Second Chance Summer

Silence fell between us for a moment, and I found myself racking my brain for conversation topics. I glanced down at my paper placemat and saw that it was printed with ads for local businesses, and in the center was something billed as the Diner’s De-Lite! It had a word scramble, a Sudoku puzzle, and a five-question quiz. I looked at the quiz more closely and realized it wasn’t asking trivia questions. Instead, it was called The Dish! and was a list of personal questions—What did you want to be when you grew up? What’s your favorite food? What’s your best memory? Where’s your favorite place to travel? It seemed like it was a get-to-know-your-table-companion game. Or maybe you were supposed to guess the answers for the other person and compare—there weren’t any instructions.

I looked up and saw that my dad was also reading his placemat. “What do you think?” he asked, nodding down at it. “Should we give it a whirl?”

By the time our food arrived, we’d solved the word scramble and the Sudoku puzzle. My dad dug into his pancakes as I took a bite of my omelet. I tried to concentrate on the cheese-and-meat extravaganza I was currently experiencing, but my glance kept returning to the five-question quiz. As I read the questions again, I realized I didn’t know any of my father’s answers. And even though he was sitting across from me, adding more syrup to his blueberry waffles and tapping his coffee cup for a refill, I knew—even though I hated to know it—that at some point, some point soon, he wouldn’t be around to ask. So I needed to find out his answers to these questions—which seemed somehow both utterly trivial and incredibly important.

“So,” I said, pushing my plate a little off to the side and looking down at question one, “what is your favorite movie?” I realized I knew the answer to that as soon as I’d asked it, and together we said, “Casablanca.”

“You got it,” my dad said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe that none of my progeny have seen it. It is, from first frame to last, a perfect movie.”

“I’ll see it,” I promised. I’d said this to him a lot in the past when he’d started giving me a hard time for not having seen it. But I meant it now.

“Although,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s probably better to see it on the big screen. That’s what I’ve always heard. Never gotten the chance to see it that way, myself, though.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “You know the plot, right?”

“Sure,” I said quickly, but not, apparently, fast enough.

“So it’s the dawn of World War II,” he said, settling back in his chair, “and we’re in unoccupied French Morocco….”

By the time we turned down Dockside, I was thoroughly full and had heard most of the plot of Casablanca. He was now waxing nostalgic about the music when something at the foot of our driveway caught my eye. “Dad!” I yelled, my voice sharp, and he stepped on the brake, slamming me forward against my seat belt and then back against the seat again.

“What?” he asked, looking around. “What is it?”

I looked down from my window and saw the dog, who was basically doing the canine equivalent of stalking, sitting in the middle of our driveway. “It’s that dog,” I said. I got out of the car and shut my door. He looked particularly mangy in the bright sunlight, and I wondered, for the first time, collar notwithstanding, whether he actually had a home to go to. He wagged his tail as I approached, which surprised me, since the only interactions I’d had with him had not been friendly ones. Maybe this dog had an amazing capacity for forgiveness—or, more likely, a really short memory.

I reached my fingers under his collar and pulled him aside, out of the way of the car, and my father drove on past us.

“Is that the same dog from before?” my dad asked, and I nodded as I walked toward the house. As I’d been expecting, the dog followed, looking so thrilled to find himself on the promised land, the driveway, that he was practically high-stepping.

“Yeah,” I said. The dog stopped when I stopped, sitting at my feet, and I bent down and looked at his tag. I was hoping the scratched gold disk might give me an address or phone number where I could finally deposit him. But the tag read only MURPHY. This rang a bell with me for some reason, but I couldn’t remember why. “Same one.”

“No tags?” my father asked, bending down slowly and wincing a little as he did so, until he was crouched in front of the dog.

“No address or owner,” I said, “just a name. Murphy.” Upon hearing this, the dog stopped scratching himself and sat up at attention, tail thumping on the ground again.

“Hey there,” my dad said softly. He rested his hand on the dog’s head and scratched him between the ears. “Between you and me,” he said, almost confidentially to the dog, “you don’t smell too good.”

“So what should we do?” I asked. I knew, vaguely, mostly from TV shows, about shelters and vets’ offices, but had never had any experience with them myself.

“Well,” my dad said, pushing himself to his feet a little unsteadily, “I think the first thing is to talk to the neighbors, make sure he’s not just someone’s pet who wandered away. And then if nobody claims him, I think there’s an animal shelter in Mountainview.”

“What’s going on?” Gelsey asked as she stepped onto the porch, not wearing her tennis or her dance clothes, but instead, a pink sundress with sandals, her hair loose and hanging around her shoulders. Her eyes widened when she looked at the dog. “Did we get a dog?” she asked, her voice raising excitedly on the last word, making her sound actually twelve for once, and not twelve-going-on-twenty-nine.

“No,” my father and I said together.

“Oh,” Gelsey said, her face falling.

“I should get to work,” my father said, turning to head inside. He was still working on his case, the FedEx truck still arriving with files from his office. The deliveries were no longer happening every day, but had gone down to two or three times a week. My dad had also taken to closing his laptop screen if any of us leaned in for a look, fueling Warren’s speculation that he was also spending a lot of time of this mystery project of his. “Can you handle this, Taylor?” he asked, nodding down at the dog. The dog was now scratching his ear with his back paw, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his fate was being discussed.