KANO
An Opening
"Don't even think about it."
The tiny Poodle looked back at Brenna with defiant eyes; it gave another jerk of the paw she had trapped between gentle fingers and added a calculated curl of its lip, revealing age-darkened but still needle-sharp teeth.
What was left of them, anyway.
"Quit," Brenna murmured, deftly clipping between the lilliputian toes. On second thought she briefly rested the flat of the blade against her own cheek. No more than warm. Nothing to complain about. A quick adjustment to the flat nylon grooming noose restricted the Poodle's head movement, and Brenna went back to work. "You're supposed to be one of my good customers," she muttered, shifting the animal so she could handle its hind paws.
Not today. None of them were good today. The tub room behind her reeked—she couldn't name a single dog who hadn't messed in the crate today—and still bore the effects of the escapee Collie who had torn around the room like someone's little brother, tipping over shampoo, spreading wet towels, and knocking over the tall, standing dryers. The tub walls were covered with shed dog hair—literally blown from the backs of several double-coated dogs whose owners hadn't taken a brush to them for at least a season.
And the noise. Every dog had something to say today. Loudly.
She had put the earplugs in early. And swallowed a couple of aspirins only a few moments ago, washed down by more caffeine than she normally dared. It made her hands shake, and that wasn't something she could afford in a business full of sharp blades and shifting clients. No wonder she had lost her childhood touch with dogs these days.
Flowers the Poodle, thinking herself sly, jerked her paw from Brenna's grasp and made a break for it, darting for freedom—only long enough to hit the edge of the table and the end of the noose at the same time. With an exasperated noise, Brenna scooped her out of midair and plunked her back in place. "Act your considerable age. You're not making my day any easier," she growled, and there was something to that growl that finally got through to the tiny dog.
Or else she was simply humbled by her brief midair experience. Brenna sighed. "Count yourself lucky it wasn't a bungee cord," Brenna said and went back to work, once more thankful that the Pets! grooming room was tucked away from customer eyes and not behind glass as some of the other major pet store chains insisted. Between the clamping adjustment on the noose and the dog's inconsequential weight, she could have hung there for quite some time without dire result, but best if no one saw. Not something a customer would understand.
Or a manager, for that matter.
Especially not the manager who now stood in the doorway, arms crossed. She found him when she circled the table to get a better angle on Flowers' back leg, simultaneously changing to a longer blade without stopping the clippers, a practiced motion of skillful fingers. But when she saw Roger . . . then she turned off the clippers. She knew that look, and it never bode well.
Roger was boss, and he knew it. And being boss meant telling people to do the impossible and smiling benignly when they had no choice but to agree. He wasn't a big man, but he had a meaty look to him; he filled out his shirts with a bulk that at one point had been muscle and now wasn't so sure anymore—just as his dull brown hair still held the style that had suited it when it was thick. Now Brenna thought a quick pass or two with her clippers—a nice #4 blade—would be a mercy.
"Busy in here today," he said. "That's the way I like to see it."
"Keeps things interesting." Brenna grabbed the ever-handy broom for a few quick, futile swipes at the growing tumbles of dog hair around her feet. The small room held three height-adjustable grooming tables, but the third table no longer adjusted without several people grunting and hauling and twisting it, so they kept it at the lowest height and used it for the largest dogs. Other than that, it usually held a fishbowl full of tiny handmade bows, with the bows-in-progress beside it. There was a short set of corner shelves and two rolling carts crammed with grooming equipment; the tub room held the shop vac and a plain grooming table where they towel-dried the dogs before popping them into crates to sit before powerful crate and stand dryers. Three tables but not quite enough space for three active groomers; they never had more than two on shift at once, with only three on the payroll and Brenna as senior.
"Just signed up another one for you," Roger said, and his voice held that tone, the one he used when he knew he'd done something to ruin her day but had done it anyway because it would make a happy customer. Or so he thought, with the giant assumption that things would turn out his way.
They weren't likely to. Not this time. "I can't fit in any more dogs today. I can't do any more dogs than this in one day ever, unless you get me experienced help."
