Stepdog Page 10

  “Let’s go,” she said as I came near to her, and strode off briskly toward the clerks. I tagged along behind her, longing for water, longing to close my eyes against the fluorescent glare.

  We crossed a sea of nationalities, mostly Brazilian. A few Indian families, others Haitian judging by the nearly-Frenchness of their speech. One Asian, some Caucasians. A few Middle Easterners—I silently wished them the most luck, they would need it. Despite the anticipation and multiculturalism one might imagine enlivening such a place, it was tense and depressing. Maybe they had all just estranged themselves from their spouses, too.

  We checked in with one of the clerks, then Sara crossed to an empty bank of chairs and sat. I moved as if to sit beside her. She gave me a cold stare, pale skin almost green in the fluorescence, and I moved two chairs away before sitting. Not because I was frightened by her iciness but because my own volcanic irritability was rising in response to it.

  I was a white, native English speaker; the system was predisposed to go easy on me as long as I could demonstrate I was in “a bona fide marriage.” Suddenly, for the first time ever, I worried about that. Twelve hours earlier I had declared I was moving out because I disapproved of my wife’s affection for her dog. Bona fide husbands were probably not quite that reactionary.

  “So glad I didn’t marry my cousin,” I said impulsively. “I mean, I think we’d have done it fine, but this feels so much better.”

  “Does it,” she said, in a damp, uninflected voice.

  Oh, fuck.

  “Maybe I should just check Dougie’s voice mail,” I said, desperate for chitchat, and reached into my raincoat pocket for my phone.

  She did not bother to argue with me, but released a sigh of fake boredom and looked around the room, making it clear that every stranger in there was worthier of her time than myself. I’d not known she was capable of being so insulting. My hands clenched.

  “O’Connor,” a male voice called. We looked at each other. I stood up. She didn’t move. With nauseating dread, I was sure she wasn’t going in to the interview.

  “Put away your cell phone,” she muttered, finally standing. “For the next half hour this green card is not about your brilliant career, it’s about your marriage.”

  Surly but abashed, I put away the phone and grabbed her limp hand as we walked toward the middle-aged official who had called my name. He was tall and gaunt, and grim, like that servant in The Addams Family. He introduced himself as Mr. Smith. I bet all the immigration officials called themselves Smith.

  He led us along a narrow hall—more industrial carpet, more fluorescent lights—and into his very little office, one of many off the same corridor. It was just large enough for him to slide between his desk and the wall and then sit behind his desk. There were two chairs on the near side and we took these. Sara’s hand had remained limp in mine; she pulled it away as soon as we were seated. I tried to give her a reassuring squeeze before she had entirely removed it, but she ignored this and did not look at me. I felt my gut clench. Which made my headache worse. I felt like one of those rubber stress-release dolls, whose eyes bulge out when you squeeze their belly.

  Sara, the furrow between her eyebrows misshaping her face, unclasped a blue plastic accordion file: the most recent tax return, which she’d filed jointly; the records of our joint bank account, including printed statements showing that we both used it regularly. Affidavits from our friends, who all said they saw it coming and that Sara had never seemed so happy. Printed copies of all the photos from the parties and gatherings. She had spent hours preparing this dossier, although I’d like to think I helped some by serenading her and feeding her ice cream while she did so. She looked as if she wanted to simply hand the folder over to the bloke and then close her eyes and hold her breath until he made his decision. She did not want to ruin this for me, but her heart was not in it today.

  I sat back in my chair and pretended I did not have a pounding headache or a mouth full of cotton. I wished I was still a smoker, and then I was glad I wasn’t because then I’d be craving a smoke even worse than I was now.

  The bloke had his own file on us, all the stuff we’d sent in weeks ago. He looked through it, as if for the first time, glancing up at us occasionally. He especially glanced a lot at me, which I’m sure had to do with how miserable I looked. To be fair, his own skin was a sallow pasty color and the bags under his eyes larger than the eyes themselves. I knew I had bags that morning, too, and hoped I did not look as saggy as he did, because that would definitely undermine the charm I needed to ooze, to make up for Sara’s lack of spirit. Mr. Smith’s expression suggested he was holding a grudge against one of us and hoped to find satisfaction before we left the room. Or maybe that was the hangover talking.

