Alternate Side(24)

Nora had liked it there right from the beginning. Homer was young when they first moved in, and more tolerant of strangers, and, walking him, Nora met most of the neighbors. The Fisks had had the mastiff before the Rottweiler. The Fenstermachers had a standard poodle, a redhead called Elizabeth II, not after the queen, it emerged, but after Elizabeth I, who had herself been preceded by Charles. George had what he always described as a rescue pug, as though he were the champion of small, bug-eyed dogs everywhere. He often had two or three. They would dance around Homer on their pinpoint feet, wheezing and growling, while Homer looked out into the middle distance, his ice-blue eyes unfocused, as though thinking, “What are these things and why do they think I should acknowledge them?”

Homer was an Australian cattle dog, mottled and spade-faced, with a solid body and stance that telegraphed what he was, a working dog with no nonsense about him. Rachel had started to whine about a dog from first grade, when it seemed every playdate and duplex apartment came with a Labrador. “That’s all we need,” Charlie used to say, as though dog ownership were like a second mortgage, or bankruptcy. Then he’d blown it at a barbecue in Pound Ridge given by one of the senior partners. The man’s wife bred dogs—“And looks every inch of it,” said Nora in the car, although the woman had been perfectly nice in that bluff, collegial, WASP way—and Charlie had looked down at the cattle dog peering up into his face with an intelligent gaze, the dog seeing in Charlie’s thick fingers an hors d’oeuvre possibly dropping, and said to his host, “Now, if we were talking about a dog like this, I would get a dog in a heartbeat.”

Charlie had not noticed that Rachel was behind him, with the same glittery look in her eyes that Nora saw in people at the newsstand who were buying lottery tickets. That was how they came to arrive home from Westchester County six months later with a piglet of a puppy. Nora had been surprised at how attached she became to Homer, even when he needed to pee at the curb on a cold night, a little puddle that turned into yellow ice. Charity had been unpersuaded about Homer when he had first appeared, unpersuaded as well that Rachel and Oliver truly intended to take care of the dog in the way they both insisted they would. In this, of course, Charity was wise as she was in all else. “Lotta mess,” she kept repeating as the puppy piddled on the parquet. “Whole lotta mess.”

“You’ve been to Jamaica,” Jenny said on one of their phone calls. “Dogs aren’t pets there. They’re feral animals who roam the streets.”

So it had come as something of a surprise when Homer had become as singular and triumphant a figure in the Charity narrative as the twins had always been. Homer had found and killed a rat in the park. (Perhaps true, although Nora couldn’t think of it without shuddering.) Homer had leapt into the air and snagged a pigeon. (Sounded apochrypal, was actually accurate, as Nora discovered when she picked up a poop full of feathers the next day.) Homer was an object of desire for a professional football player in one of the high-rises, who had offered thousands of dollars to buy him. (Almost certainly embellished, although there was a pro player living in one of the nearby buildings.)

“If she says that Homer dragged a couple of kids out of a burning building, are you going to keep agreeing with her?” Charlie asked one morning when Charity had insisted that it had not been Homer who had taken the block of Cheddar from the counter.

(“Why does that man leave cheese out?” she asked Nora later, Charlie usually being referred to in the vaguest possible terms. When she had first interviewed Charity, Nora had asked if she was married. “Who wants that mess?” Charity had said with a snort.)

“If it makes Charity happy,” she’d said.

Charity, too, remained insensible of the bags being left on their stoop. One morning at the corner Nora had confided in Linda Lessman. “That feels like such a hostile gesture,” Linda said. “If someone was doing that to me I’d be tempted to let the court officers know.”

“Thank you. That’s just how I feel. It’s not about litter. It’s a message, right?” Nora looked at the aged panel van double-parked up the street. “I’m going to ask Ricky if he’s seen anyone,” she said.

That morning Nora had come out of the house and stepped right into an encounter between a traffic enforcement agent and one of Ricky’s guys, whose English didn’t extend to much beyond “Se?ora! No! Se?ora!”

“Don’t Se?ora me,” the agent, a broad-shouldered woman who was wielding a pen like a deadly weapon over a pad of tickets, replied.

Ricky came running down the block, waving his arms. “Oh, please, no,” he cried, looking from the double-parked van to the agent, who had the look of concentration on her face you usually saw in teenagers working on an essay in AP English. It was well known throughout New York that once the tip of a traffic agent’s pen had so much as touched the surface of the paper, there was no going back. Jack Fisk’s favorite line was “I know the mayor.” It never worked.

Ricky had always been one of those skinny, ropy guys who never gained a pound, but his pants hung loose now, and it looked as though he was losing weight. Nora was sad to see it because she had once seen a different Enrique Ramos, the one they didn’t know on the block. She’d met him several months before, when it turned out the dishwasher wouldn’t drain, no matter how much she bailed water, and she’d been reduced to using the apple corer to try to unplug the downspout. Twice she asked Charity to get Ricky, and finally Charity said, “No one sees that man this week. His little boy is terrible sick.”