Saturday
Interstitial
Mae Shipman stands on a secluded patch of grass outside a La Quinta in South Bend, Indiana, almost exactly halfway between Boulder, Colorado, and her final destination: Rye, New Hampshire. The temperature is ninety-one degrees. The humidity, at eighty-three percent, is nearly thick enough to see. The air is chewy. It is the fifth of July, afternoon.
Many of Mae’s belongings are in her car, a twelve-year-old Subaru parked in La Quinta’s lot. Her sister Jordan paid for the motel room. The Subaru bears the scars of hard, unlucky living. Just like I do, she thinks dramatically, but not inaccurately. The rest of what she owns is in a storage unit in Boulder that is costing her $139 a month, which is $139 per month more than she can afford. She imagines that one day in the near future her storage unit will be adopted by one of those people who scavenge through other people’s abandoned detritus in hopes of finding a treasure. There should be a reality show about this, and she thinks there probably is.Storage Scavengers. Locker Luck. Vacant Vultures.
She’s trying to coax some bathroom activity from Leo, a ten-month-old pit bull mix. Mixed with what? Who knows. Ninety-nine percent of rescue dogs, in Mae’s experience, are pit bull mixed with something. This alarms a lot of people, but it doesn’t alarm Mae.
Mae and Leo drove from just before noon the previous day until four in the morning, which is why she asked for, and received, a latecheckout time, though she had to weigh the sleep time against the allure of the free breakfast. She and Leo had slept face-to-face on the same pillow, breathing each other’s air. She’d been too tired to get the crate out of the car.
“What happens in South Bend stays in South Bend,” she’d told him, and he seemed to understand. You are not supposed to allow a dog you are training into the bed. Leo is her first official board-and-train client. His new owner is an overworked computer programmer who’s also named Leo.
“Sorry?” she’d said when her boss, Hal, had called to ask her if she was interested in meeting Leo. “This guy named his dog after himself?” (Hello, Narcissus!)
“No, no.” Hal laughed. “Leo the dog came with the name from the rescue organization. It was pure coincidence! Leo the human felt bad changing it, since Leo the dog has already been through so much. He’s a good guy, Leo the human, just too busy to give Leo the dog the initial training he needs. You know how it is.”
Mae does, indeed, know how it is. The board-and-train is one of Hal’s premium offerings; he charges $975 for a week. For her time with Leo, Mae will receive five hundred of those dollars. Passing on this offer was not an option.
This gig is a big deal for Mae, who will turn thirty next year. Thirty! When Mae was a little girl running along the wide stretch of New Hampshire’s Jenness Beach, where this road trip will take her, trying, as ever, to keep up with her two older sisters, she would have considered thirty impossibly old. Well, at least they lived a good long life! she would have thought upon hearing about the passing of someone beginning their fourth decade on Earth. What more could they hope for?
Her father, Calvin Shipman, had sent an email to his threedaughters a few days ago, asking that they make haste to New Hampshire (he actually used the phrase “make haste”), and that they arrive on Sunday, when the last of the renters would be gone. He’d also used the phrase “family bonding.” Perhaps to soften the imperative, perhaps because he didn’t have his readers on and couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, he’d added to his email a string of nonsensical emojis: a frog, a birthday hat, a “rolling on the floor laughing” face. A poop (he probably thought it was a mountain; Calvin loved to hike).
Can’t, Mae had replied immediately.Need to work. She’d already committed to Leo. She is part of the gig economy! The new world order! She is an overeducated Gen Zer with holes in her ears (seven) and holes in her résumé. Holes in her heart, sometimes, especially now.
Technically she is a millennial, like her sisters, but she’s right on the cusp, and she feels very Gen Z. The gig economy doesn’t allow for paid time off, not for sickness, not for a mental health day, and certainly not for a thirty-hour drive to New Hampshire.
If her mother, Theresa, had been alive, she would have been horrified to think of Mae traversing two-thirds of the country alone (sorry, Leo, that’s not fair, not really alone) and staying in a La Quinta, where she easily could have been murdered in the middle of the night, especially if the murderer knew enough to bribe Leo with a scatter of freeze-dried salmon. Leo will do almost anything for freeze-dried salmon.
Her father had replied all:I’m afraid it’s not optional.
No emojis this time, not even the poop one. That’s how Mae knew it was serious. That’s why Mae began to make haste.
It has been just over twenty-six months since their mother’s death, and communication has fallen quite silent since their father’s mourning period ended abruptly and he married Kara, their mother’s hospice nurse.
Do we have to go.This came from Natalie, the middle, about their father’s recent petition.It’s a rly bad time for me.The Shipman sisters maintain their own group chat, and this is where Natalie’s text landed.
This was a typical reaction for Natalie; she and her husband are the queen and king of a social media empire, and they run a dairy farm, and it’s always a bad time to do anything other than run the empire and the farm and raise their three children.The New York Magazine article is coming out, the next text elaborated.I’m going to get busier.
He hasn’t asked us for anything for a long time, answered Jordan, the eldest, who usually has final say in matters of familial dissent.We need to go.
Fine, texted Natalie in a huff. (You couldn’t hear a huff in a text, but it was implied.)
Jordan had then side-texted Mae to see if she needed money for a flight. Jordan is seven years Mae’s senior and makes buckets of money in her job in crisis communications, managing the secret and sometimes sordid mistakes of New York’s finest; she’s also single and childless, so she’s usually flush.
But, there was Leo.
Have to drive. Have to bring this guy.Mae had texted a photo of Leo the dog that she’d taken when she’d met with Leo the human for the initial assessment. In the photo Leo has his lips pulled back from his teeth in a way that makes it look like he’s smiling, although he may well have been snarling.I wouldn’t say no to a little cash for hotel tho.
Here, now, outside the South Bend La Quinta, Leo lifts his leg and unleashes the impressively voluminous contents of his bladder on an already dying shrub along the far edge of the parking lot. He looks expectantly at Mae, who reaches into her treat pouch and produces a reward.Good boy, Leo.
From across the parking lot a small boy approaches. He’s maybe five—she’s gauging his age, as she gauges the ages of all children, by comparing him with her sister Natalie’s older daughter, Evangeline, who is almost six.
“I’m going to pet your dog,” the boy announces, drawing closer.
Small children are one of Leo’s triggers. Leo has come from the mean streets somewhere in Tennessee, and there’s no telling what painful puppyhood memories are lodged inside his tangerine-size brain. One of them, Mae suspects, has to do with a cruel child.
“Sorry, we’re working!” Mae says brightly, as she learned to do in her own training. “We can’t say hi right now!” Usually this is enough to make a person turn back, if the obvious pit bull part of Leo’s DNA hasn’t done the trick. (People are so prejudiced against pit bulls! Many pits are very easygoing! Not Leo, but many others!) But the boy proceeds apace, hand outstretched.
