Claire was lost in her thoughts when Mason crunched on something in the weeds.
“No.” Claire tugged at the leash, trying to pull the Lab back to her side. “What have you got?”
The dog kept his head down, not allowing her to reach the object, and growled.
“Mason? Give it,” she commanded. But still the dog worried the thing.
Whatever it was, it couldn’t be alive, she decided. Most likely a bone, but you never knew with a dog. She didn’t want a mess back home, when the object Mason had disagreed with him.
“Let’s go.” Claire tried again to separate the dog from his newfound fetish. Mason lifted his head and shook it, then responded to the pull of the leash. He wagged his tail as if to say, Aren’t you proud?
Protruding from either side of his jaws was a length of deer leg, stripped mostly of fur and skin. A strong whiff of decay floated up, making Claire scrunch up her nose.
The trail through the woods behind her house often crossed paths with the narrow routes made by white-tailed deer. It wasn’t unusual for Mason to flush out a doe or even pounce on a fawn hidden in a clump of wild grasses.
“No,” Claire said. “You can’t bring it.”
The dog pranced around her, and each time she tried to snag one end of the leg, he moved away from her.
Giving up, she turned toward home, and the dog followed, still grinning in that canine way with his prize in his mouth.
It was a lot like her brother, Duane, and his endless stories about their childhood, unearthing a past she had done her best to bury. A past now thankfully down to the bones and a little skin. The meat—the core of what had happened—had rotted away, as long as she didn’t go looking for it.
Duane knew only the good side of their father. And with the funeral in two days, she would steel herself to listen to the well-wishers and keep her mouth shut. Let her brother do all the eulogizing. She’d told him she didn’t like talking in front of a crowd, and he’d believed her.
Back at the porch steps, Claire pulled her house keys from her coat pocket and bent to unclip Mason’s leash from his collar. The dog dropped the deer leg into the flower bed and looked up at her with a whimper.
“Good dog,” she said, and dipped into another coat pocket for a biscuit. “We’ll leave it out here.” Mason trotted onto the porch with her, eyeing her hand for another treat.
If only discarding the past were that simple, she thought. Still, she could try.
Dianna’s Books
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Sixty miles into the drive, Jill had second thoughts about the wisdom of bringing her animals with her. The cat, sequestered in her carrying case on the front seat, kept up a steady mewling. Except when the beagle in the back seat got too near, which set off a yowl. That prompted a barking response, joined by the woof of the English setter in the rear compartment.
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Hannah dipped a brush into the egg wash and spread the pale fluid over the turnovers, mentally crossing her fingers. Beside her and across the steel work table from her other students concentrated on their entries. She had to ace this final exam; if she didn’t, her budding pastry career would never rise to reality.
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Most of the seats at the DMV were filled when Charla arrived, license renewal form in hand, and she ended up taking an unoccupied plastic chair against the far wall. She had an hour and maybe a smidge more to get her new license before Sam started docking her pay for being late from her lunch break.
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This is your last chance, people, to find the perfect gift! My perfect gift would be a medical miracle for my dad. He’s been unconscious for two weeks, since the car wreck on I-80. The doctors say he should recover—if he wakes up. But he’s pushing eighty. It may not happen.
That would make a good card theme, right? A get-well wish made for people whose loved one is in a coma. May they snap out of it. Or, how about: Wake up, sleepy Jean. But that’s my dark humor bubbling up. Damn it, now my eyes are blurry.
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Thanksgiving was three days ago, and I’m still reeling at what I witnessed. My sister hosted, as she has for the last twenty years. That was the only thing predictable about the holiday, though. I was there, of course.
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