One Good Dog

  Also by Susan Wilson

  Summer Harbor

  The Fortune Teller’s Daughter

  Cameo Lake

  Hawke’s Cove

  Beauty

  One Good Dog

  SUSAN WILSON

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ONE GOOD DOG. Copyright © 2010 by Susan Wilson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilson, Susan, 1951-

  One good dog / Susan Wilson. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-5930-8

  1. Executives—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction.

  3. Community service (Punishment)—Fiction. 4. Soup kitchens—Fiction. 5. Pit bull terriers—Fiction. 6. Human-animal relationships—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.I47533O64 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2009040089

  First Edition: March 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated, as always, to my family—with love.

  And in memory of two good men, our fathers:

  William Everett Hidler and Frank Gordon Gibson, Jr.

  Prologue

  He was a rough-looking thing. Big ears, wiry hair. His muzzle just beginning to grizzle. He looked like the sort who’d been living outside of society for a while, maybe never really been a companion. After a long parade of supplicants appearing before me, each wanting me to choose him or her, their noses pressed up to the chain-link fence that separated us, there was something in this one’s deep brown eyes, not a pleading—pleading I can overlook—but something else. A quiet dignity, maybe even an aloofness, as if he really didn’t need me or my kind being nice to him. Yes. That was it, a haughtiness that declared he needed no one’s pity; he shouldn’t even be here. Don’t look at me; I’m only here by coercion.

  Our eyes met and held, but then he turned away. Beta to my alpha. But in that brief gaze, I saw something I recognized. Maybe it was just that I saw my own independent streak, the one that has kept me on top. Or the eyes of a fighter down on his luck, but with memories of recent glory. Maybe I saw that underneath the rough exterior lay a heart, like mine, not entirely hard. You’ve got to be tough to live in this world, whether your lip is curled in real anger or fear aggression, you have to be willing to carry out the threat. This battle-scarred fella understood that, and on that basis I made my decision. He was the one for me.

  So I wagged my tail.

  Chapter One

  “Sophie.” Adam March doesn’t look up from the rectangle of paper in his hand. His tone is, as always, even, and no louder than it should be to reach across his executive-size office, through the open mahogany door, and to the ears of his latest personal assistant. On the pink rectangle of a “While You Were Out” memo slip, in Sophie’s preferred lilac-colored ink and written in her loopy handwriting, are three simple words that make no sense to Adam March. Your sister called. Not possible. Time and date of call: yesterday afternoon, while he was enduring what he hoped was the last of the meetings he was going to have to hold before today’s main event. A meeting in which he’d given a combination pep talk and take-no-prisoners mandate to his handpicked team.

  Adam flips the pink note back and forth against the knuckles of his left hand. This is a mistake. Sophie has made a mistake. Not her first. Lately he’s been noticing these little slips of judgment, of carelessness, of Sophie’s slightly less than deferential attitude. As if she’s not a subordinate, but a peer. Too many late nights when the jacket comes off, the tie is loosened, and the sleeves are rolled up. Too many weary hours leaning over her as she works on her computer, struggling to make every document perfect. She’s made a common mistake: Being in the trenches together doesn’t mean that they are friends, that he will overlook sloppiness.

  Adam closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. The most important day of his career and it’s already started out badly.

  His alarm hadn’t gone off. Which meant he hadn’t had time for his run around the gravel jogging paths of his gated neighborhood, which meant he had lost that thirty minutes of “me time” he needed so desperately before a day filled with meetings, conference calls, at least one confrontation with middle management, and, at the end of the day, a dinner party his wife, Sterling, had planned in order to befriend the newest neighbors, the Van Arlens, before someone else got them. The Van Arlens, it was believed, had connections to the best people. People who were useful to anyone interested in social advancement and really good schools for their children. Which basically summed up Sterling.

  Adam had no objection to a get-to-know-you dinner; he just preferred not to have them on the same day as so much else was going on in his life. But then, if they waited until he had a slow day, they’d still be living in Natick and their daughter wouldn’t be enjoying the connections that would serve her for the rest of her life. It was hard work, laying the groundwork for social/business/education/recreational pathways for a teenage daughter who greeted him with ill-disguised sullenness when he made the effort to show up for one or another of her endless sports in time for the final score.

  When Adam thought about having kids, he’d pictured himself the Ward Cleaver of his family—wise, loving, adored. Ariel hadn’t been wryly mischievous like Beaver, or devoted like Wally. Adam hadn’t heard an understandable phrase out of her mouth in years, every mumble directed at the table, or muttered behind her long blond hair. The only time he saw her face was when he attended her horse shows, when her hair was scraped back and under her velvet-covered helmet. But then she blended in with the other girls, all pink cheeks and tight breeches and blue coats. Sometimes he rooted for the wrong girl/horse combination. To say nothing of the fact that all the horses looked alike, too. To Adam, horse shows were a tortuous and endless replication of the same blue coat, black helmet, brown horse racing around the course, and then the girl crying when a rail was knocked or a time fault incurred or because the horse was crazy, lazy, lame, or just plain stupid.

