Dark Places

her whip out a photo of Gracie from her wallet, instead of me. The dog was obsessed with my foot, the bad one, with only two toes, the second and the pinky, skinny gnarled things. Gracie was always smelling at them, like she knew they were wrong somehow. It did not endear her to me.
    I’d been grounded for something, the summer between sophomore and junior year, and while Diane worked, I sat in the hot trailer getting angrier and angrier with that dog, the dog getting feistier and feistier. I refused to walk it, so it had resorted to running in frantic loops from the sofa to the kitchen to the closet, yipping the whole time, nipping at my feet. As I coiled up, nursing my fury, pretending to watch a soap opera but instead letting my brain turn good and red, Gracie paused in one of her loops and bit at the pinky toe on my bad foot, just grabbed onto it with her canines and shook. I remember thinking,
If this dog takes one of my last toes,
and then getting enraged at how ridiculous I was: On my left hand was a stump where a man would never put a wedding ring, and my unsupported right foot gave me a permanent sailor’s gait in a land-locked town. The girls at school called my finger a nubbin. That was worse, it sounded both quaint and grotesque at the same time, something to giggle at whilelooking quickly away. A physician had recently told me the amputations probably weren’t even necessary, “Just an overambitious country doctor.” I grabbed Gracie around her middle, feeling her ribcage, that chilly tremble of a little thing. The tremble only made me angrier, and suddenly I was ripping her off my toe—the flesh going with her—and throwing her as hard as I could toward the kitchen. She hit the pick-axe edge of the counter and collapsed in a twitching pile, bleeding all over the linoleum.
    I hadn’t meant to kill her, but she died, not as quickly as I’d have liked, but within about ten minutes as I paced around the trailer trying to figure out what to do. When Diane came home, bearing an offertory of fried chicken, Gracie was still lying on the floor, and all I could say was, “She bit me.”
    I tried to say more, to explain why it wasn’t my fault, but Diane just held up a single, shaking finger:
Don’t
. She’d called her best friend, Valerie, a woman as delicate and motherly as Diane was bulky and bluff. Diane stood hunched over the sink, looking out the window as Valerie folded Gracie into a special blanket. Then they huddled behind a closed bedroom door, and emerged, Valerie standing silently next to Diane, teary and kneading, as Diane told me to pack my things. In retrospect, I assume Valerie must have been Diane’s girlfriend—every night, Diane would climb in bed and talk to her on the phone til she fell asleep. They conferred on everything together and even had the exact same gently feathered wash-n-wear haircut. At the time I didn’t care who she was to Diane.
    I lived my last two high school years with a polite couple in Abilene who were twice-removed somethings and whom I only mildly terrorized. From then on, every few months, Diane would phone. I’d sit with her on the line, all heavy telephone buzz and Diane’s smoky breathing into the receiver. I’d picture the bottom half of her mouth hanging there, the peach fuzz on her chin and that mole perched near her bottom lip, a flesh-colored disc that she once told me, cackling, would grant wishes if I rubbed it. I’d hear a creak-squeak in the background, and knew Diane was opening the middle cabinet in the kitchen of her trailer. I knew that place better than I did the farmhouse. Diane and I would make unnecessary noises, pretend tosneeze or cough, and then Diane would say, “Hold on, Libby,” pointlessly since neither of us had been talking. Valerie would usually be there, and they’d murmur to each other, Valerie’s voice coaxing, Diane’s a grumble, and then Diane would give me about twenty more seconds of conversation and make an excuse to go.
    She stopped taking my calls when
Brand New Day
came out. Her only words:
What possessed you to
do
such a thing?
which was prim for Diane, but filled with more hurt than three dozen fuckyous.
    I knew Diane would be at the same number, she was never going to move—the trailer was attached to her like a shell. I spent twenty minutes digging through piles at my house, looking for my old address book, one I’d had since grade school, with a pig-tailed redheaded girl on the cover that someone