"I gave you Katy," he protested, throwing his arms out wide.
"For two hours in the morning, and she hates it. She's bad at it, and she doesn't know what she's doing."
"What do you have to know to bathe a dog?"
"The question," Brenna said, managing to keep her voice light only because she'd had so much practice, "is what do you have to know to bathe a dog correctly? Or even, say, to get a dog in the tub?"
She shouldn't have said that last; she knew it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. His face closed down at the reminder of the time Katy had needed help and neither of them could get the seventy pounds of quivering German Shepherd into the waist-high tub—not by trying to convince her to walk up the ramp meant for large dogs, nor by tugging or shoving or lifting. Until Brenna walked in from lunch, expecting to find the animal bathed and drying, and with no more thought than I don't have time for this, slung the dog up into the tub.
Only in retrospect had she seen the look on Roger's face, now imbedded in her mind's eye. Embarrassment. Resentment. It had at least, she'd hoped, taught him that he couldn't simply throw just any of the interchangeable floor associates back to work grooming for a day.
She had hoped.
"It's just a bath," Roger said. "No clipping. Medium-sized dog, I checked."
Brenna felt something clutch hard in her stomach. She waved toward the tub room. "There's a whole room full of dogs waiting for me, and every one of them is a problem today. I swear, there's something in the air today. I can't do it, Roger. I can't even do what I've already got."
"We don't turn away walk-ins, you know that."
Steadily, her voice as flat as it could be when she had to raise it over the dryers and the barking, she said, "Then get me help."
Agreeably, as if he'd never consider asking the unreasonable of her, he said, "I'll grab someone off the floor when the dog comes in," and left the room with the air of a man who has just solved a major problem with much aplomb.
Brenna closed her eyes, momentarily overwhelmed by the impossible.
Then she picked up her clippers and went to work.
Twenty minutes later she presented Flowers to Ginger Delgaria, a pleasant woman who had come to Brenna since Flowers' first puppy cut. Flowers, by this time tucked into the nook of Brenna's elbow with a sulky expression pasted on her face, merely stared at Mrs. Delgaria without bestirring herself to move; Brenna had to hand her over. The woman gave a rueful shake of her head. "I see her mood hasn't improved."
"They're all like that today," Brenna said, absently rubbing her forehead between her eyebrows as she filled out the charge slip for the cashier, already calculating how long it would take to have the Sheltie done; she'd finished dematting before the bath, but the dog had way too much hair for its owners to handle, at least not without a judicious amount of trimming and thinning. Like a woman with just the right makeup . . . no one could see where the work had been done, but people could definitely appreciate the difference.
The Sheltie would take too long, that was the answer. And there was the Cocker in for a cut-down; she hadn't done the dog before and wasn't encouraged by her behavior in the tub. And Roger's new appointment still hadn't shown—
"—feral dog pack," Mrs. Delgaria was saying.
Brenna looked up at her, unable to reconcile the words with the neatly professional woman before her. No, don't ask. Give her the charge slip and go get the Sheltie.
She asked. "What did you say?"
"You haven't heard? I'm surprised. It's been in the news since last night." Mrs. Delgaria shifted Flowers into a more protective hold that Brenna didn't think was coincidental. "And you live out toward the lake, don't you? That's where they're supposed to be. If you've got animals out there, you'd better make sure they're put up safely."
Sunny. Numbly, Brenna held out the slip. "I don't listen to the radio much," she said. "Thank you for mentioning it." Sunny the hound. Poor dumb Redbone reject would stand there with her tongue hanging out, happily watching the canine visitors approach and never know the mistake until they bowled her over and chewed her into little pieces. She glanced at the clock. Two hours till her shift ended and not even then, if this new dog was other than what Roger said it would be.