  Except for Ariel’s drive to become some kind of horse-jumping champion, a goal at which Adam had thrown great handfuls of money, she was an enigma to him. Yet this is why he worked so hard. This and Sterling’s four-carat dinner ring and her personal fitness gurus, one at each of the three homes they owned—Sylvan Fields, Wellington, Florida, and Martha’s Vineyard—the support of an increasingly large staff and their illegal cousins; and the cadre of financial managers to make sure he didn’t pay more taxes than he should. They, unlike most of the rest of the people he employed, were very, very good.

  At age forty-six, Adam March had found himself, on this overcast morning, pressing his forehead against the bathroom mirror and wishing he didn’t have to go to work. Not only had his alarm failed him but the housekeeper had failed—again—to have the made-to-order granola he needed. Nowhere in the giant pantry could he put his hands on the imported cereal he preferred. All he could find was the crap Ariel ate. With a childhood fed on cornflakes, now he could afford the best in breakfast food, so was it too much to ask that he find his granola when he wanted it? The sheer cost of importing it from Norway had to be justified by his eating it every day. But beyond that, without it, his bowels wouldn’t function, and if that system also failed him, Adam knew that he was in danger of really losing his temper, and it might be that this housekeeper would be the biggest loser once he was done with her. Which, of course, he couldn’t even consider until after this di
nner party. To fire the stupid bitch today would mean that Sterling’s ire would overshadow his, until his temper and his bowels would shrink to a pipsqueak size.

  Sterling, blond, whippet-thin, and sleeping the peaceful sleep of the person in charge of everything, was a force to be reckoned with, and Adam wasn’t about to unleash that power on a day so patently important to her. Not for her own sake, she so often said, but for his sake. His advancement, their only child’s advancement. It was social warfare out there, and Sterling provided the leadership of a general over her troops. “We have to be seen; we have to support the right charities.” Their name even appeared as supporters on a PBS documentary series. “We need to attend the right concerts. If you intend to succeed, that’s the price you have to pay.” That was but one of Sterling’s cheerleading themes. Some might say that Adam March had already succeeded. What more could he want? Some men might want strings of letters following their names, others the glory that came from leadership in the arts, the sciences, the political arena. Adam lusted after three letters: C E O. Chief Executive Officer. Such an achievement was no longer dependent on moving up in the ranks of promotions and cultivating years in the same company. It was more of a hopscotch of leaps across and over, one foot down, now two, from corporation to corporation, allowing himself to be seduced away from one major executive role to another. Manager, Vice President of Acquisitions or Division. A rise that came with a move to a bigger house in a better—read: more exclusive—neighborhood, another vacation home where he’d spend most of his time on his phone, too afraid to be out of touch for more than the time it took to use the bathroom, more BlackBerrys. More expense. Some days Adam felt like he didn’t have two coins to rub together. All of his salary and bonuses seemed to be absorbed into this machine of ambition. Still, the ripe red cherry of the top post was just out of reach. But not for long. After today, Adam’s elevation to the ultimate spot on the ladder at Dynamic Industries would be secure. President and CEO.

  But this morning, all Adam had wanted for himself was a bowl of Norwegian granola and a fucking run through the contrived landscape of his most recent gated neighborhood. He wanted his “me time,” thirty minutes to call his own, leaving the Bluetooth behind, keeping his head down and his eyes only on the path so that he didn’t have to wave at neighbors or their help. His best ideas often came to him during that thirty minutes.

  There was only one thing stopping Adam from just taking his run and going into work a bit late. He held himself and his staff to a rigorous standard of punctuality. Adam March entered his office at precisely seven-thirty every day. Not one minute before or after. It was a source of incredible satisfaction to him that people could set their watches by him. Adam believed that timeliness was an art and a science. Despite the ten-mile commute and all the variables of traffic, Adam arrived on time. And woe betide the staffer in his group who wasn’t there to greet him. Adam required simple things of people, the sine qua non of his expectation: Be on time. The groups that wandered into the building here and there, untaxed by punctuality, smacked of a basic sloppiness he would not allow in his.

  Adam stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, looking at an attractively craggy face, his morning shadow of dark beard firming up a jaw that had only just begun to soften. He stared into his own cold brown eyes, eyes that had earned him the nickname, “Dead Eye.” A nickname he didn’t find offensive, but grudgingly affectionate. A face with gravitas. A face suited to the take-no-prisoners deal maker he had become.

  If there was a shadow of an angry, grizzled man in the mirror, Adam swept it away with a brushful of French milled shaving soap.

  Adam runs a hand down his silk tie, tucks the strange note into his jacket pocket. Sophie is still AWOL. He stares at her empty chair and, for the first time in many years, wonders about his sister.

  Sophie’s armless secretary’s chair is cocked at an angle, as if its occupant weighs more on one side. Her computer screen with the Microsoft logo drifting around speaks of her having been on the computer opening up the e-mails that she will either forward to him or to his underlings or delete as unworthy. It isn’t enough that she’s in the building. Sophie needs to be at her desk when he arrives.