  “So,” he said at last in a droll voice, looking up. “You’re married.” He said it as if he already did not buy it. “How did you meet?” His eyes turned to Sara. She fumbled a moment, looking like a deer in headlights. What a nightmare, I thought.

  Something clicked in Sara and she managed to summarize, succinctly but without enthusiasm, the story of my busking in front of the museum and how I kissed her when she laid me off. This was the story that, if told with her usual twinkly-eyed pleasure, would surely have netted me the green card right away. I could see that she was genuinely trying to look engaged, but what showed most was that she was making an effort. It looked and sounded forced.

  Mr. Smith seemed pensive. Then he turned to me. I thought for a moment he was going to ask me what color Sara’s toothbrush was. “You moved in together very quickly. Why?” he asked me.

  “Because she has a dog,” I said in flat, low tones. The pain was shifting from dehydration headache to tension headache.

  He blinked. My response didn’t exactly answer his question, but he found something useful in it. “What kind of dog?”

  “A sort of golden-red silky mutt,” I said—too promptly, so that it sounded like something I had memorized. I think that made him suspicious.

  “Boy or girl?” he asked.

  “Girl,” I said more slowly, which again made me sound ragged. “Her name is Sara. I mean Cody.” I had to suppress a welling up of the nervous giggles. Sara glared at me like I was mad.

  “What kind of food does she eat?” he asked.

  “Oh God, I don’t know,” I said, trying not to groan, the edges of my vision blurring from the pain. I sensed Sara squirm, and Mr. Smith’s eyebrows rose a little. A slightly predatory look settled onto his gaunt features; now he looked interested. I was about to fuck this up—because of the dog. “The big blue bag with a giant salmon leaping out of a stream,” I said.

  He continued to gaze at me levelly. He seemed suddenly like a sheriff in a seventies TV show who was nice enough, but about to inform me that he was going to have to take me in. And secretly, he would enjoy it. After all, calling someone out was the only thrill to be had in his job.

  “What’s her name again?”

  “Cody.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s two,” I said.

  “Three,” Sara corrected. She paled slightly, and gave him a pleading look. “Rory can hardly keep track of his own age,” she said, a nervous joke. “And he’s right about the dog food, it’s called Taste of the Wild and you can go online right now and see it. He does most of the shopping because I’m at work. He’s bought it plenty of times.”

  Stop it, I tried to say to her psychically. She was terribly tense, and he was noticing.

  He looked at me. “How big is the dog?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, fighting off a rising sense of worry, which at least had the benefit of cutting right through the headache and giving me some clarity. This was not going at all the way I’d imagined it. “Maybe sixty-five pounds.”

  “Where’d she come from?”

  “I don’t know. She’s not my dog. She’s my wife’s dog.” I silently thanked all the young mothers of the arboretum for giving me the chance to learn to sa
y that so offhandedly.

  But Mr. Smith frowned. “Doesn’t that make her your dog?”

  “No, and here’s why,” I said, feeling my Irish temperament well up through the hangover fog and get the better of me. “Sara’s mother had just died when Sara and her ex got the puppy, so she was pretty fragile. Her ex was such a wanker that her best friend Lena literally spits when she mentions him. He was very controlling and he decided they were going to have the best dog in the world, so he pressured Sara to take a leave of absence from her job at the museum, if you please, so she could be home with the puppy all day and train it. If I were her, I’d hate the dog for all that, but Sara’s so affectionate and loving, and she needs affection and love, and she used to get it all day long at work, but now she only got it from the dog, plus of course the dog came of age believing that life consisted of spending all day every day with Sara, so they developed a seriously codependent relationship which frankly neither of them has grown out of, and explains why no matter what I do for the dog—and let me tell you, I do a lot, I take her out to the arboretum every weekday and we go to her favorite spots, every single day, rain, hail, sleet, or snow, and I give her treats—I have a whole bag of treats I keep in my anorak that Sara doesn’t even know about—”

  “You do?” said Sara, making nonhostile eye contact with me for the first time since Lena’s kitchen.

