The Other Mrs.(40)

Mouse and her father didn’t wear nice clothes except for when it was Christmas or when her father was going to work. Mouse didn’t think nice clothes were comfortable. They made it hard to move. They made her arms and legs feel stiff.

Mouse didn’t know about Fake Mom until the night she arrived. Her father had never mentioned her and so Mouse got to thinking he probably met Fake Mom that very day he brought her home. But Mouse didn’t ask and her father didn’t say.

The night she arrived, Mouse’s father came into the house the same way he always did when he’d been gone. Mouse’s father usually worked from their home, in the room they called his office. He had another office, in a big building somewhere else that Mouse saw once, but he didn’t go there every day like other dads she knew did when they went to work. Instead he stayed home, in the room with the door closed, talking to customers nearly all day on the phone.

But sometimes he had to go to his other office, like he had the day he brought Fake Mom home with him. And sometimes he had to go away. Then he’d be gone for days.

The night that Fake Mom came home, he stepped into the house alone. He set his briefcase beside the door, hung his coat on the hook. He thanked the older couple across the street for keeping an eye on her. He walked them to the door with Mouse trailing behind.

Mouse and her father watched them make their way slowly across the street and back home. It looked like it was hard. It looked like it hurt. Mouse didn’t think that she ever wanted to get old.

When they were gone, her father shut the door. He turned to Mouse. He told her he had a surprise for her, that she should close her eyes.

Mouse was sure her surprise was a puppy, the one she had been begging for since the day they walked past it in the pet shop window, big and fluffy and white. Her father had said no at the time, that a puppy was too much work, but maybe he had changed his mind. He did that sometimes when she really wanted something. Because Mouse was a good girl. He didn’t spoil her, but he did like knowing she was happy. And a puppy would make her very, very happy.

Mouse pressed her hands to her eyes. For whatever reason, she held her breath. She listened intently for the sound of yaps and whimpers coming from the other end of the room where her father was standing. But there were no yaps or whimpers.

What she heard instead was the sound of the front door opening and then closing again. Mouse knew why. Her father had gone outside, back to his car to collect the puppy. Because it wasn’t like the puppy was hiding in his briefcase. It was still in the car, where he had left it so he could surprise her with it.

As she waited, a grin spread across Mouse’s face. Her knees shook in excitement. She could hardly contain herself.

Mouse heard the door close, her father clear his voice.

He was eager when he spoke. He said to Mouse, Open your eyes, and before she ever laid eyes on him, she knew that he was smiling, too.

Mouse’s eyes flung open, and without meaning to, her hand shot to her mouth. She gasped, because it wasn’t a puppy she saw standing before her in her own living room.

It was a woman.

The woman’s thin hand was holding Mouse’s father’s hand, fingers spliced together in that same way Mouse had seen men and women do it on TV. The woman was smiling widely at Mouse, her mouth big and beautiful. She said hello to the girl, her voice somehow as pretty as her face was. Mouse said nothing back.

The woman let go of Mouse’s father’s hand. She came forward, bent down to the girl’s height. The woman extended that same thin hand to Mouse, but Mouse didn’t know what to do with it, so she just stared down at the bony hand, doing nothing.

Mouse noticed then how the air was different that night, more dense, harder to breathe.

Her father told her, Now go on. Don’t be rude. Say hello. Shake her hand, and Mouse did, mumbling a feeble hello and slipping her tiny hand inside the woman’s hand.

Mouse’s father turned and hurried back outside. The woman followed behind.

Mouse watched on silently, staring through the window as her father unloaded bags of the woman’s things from his trunk. So many things, Mouse didn’t know what to make of it all.

When they came back inside, the woman slipped a candy bar out from the inside of her purse and handed it to the girl. Your father says chocolate is your favorite, she said, and it was, second only to Salerno Butter Cookies. But chocolate was a sorry consolation prize for a puppy. She would have rather had a puppy. But she knew better than to say that.

Mouse thought about asking the woman when she was going to leave. But she knew better than to ask that, too, and so she took the candy bar from the woman’s hand. She held it in her sweaty hands, feeling it go limp in her grip as the chocolate started to melt. She didn’t eat it. She wasn’t hungry, though she hadn’t had dinner yet. She had no appetite.

Among the woman’s many belongings was a dog crate. That got the girl’s attention. It was a good-size cage. Right away, Mouse tried to imagine what kind of dog it might hold: a collie or a basset hound or a beagle. She stared out the window as her father continued to bring things in, wondering when the dog would come.

Where’s your dog? the girl asked after her father had finished unloading the car and come back inside, locking up behind himself.

But the woman shook her head and told the girl sadly that she didn’t have a dog anymore, that her dog had just very recently died.

Then why do you have a dog crate? she asked, but her father said, That’s enough, Mouse. Don’t be rude, because they could both see that talking about the dead dog made the woman sad.