  Adam lays the offending piece of memo paper down and opens up his old-fashioned top-loading briefcase. He can’t remember what he’s looking for. There she is, slinking back to her desk with a giant paper coffee cup in one hand, a pastry in the other. Even from deep in his office, Adam can see that she has a flake of icing on her chin. Now Sophie really is testing him. Instead of dropping everything and grabbing her notebook, she leans over her computer keyboard and taps the mouse. She is checking her e-mail. On his time. Outrageous. Sophie knows this is an important day. What can be more important to her than getting her marching orders from him? He’s really getting tired of her insubordination.

  Your sister called.

  Chapter Two

  Adam sits on the floor of a small kitchen. The floor beneath him is sticky, splotched here and there with stains so old, they are part of the geometric pattern of the linoleum. He plays with a Matchbox car, making car noises as he pushes it along and around the cracks in the tile. He is underneath the kitchen table. Four chairs are pushed in; only one has someone sitting in it. His father. Big feet in work, boots, one lacing looser than the other. One foot tilted just a little on the rubber edge of its lug sole. Adam runs the little car up and over the feet of his father. His father shifts his foot away, removing the mountain. Adam putters his lips and propels his car around the perimeter of the defined space beneath the table. He can hear the clink of glass on glass, and the rustle of the newspaper being folded. They haven’t had supper yet, and there are no sounds of it being prepared. A pair of improbably high-heeled vinyl boots appears. His big sister. From his lair, Adam can see her knees, pale, knobby protuberances peeking out over the top of the white boots, above them a long sweep of skinny leg to the hem of her miniskirt.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” His father’s voice is low, tired.

  “I’m going out. I told you.”

  “You are not. You need to start dinner.”

  “You promised.”

  Suddenly, his father scrapes back the chair and stands up. “Veronica.” Now all Adam can see is his blue work pants, the too-long pant legs covering the tops of his black steel-toed boots. His sister’s legs are obscured by their father’s. “No, I didn’t. You have responsibilities in this house.”

  “Fuck my responsibilities.”

  The sound of the slap is sharp, brief, startling, like the sound of his cap gun, and involuntary tears spark his eyes. His sister makes no sound. “Don’t you talk like that, young lady. Who do you think you are?”

  “I’m sick of this. I’m sick of you. I’m sick of being the unpaid babysitter. He’s your kid; you take care of him.”

  Adam watches from beneath the table, watches his sister’s long legs in those ridiculous boots stride to the back door. They live on the second floor; this door leads to the back stairs, to the dank hallway below with its clutter of empty cans and unused garden tools. She opens the door.

  “Don’t you walk away from me.” His father’s voice is authority, dominance, power. Adam is too young at five and a half to think in those words, but he recognizes the hollowness in his chest every time his father speaks. The hollow fear that the troll beneath the bridge is talking to him and that he won’t have the answers.

  From under his kitchen table cave, Adam watches as his sister’s legs come back, coming closer, until her small feet in the vinyl boots point directly at him. He feels a little relief. She’s back. She’ll stay.

  He leans out a little, to see past his father’s legs. Veronica speaks, and what she says become the last words he’ll ever hear from his sister; the last words he remembers. “Fuck you, old man.” The door slams shut. And he is left alone with his father.

  “Sophie.” A little more insistent. He needs to stop this before it goes any further. W
here is that girl? Why isn’t she here standing in front of him with her little steno pad, her lilac-colored pen at the ready, waiting for his orders, waiting for his needs to be expressed and acted on. Waiting to hear him say that he, Adam March, has no sister and that whoever left that message should not be given any encouragement. He will not speak to her. Even before he can start the day’s critical work, now he has to tell Sophie she’s made a mistake, that despite those three innocuous words, despite what some woman has told her, he doesn’t have a sister. Sophie needs to be smarter about crank calls.

  In more than forty years, he’s never had a word from her, not since the day she stormed out of the house, leaving him behind, alone with their widowed father. Veronica has been gone so long that he’s never spoken of an older sister, not even to his wife. Why would he bother bringing up a faint memory, a vague recollection of sitting on the couch and sharing a bowl of popcorn, when Veronica’s existence has nothing to do with him? With who he is. Who he has become.

  Adam has not so much denied his history as created a whole new mythology—that of self-made man, his history beginning not with childhood, but with his summa cum laude graduation from the University of Massachusetts with his B.S., followed by his Harvard M.B.A. He has whitewashed the years of working as a Pioneer Valley Transit driver to pay for college. He has downplayed his childhood as a virtual orphan, refusing to speak of his past with a firmness that implies a slightly romantic, yet painful experience, not the facts of a father who gave him up to the state. Or the series of foster homes. The degradation of a life in the system. Long ago, Adam March encapsulated his actual childhood as the body will encapsulate a splinter, forming a hard mass of cells to separate the foreign body and dissolve it. In its place, he found ambition. Adam is a man who always catches the gold ring.