Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

small, like a pig’s.
    “It’s not a crime. It’s a lie.”
    “What m-makes you—”
    “You can tell me, Howie,” I said, my voice now soft and nurturing, the voice he’d never heard at home. I didn’t live that far away from the HB Acting Studio myself.
    I pushed the t’ai chi magazines aside and put the bag of food on the low table between us, opening the bag and taking out the juicy hamburgers and fries, then the sodas, and putting one portion in front of Howie.
    “You can tell me anything. You know you can. What happened yesterday?”
    “I w-went for a walk. And 11-lost track of time. Th -that’s all.”
    “Doesn’t sound right to me, Howie. I’m trying to believe you. Honestly, I am. Hell, I want to believe you. But it just doesn’t come together for me, Howie. It doesn’t jive, does it, that you lost track of time and missed two appointments. Doesn’t sound like you, Howie, a responsible man who cares for his mother in her old age. ”
    Howie, who’d talked to me about a low-fat diet, always a dead giveaway, eyed his burger like a hungry wolf.
    “Howie, you know you’ll feel better if you’re honest, if you tell me.
    “It was my m-mother,” he shouted. “Ha-happy now?”
    And then it happened, the tears, first one, rolling down his doughy cheek, then a double. Thin-skinned, she’d said. Mother knows best.
    “She was after me a-a-again.”
    “About money?”
    “About everything, how inadequate I am, how insufficient a human being I t-turned out to be, how I d-d-disappoint her, in every way. ‘You have a f-fine mind, Howie,’ she said yesterday. That’s how it started. She was st -standing in the doorway of my office with a ci-ci-cigarette even though I told her not to smoke there because it’s not fair to the pa-patients. ‘You have a fine m-mind, Howie,’ she said, ‘so how come you n-never use it?’ That’s what I li-live with, Rachel, and sometimes, every once in a while, I can’t st-st-st take it, and I just have to get away from her. But I am so sorry that I had you come for no-nothing. There’s no excuse for me not calling you. None wh -whatsoever.”
    “It’s no big thing, Howie.”
    “But it is. You’re being so k-kind to n> ?, and I lied to you,” he said, picking up his napkin and starting to shred it.
    “About forgetting the appointment? Forget it, Howie. It’s no big thing.” I took a bite of my hamburger and salted my fries. Like an Akita , I knew how to pay attention without seeming to do so.
    “No. About Lisa. About, you know, us n-not having a relationship.” He opened one of the sodas and drank as if he were at the twenty-mile marker of a marathon.
    “You had a relationship?” I asked, incredulous, but using the same neutral look I’d used as a dog trainer when someone told me about the “little game” they played with their dog that had “gone wrong.“
    “You were lovers?” I asked, as if it were the only obvious conclusion an intelligent observer could draw, as if I’d known it all along.
    “No. N-not l-1-like that,” he said, his neck all red and splotchy, color flaring in his cheeks and chin. “We were friends.”
    “Friends? Your mother said Lisa was going to fire you.”
    Howie looked down at his shoes.
    “Talk to me, Howie. The bitch was going to fire you. That’s what your mother told me. So you tell me, Howie, what kind of a person fires a friend?”
    “That’s not what happened,” he said, looking sadly at his hamburger, as if he thought I’d take it away once he spoke.
    “That’s what your mother said happened. Why did she tell me that, Howie? What’s going on here?”
    “ Sh -she was m-misinformed,” he said.
    “Yeah? By whom?”
    “She saw me,” he wiped at his eyes with his hand, “crying,” he said, almost inaudibly. “I mean, she heard me, pushed into my room, the way she always d-does, put on the light, almost blinding me, stood there making f-fun of me, why was I crying, what the hell was wrong with me, like she always does. I couldn’t tell her the truth, so I told her, you know, what she told you, that L-Lisa said she’d fire me.”
    “You must have been pretty mad at Lisa to say that, Howie.”
    “No, I—”
    “I guess, given the circumstances, anyone would be upset. Here you thought you had a tine friend, and she was going to desert you, wasn’t she?”
    Howie shrugged.
    “You told Lisa everything, Howie, didn’t you? Then you can talk to me, Howie. I’m her cousin. Howie?”
    “I