  “And all she wants when Sara comes home is Sara’s attention, not mine, so yes, she is my wife’s dog, and my stepdog, so I don’t know where she came from. That’s Sara’s business.”

  I suddenly noticed I was standing up. Somehow in all of that, despite the hangover, I’d risen and started pacing in the tiny office, and didn’t even realize it until I stopped.

  I sat down. Quickly. “Sorry,” I said.

  Sara was staring at me. “I didn’t know you gave her treats,” she said, sotto voce.

  “Not nearly as much as you do,” I retorted impatiently.

  A cough from Mr. Smith silenced us and commanded our complete attention. He grimaced, and looked back and forth between us.

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” he said, forebodingly.

  I felt my stomach sink into my balls.

  “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he went on. “And that was about the most convincing display of matrimony I have ever witnessed in this room. Mr. O’Connor, sir, welcome to the United States of America.”

  Chapter 10

  The relief was so huge I almost couldn’t feel it, the way your brain can’t feel sleep when you’re actually asleep.

  But I wasn’t sure if we were still friends or not. Sara was angry about things that didn’t change when my immigration status did. Whatever was roiling around in her kept her from looking at me, so we surged like a harnessed team of horses out to the lobby.

  Still . . . this was a huge moment, and it was so much her doing, and I all wanted was for us to be happy together in it. So I turned to her, grabbed her shoulders, and twisted her suddenly toward me. She stumbled, one ankle tripping against the other, so I grabbed her as she literally fell into my arms. She tensed against the fall and I squeezed her like I hadn’t done in nearly twenty-four hours, which is forever when you’re newlyweds and madly in love and recently fighting. She was trembling.

  She squeezed the bejesus out of me in return, her face buried against my neck. Thank God. Now I really was the happiest man on earth.

  “We did it!” I cheered. “You did it.”

  “You’re the one who convinced him,” she said with a relieved laugh. “Congratulations. Welcome to the United States, Mr. O’Connor. Wow!”

  “Well, thank you, Mrs. O’Connor,” I said, beaming. I pulled my head back enough to look her in the eye. “You are still Mrs. O’Connor, aren’t you?” I asked carefully.

  She gave me the Princess Diana look. “Do you still want me to be Mrs. O’Connor?”

  I stopped myself from blurting out the obvious answer and pretended I had to muse upon it for a moment. “Oh, I suppose so.”

  She nodded, pleased. I thought we were over it. But then, of course, she had to point out:

  “But Mrs. O’Connor has a dog, okay?”

  I took in a larger breath than I meant to, which must have made it seem like I was about to protest because she raised her voice slightly to pre-empt me:

  “And your relationship with Mrs. O’Connor’s dog is why you just got your green card.”

  “That’s bollocks,” I said breezily. “If there were no dog, we wouldn’t’ve had a fight, and I wouldn’t’ve gotten drunk, and there wouldn’t’ve been a problem, and today would have gone totally smoothly.”

  “There’s no way to prove that,” she said, and the furrow between her brows was all business.

  I desperately wanted this moment to be purely happy and triumphant. “All right,” I said, placating. “Cody gets extra treats today, then. But so do we. All right? Let’s grab an espresso, ’cuz I fucking need one.” I squeezed her hard again, and she squeezed me hard back again, and then we laughed with joy and with relief, and also appreciation at the madness of how it had happened.

  She linked her arm with mine, which is always a great feeling with Sara, more than any other bird who’s ever linked me. We rushed through the lobby, out the doors, and outside across the damp, raw, windy plaza and down the street to the nearest café, which happily was Bay State Caffeine, a hip Boston café chain of which the hippest was in Jamaica Plain.

