved him, and did she want to marry him, and was he going to leave my mother. I could call her a slut, tell her that she stained my memories of my father, my daddy, the man I loved best in the world, thanks a lot, whore.
I want to know why. I want to know how a woman can sleep with another woman’s husband. I want to know how it started, how my father took that first step away from my mother. Did he stop loving Mom bit by bit, the way Owen stopped loving me? Or was it pure, carnal sex, like Adam described to my sister?
I hope Dorothy never found anyone. I hope she lay awake at night for years, thinking about the poor widow and daughters and how she tainted and polluted his last months on earth.
I’m Jenny Tate. Robert Tate’s daughter. Great. I’d sound like an idiot. My name is Inigo Montoya, and you slept with my father. What if she says, Big deal? or Who’s Robert Tate? What if I’m wrong and it’s not really Dorothy?
I’m not wrong. Her face has been burned on my brain for twenty-two years. You don’t forget the woman you saw your father kissing.
But I just sit here like a lump, pretending to be totally engrossed in this form.
“Leo Killian’s friend? You can come back now.”
“Good luck,” Dorothy says, and I remember that smile, that sweet smile. She looks so much younger than my mother. Still.
“You, too,” I say, then I go through the swinging door with the vet, down the hall. “How’s he doing?”
“We gave him some medicine, so he’s groggy, but he’ll be okay.”
She opens the door to an exam room, and there’s Leo, sitting on the floor with his dog, rubbing his belly.
Those blue eyes are wet, but he smiles.
“Hey,” I whisper, and before I can stop myself, I bend over and kiss the top of Leo’s head. “You all right?”