Get the Sheltie started. She grabbed the stand dryer and wheeled it over to the table, which she swiftly adjusted to height. Then the tools, ready to hand; she snapped a #7 blade onto the clippers, pulled out her good thinning shears from the locking toolbox where she kept her personal gear, and hunted out the wide-toothed comb and a couple of different brushes. In moments the dog was on the table, losing the last of his matted hair and voicing his displeasure in high-pitched complaints from behind a nylon muzzle. He wasn't nearly as tough as he thought he was, but she was in no mood for the toothy pinches he commonly dealt out.
Definitely one of those days. The if-I-had-my-own-shop days. She wouldn't book this many dogs at once, not without the right kind of help. And no one allowed to book dogs against my say-so, she thought grimly, back-brushing the generous tufts of hair between the dog's toes and scissoring them to neat round paws.
But she never approached the thought too seriously. Years of her brother Russell's dismissive comments, of her parents' unintentional discouragement—though now only her mother was left to fill that role. "Let someone else worry about the bills," they'd say, her father with loving protectiveness when he was alive and her mother—now and then—with the assumption that she couldn't handle the load. "Russell will tell you." And Russell would. "Can't see you doing the accounting for your own business," he would tell her, and of course he knew, what with his partnership in the small carpet and flooring store in Brockport. "You haven't got a single class under your belt outside of high school."
True enough. But not how she'd wanted it, either.
She clipped the Sheltie's nails and pulled the muzzle off; just the thinning and a little trimming to go, and he'd be fine with that.
Feral dogs. A pack of them. What was that all about? She worked in a suburb north of Monroe City, but lived fifteen minutes northwest of that, between Lake Ontario and the city. Definitely rural—but generally tame. A handful of coyotes, not as many stray cats as there used to be, lots of small farms no longer supporting anything but a handful of cows or horses, plenty of farmland owned in modest lots but leased to larger operations. Her own place had taken that role over the years, and even now the old north pasture was in corn for Bob Haskly—the lease paid her winter's heating bills in the old farmhouse. But the right-side pasture, hilly and divided by the creek, had only ever been pasture and still was. Maybe next summer she would get another horse; right now the field was fallow, recovering from some hard grazing from Emily's last batch of cattle.
Plenty going on in her part of Parma Hill, but never had feral dogs been any part of it. Nothing more than your basic random stray, half of whom seemed to find their way to Brenna for feeding and grooming before Brenna passed them along to the local animal advocate group for placement.
"Brenna, you in there?"
Think of Emily, and Emily arrives.
"Be out in a moment," Brenna said, taking one more pass through the Sheltie's thick ruff with the thinning shears and then shaping the result. She stepped back to give him a critical eye, found a tuft she'd missed, and tucked him under her arm to step into the tub room and turn off the last dryer. The Cocker behind it gave her a bright and manic eye. "Best you change your attitude," she told it, and went out to the counter area to stash the Sheltie in one of the two open-wire crates stacked for finished dogs.
"What's up, Emily?" she asked, reaching for the charge slip and doing a quick calculation of the extra time she'd spent on the mats.
"In town for project supplies," Emily said. "As usual. Those girls go through crafts like they were born to sell little-old-lady cutouts for people's front yards. You know, the kind bending over with all their pantaloons showing."
Brenna stopped writing to look up. Emily, with her honey-blond hair drawn back in a hasty ponytail, not a trace of makeup on her slightly too-wide, slightly too-large blue eyes, looked back at her quite seriously, but there was a trace of humor hiding at the corner of her mouth. "Solemnly swear," Brenna said, "that you will never allow that to happen."
"Sheep, then," Emily said. "Lawn sheep."
Brenna gave a firm shake of her head. "Lawn skunks at the most." She finished the charge slip and stuck it in the proper cubby slot behind the counter, noted the date and the Sheltie's new wart on his customer card, and dropped it in with the others to be refiled. "No project supplies in Pets!, unless they're going to build you a cow out of rawhide bones."