  It wasn’t too crowded, but the elevenses crowd would soon be trickling in, so I gestured at Sara to grab a table by the windows and then I went to order for the both of us.

  I’d been so casually confident of this happening (until twelve hours ago) that I really wasn’t sure what I was feeling now. It was a shoo-in, and yet it was huge. Nothing would change, but everything would change. I heard the barista ask my order. “Double espresso, small chai,” I said distractedly. “And one of these.” I grabbed a little prewrapped chocolate biscuit and tossed it on the counter. What would change? What would I notice first? Sara would probably tell me it would be that I had to get health insurance, which was silly since I never got sick.

  “Rory?” said the barista.

  I hate it when people aren’t present when you’re serving them. I worked as a waiter for years when I first got here (under the table, with a fake Social Security number, like many of us). I’d been good enough at charming people to generally get and keep their attention, but it’s humiliating to be treated like a robot. And here I was, my first act as a legal resident of the United States, doing it myself. I looked up, guiltily.

  The person behind the counter was Alto, my young friend from the arboretum. We smiled tentatively at each other.

  “Hey, Alto,” I said. “Funny seeing somebody out of their native habitat. What are you doing here? Peters Hill not good enough for you anymore? You getting too full of yourself, is it?”

  Alto looked shy but pleased, like a kid called to the front of the class for unexpected praise. “Filling a shift for a friend. I usually work the Centre Street store. What brings you downtown?” And very deadpan: “Where’s your wife’s dog?”

  I grinned. “At home. But my wife is here. Hey, Sara!” I called over to the table, but Sara was in the middle of pulling her scarf off and didn’t hear me.

  “I’m off in a couple minutes, I’ll come over,” offered Alto.

  I paid, and slipped back toward Sara.

  “A friend from the arboretum’s here,” I said. “He’s coming over to say hi. Name’s Alto.”

  She smiled. “You seem to have a whole other secret life at the arboretum.”

  “Do I?”

  “Remember the woman and her kids at Halloween—”

  “Oh, Marie, sure,” I said. “Her kids are Nick and Ryan.”

  “See? You could be having an affair and I’d never know.”

  “Yeah, I meant to tell you, those are actually my kids.”

  “Ha.”

  We were both sitting
now. Sara adapted her best I-work-in-an-office-so-you-better-take-me-seriously pose, forearms on tabletop, hands clasped with knuckles forward, very schoolmarmish. “All right,” she said, “let’s talk about it.”

  “What, Marie’s kids? Well, those were my wild days, she claimed she had a little Irish in her, so I thought I’d take it literally—”

  “Rory.” Pause. She looked down—generally an adorable gesture on her, but not at this moment—and then back up at me. “I don’t ever want a repeat of last night.”

  “Neither do I,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry I got drunk. I really don’t get your treatment of the dog, I’m not backing off on that, but getting pissed off is no excuse for getting drunk.”

  She was already shaking her head. “I trust you, this isn’t about your drinking, it’s about your temper. You can’t blow your top whenever you disapprove of my behavior.”

  “I almost never disapprove of your behavior, Sara. Your behavior is the best thing to happen to me in—”

  “That’s great, so on the few occasions that I irritate you, could you please try to stay reasonable?”

  “Well, I need you to be reasonable,” I countered. “About the dog.”

  She looked at me with the kind of look that let me know I would disagree with whatever came out of her mouth. “I’ve been treating the dog the same way for three years. In three years, nobody else has ever had an issue. It’s behavior that you might be unfamiliar with but that doesn’t make it, objectively, unreasonable.”

  “Of course it’s unreasonable. No dog in Ireland—”

  “Rory, we’re not in Ireland, we’re in America.”

  “You’re all mental when it comes to your dogs.”

  “We’re just different from you. What I do is pretty normal for this culture.”

  “I know normal,” I shot back. “It’s not normal.”

  “Hey there,” said a quiet voice over my shoulder. Sara, immediately honey and wildflowers, smiled and looked up.