Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

words.
    “Rachel,” I said into the speaker. “I’m here for my massage.”
    He didn’t respond, but the buzzer sounded, and when I leaned on the door, it opened. Dashiell and I walked straight back down the dimly lit hall to Howie’s apartment, and when we got to his door, we rang again. This time we didn’t have long to wait.
    She filled the doorway. At first, I thought it was Howie, suddenly much older, and in drag.
    Her face looked like melting ice cream, formless and sagging, as if there were no bones or muscles beneath the vanilla-colored skin. Or maybe that was powder, making her look as white-faced as a mime. Her eyes were a bleached-out blue, splotches of red from broken capillaries crisscrossed her cheeks, and smack in the middle of the whole mess she had a purple ginger root of a nose. Her face was like a hide-a-bed that had been left open, stuff showing that should have been hidden away, preferably under the sink.
    She was short and heavy, leaden looking, as if she were glued to the ground beneath her Minnie Mouse-sized Nikes. Her sparse orange hair puffed out all around her head, making her look like an angry bird. But when she spoke, she was no bird. She barked like a big, cranky dog.
    “ Wha’d you want?” she asked, a cloud of Scotch and tobacco coming at me.
    “I have an appointment with Howie, for a massage,” I told her, trying not to make the mistake of inhaling again.
    “Not here,” she barked, about to close the door.
    She was holding a cigarette and now took matches out of the pocket of her sweater and lit it. Dashiell sneezed.
    “He’s getting one, too?” she asked. “Don’t look tense to me.”
    “No, he’s cool. I’m the one who needs help. Howie says—“
    “Howie says, Howie says, that kid don’t know his ass from the hole in his head. So what’re you standing in the hall, c’mon in.” Watching her tree-trunk legs shuffle slowly forward, I followed her down the hall, past the room where Howie worked, toward where I’d heard the sound of the television set last visit. The TV was on now, too. Some lady with iridescent fingernails like the wings of things that live in pipes and drains was moving her hand from side to side so that the ruby ring she was selling for sixty-nine ninety-five would catch the light.
    “Sit down,” she said, the cigarette dangling from her lips bobbing up and down when she spoke. “If he said he’d be here, he’ll be here. He went out to get me my medicine.”
    There was an empty glass on the coffee table in front of her, the last ice cube down to a shaving now, sitting in cloudy amber liquid.
    “What a good son he must be,” I said, looking around the dismal room. The little bit of light coming through the windows hit the threadbare green wall-to-wall and the worn, dirty couch that faced the television set. There was one of those aluminum walkers off near the wall and newspapers and magazines stacked everywhere. The room looked and smelled as stale as the old lady’s ashtray, overflowing with butts, a crunched-up empty cigarette package lying on top of the whole mess.
    “What a good son he must be,” she said, snorting as she did. “A lot you know. Dora Lish ,” she said. “ Howie's mother.”
    “Rachel Alexander,” I said.
    She ignored me, and I sat watching the ashes from her cigarette land on her lap. “Howie’s mother,” she repeated. “The kid still comes crying to me when someone hurts his feelings, just the way he always has. He’s thin-skinned.” She looked at me with one eye as the smoke from the cigarette dangling from her lips went up toward the cracked ceiling past the other. “Thin-skinned.”
    “You mean he’s sensitive?” I asked.
    “ Sens-tive my ass,” Howie’s mother said. “He’s a damn crybaby, is what he is. Always was. Always will be. Whines ever’ time I need something, s’if he had to trudge ten miles in the snow ’stead of around the corner.” She puffed on the cigarette without removing it from her mouth and stared at me. “You’re not from the school, are you?”
    “You mean the t’ai chi school? Yes, I am. I’m studying there, too.”
    “ You the one made him cry?” she asked, looking confused for the moment.
    “No,” I said, a little too quickly. “I just started there. I’m new. But I heard—”
    “That bitch!” Dora said. She took the cigarette and pointed toward me with it. “Wasn’t you, you sure it wasn’t you? Say, what’s your name