"They wanted to see the big lizards," Emily said, and smiled as she glanced through the glass of the counter area to the store proper. The grooming room had its own entrance, right next to the main store entrance; the counter area served as a functional antechamber behind glass. The girls, of course, were out of sight around the corner, where the reptile area boasted several huge snakes and the biggest monitor lizards Brenna had ever seen. At nine and eleven years old, they were fearless and outgoing children, and no one had ever told them that girls don't like that sort of thing. "Say, Bren, have you heard about the dog pack? I'm trying to figure out a way to put the goats up, but you know they're little escape artists—say, who's that?"
Brenna had started back for the Cocker; she looked over her shoulder to see Emily focused on the store entryway, just beyond which stood Roger and a customer, talking.
No, not just a customer. Something more. Roger was nodding with exaggeration and high frequency, and he had a veneer of pleasant enthusiasm applied to his face. The man he spoke to took a more casual stance, his hands stuck into the pockets of his worn jeans with the thumbs hanging out. He carried himself in a sort of lounging slouch, and offered the occasional lift of a shoulder, the short nod of his head. And he looked . . . casually disheveled. It didn't fit. Not a dog-food rep—they came in with spit-and-shine polish, just shy of car salesman-slick.
"Niiice," Emily said, watching them talk.
"Do you use that mouth around the girls?"
Emily tossed her ponytail. "If I'm comfortable expressing myself around them, then maybe when they're gorgeous teenagers with every single boy in school whining for them to do the dirty in the back of a pickup, they'll feel comfortable expressing themselves around me."
"Dream on," Brenna muttered, still watching the byplay between her manager and the man he so clearly wanted to impress with his affability. A man who apparently didn't have the wits to discern the sales job behind Roger's smile. Brenna gave a mental snort. With her luck the man had an entire van of fully coated English Sheepdogs and Roger was even now promising them an appointment for today. "Anyway, he's—"
Scruffy. That's how he struck her, which was why she couldn't figure out Roger's fawning interest. But then she realized that his clothes were neat enough despite being far from new, worn jeans and a flannel shirt with cuffs rolled back to mid-forearm. And he was clean-shaven, and his hair—every bit as dark as hers—barely licked the collar of his shirt. And yet . . . scruffy.
"—made you speechless, apparently," Emily teased.
Brenna went back and collected the Cocker, letting the stocky bitch stand on the table while she hunted up a #5 blade. "It's Roger I'm thinking about. He's up to something. Look at his expression and tell me he's not." The black Cocker, a badly bred individual with developing skin problems, eyed the floor and gave a wag of her stumpy tail; Brenna put an absent hand on her back and finally found the blade, accomplishing the switch one-handed and popping the new blade home with an expert flick against her thigh.
"You're no fun," Emily said, coming to stand in the doorway.
"Blame Roger for that, too. Did you see how he ran up the schedule today?"
"You need your own place," Emily said, completely unaware of Brenna's thoughts on the subject and not the least deserving of the sudden angry frustration that rose up in Brenna.
She turned her back to hide her glower, and concentrated intently on cutting the dog's nails—not entirely without necessity, since the Cocker had thrown herself back on her haunches and was jerking on the entrapped foot with manic intensity, a low moan in her throat that long experience told Brenna would soon be the sort of scream to draw spectators from two parking lots over. She startled the dog by swapping her end for end while maintaining her hold on the paw and quickly targeted the nails while the Cocker struggled with the notion that she could neither yank the leg forward nor up from that position. "Roger'll yell at you if he sees you behind the counter."
"No he won't," Emily said, somewhat smug. "I'm a customer. He'll do anything for a customer."
"I've taught you well, I see," Brenna said, finishing the nails and exchanging tools, firing up the clippers.
"Well enough so this is one place I'll never work," Emily said over the buzz of Brenna at work, smoothly drawing the clippers over the Cocker's dumpy back.
"As if you'd ever let a job take you away from the family." Not Emily, married right out of her two-year college program and a mother a year later, in love with her good-natured garage mechanic and totally devoted to her girls. Happy, that was Emily. Happy and given to occasional fits of childish rowdiness—the best kind of rowdy, the water hose fights in midsummer, sledding and snowmen in the winter. Brenna envied her kids, and enjoyed being her neighbor.
