Animal Appetite

it’s supposed to, I at last said, “You know, Tracy, I really didn’t come here to cause trouble. I honestly didn’t. Even before I saw Drew. I didn’t know about him, you know.”
    “No one did. Not even Jack.”
    The door to the shop abruptly burst open. Drew stuck his head in. “Mom?”
    “Dinner! Is Jim...?” To me, she said, “Jim’s my brother. We share the house.”
    “He’s gone to volleyball,” Drew said. “He’s going to grab a sub. Can I—?”
    “When you took Lucky back, did you stay for a visit?”
    “Yeah.”
    “For how long?”
    “Fifteen minutes.”
    “Good kid.”
    Drew had to be seventeen. His mother, I thought, treated him like a twelve-year-old. With remarkably good cheer, he rolled his eyes. “Mom, I’m—”
    “What time’ll you be home?”
    “I finish at eleven.” Turning to me, he said, “Nice to meet you.”
    When he’d left, Tracy said, “Drew’s a hard worker. He works with my brother, Jim—plumbing and heating—and he’s got a night job, and he helps me out here. He’s a smart kid. Good grades. He wants to go to college, but he’s got to take a year off first to save up.”
    “It’s not a bad idea, anyway.” But all I thought of were Jack Andrews’s other two children, who’d dreaded the catastrophe of switching from private to public school. To this day, Brat resented the threat. Meanwhile, the unknown brother who looked exactly like her deified Daddy was working three jobs to save for college, and doing it with apparent good spirits, too.
    Changing the subject, Tracy asked, “You hungry?”
    Instead of accepting her offer of dinner, I persuaded her to eat out with me.
    An hour later, after I’d fed and walked the dogs, Tracy and I were sitting at a booth in what I’d been happy to learn was a branch of Helen’s Restaurant that had opened in Ellsworth. Like the original in Machias, this Helen’s was a year-round eatery favored by the locals, not just a tourist place. At five or five-thirty, there’d probably been quite a few patrons. Now, at seven-thirty on a Wednesday evening in December, there were a lot of empty tables.
    Looking up from the menu, I said, “Lobster. My treat.” I lied: “I can charge it to Dog’s Life.” Have I mentioned that I train with food? Tracy ordered baked stuffed. I had what may seem like an odd choice for the time of year, lobster salad, but I prevailed on the waitress to serve it the way the Helen’s in Machias sometimes does, with the mayo on the side and the salad consisting of a mound of lobster meat.
    “So how did you meet Jack Andrews?” I asked Tracy.
    “By accident. Outside a motel in Stowe, Vermont. 1 was there for a show. I had three dogs with me, two of my own and one I was handling for someone else. And one of them got loose. Maybe the crate wasn’t latched right. Anyway, I had my van pulled up by the motel room, and I was unloading, and one second the dog was in his crate in the back of the van, and the next second he was loose. Jack helped me catch him. We started talking. He helped me walk the dogs. The next day, he came to the show with me.”
    “He was in Vermont selling books?”
    “Visiting bookstores. Promoting the guides. You know about those?” She cracked a lobster claw, extracted the meat, and dipped it in butter.
    “Yes. Tracy, when was this?”
    She finished swallowing. “Four years before he died. We clicked right away. Well, not exactly right away. The show was really what did it. He discovered this wonderful thing that had been missing from his life.”
    “Dogs,” I said.
    She gave that quirky smile. “Wrong,” she said. “Fun.” She proceeded to tell me, now with a straight face, that Jack’s wife hadn’t understood him. I almost choked on a piece of tail meat.
    Without the slightest show of emotion, Tracy added, “I’ve always thought she killed him. She always sounded to me like a perfect bitch. Her or Gareth. That was their son. From what Jack said, I thought she and Gareth had a really sick relationship. Gareth was glued to his mother. He always took her side against Jack.” Her, she, his mother. Never Claudia. I couldn’t help thinking of what had struck me as Brat’s deliberate insistence on referring only to Claudia, never to my mother.
    “Did you ever meet Jack’s children?”
    “Not when he was alive.”
    I was amazed. “Afterward?”
    “At his funeral. I didn’t meet them. I just saw them. That was the only time I ever saw them. Her.