But sometimes—on days like this—Emily just didn't get it. Didn't get that while Brenna was obliging her with light conversation, she was twisted up with the pressure of achieving the impossible in a day with constantly shifting rules. She'd never be done before dark at this rate, never mind at shift's end. And one day she'd just walk right out on Roger, because she'd told him no and he'd ignored her and for once she'd meant no.
Hang on. You've got tomorrow off.
"Listen, Em, can you do me a favor? Can you grab Sunny up and stick her in the dog room?"
Emily stopped watching Roger and her self-assigned eye-candy to give Brenna an uncertain look. "I thought you didn't want her in the house because she'll mess."
"Just make sure the door's closed to the main house. Shut her in the dog room. She probably will mess, but it's linoleum. And I won't be that late." Not if she could stick to her schedule. Six-thirty to three-thirty, up early and out early, just the way she liked it if you didn't count the Sunday morning shift. Elizabeth joined her mid-morning and worked until eight at night, and with Kelly doubling up on weekends and filling in on their off days, they kept the store covered.
"Dumbest dog I ever met," Emily said of Sunny, a mutter nonetheless meant to be heard.
"That's the consensus," Brenna agreed. "She's an idiot. How do you think she ended up with me?"
"No one else would take her," Emily said. Not even guessing, just flat knowing.
"I'd still rather not have her torn up by that pack. Can you do it?"
"I can try." Emily made a face. "If she's even learned her name well enough to come to it."
"Get the birdseed bucket and rattle it. She loves birdseed."
Emily, bless her heart, managed to hold her tongue on that one. "I'll do my best," she said. "I'm hoping the business about the dog pack is just a rumor gotten out of hand."
"But you're still putting up the goats." Brenna lifted the Cocker's back leg and bent to clear out the hair on her stomach, carefully skimming the sensitive skin. Her own hair fell free of its confinement down the back of her grooming smock and the doubled braid thumped against the table. Dark and thick and wavy and almost impossibly long, just as it had grown in after that summer she was nine years old and had made her silly offering to try to keep her hound alive.
Or maybe not so silly, considering the years she'd had with him, years that had made her parents puzzle—just as they had puzzled over her hair, hair she had been trying so desperately—and mostly unsuccessfully—to grow, and which she'd chopped off with a pocket knife and no explanation whatsoever.
Mars Nodens had liked offerings, her father's article had said. She had given him the only one she'd had. And had not cut her hair again since then—not counting the occasional light fringe of her bangs—though it was neither a rational nor a practical decision.
"Well," Emily said, talking about the goats, "I'll put them up. I don't know that they'll stay that way." She checked her watch. "Enough lizard-time for one day. They've got homework to do, anyway."
"Yeah, better make a run for it. If that straggly Wheaten Terrier coming this way is my mystery customer, things are going to get real ugly around here, real fast."
Emily needed no more encouragement than that. Brenna crated the partially groomed Cocker and returned to the grooming counter, steeling herself for battle. Wheaten hair was notoriously soft and prone to matting; randomly scheduling Wheaten owners were notorious for not noticing the mats until they all but covered the dog's body, and then squalling at the suggestion of a cut-down. And Wheatens . . .
Wheatens were notorious for their own reasons.
I don't have time for this today. And as she thought it, as she tucked back a tendril of loose hair and prepared her customer-service face for an appointment she suddenly had absolutely no intention of keeping, she was startled to catch a brief glimpse of the man Emily had drooled over, and to discover that he was looking at her. Staring.
Dismissive, she would have said, reacting instantly to that expression with an inward bristling. As if she needed to be judged and dismissed by someone who would stand still for Roger's Happy Manager act. And as if she didn't get quite enough of the same from her own brother. She had only an instant, with the Wheaten close enough to give the corner of her counter a preparatory sniff and the owner oblivious enough that she had to preempt the dog's rising leg and welcome the owner at the same time—but that was time enough to return his look with her own cool expression.
And then she went back to work.