Buddy Read online

  As we were getting ready to leave, Adam said to Pam, “You want to talk about the shed?”

  Shed?

  “For Buddy,” she said to me. “He needs a place to sleep. You said you don’t want him in the garage anymore, and I don’t blame you.”

  Wow. Suddenly I started feeling as if the pecking order was being established in the new household, and who the hell would have dared imagine this, but I was coming out on top. I had, in fact, made a request that Buddy not sleep in our brand-new garage. The insides were beautiful—shiny, spotless floors, clean walls, the scent of newness everywhere. Buddy would basically destroy it in a night, what with the terraced furniture leading up to a high perch, his excrement wherever he decided to leave it, feathers, strewn cracked corn that would attract bugs and assorted small animals, though none big enough to threaten his survival. Weeks before, I had made a simple request: can’t we get him a small hut? Think doghouse—something waist high with a small door that swings shut. There are probably, what, a billion chickens in this world living in that exact kind of domicile. Why not make it a billion and one?

  Pam and Adam headed with one of Adam’s crew members to a far corner of the yard while I grabbed some things out of my car—boxes of books and the like—to take into the house. As I was putting them into the immaculate basement, the thought occurred about how nice it was to live in a brand-new house. No one had ever died there. There had been no sad moments, no tears shed, no disappointments, no tragedies, no negative vibes. There would be happiness, and it would be ours. The house would be what we made it.

  Pam caught up with me in a few minutes, and we drove back to her house. “It’s great,” she said. “Adam said he could have Buddy’s house done in a day or two.”

  Buddy, just like us, would have a brand-new place to call his very own.

  When I pulled into the house the next afternoon with another carload of stuff that probably should have gone into the trash but was instead heading for the basement, where it would remain until my next move, assuming there was one, though maybe not, I heard power saws and the thwack of hammers and men shouting instructions to one another over the noise. I walked across the front lawn, around the house, to see the source, and the next sound that could be heard was my jaw hitting the ground.

  Before me, in the corner of the yard that Pam had chosen for Buddy’s hut, Adam’s crew members had wrestled Tyvek drywall siding into place, and it must have risen eight feet into the air. Above the siding, two guys on ladders were banging cedar shingles into the new pitched roof. Two other men were installing clapboard. This little hut was probably the size of my first studio apartment in Boston, though that had been a fifth-floor walk-up and Buddy wouldn’t be required to expend that kind of energy to get into his new home. It was nicer than half the houses we had looked at in our months-long search, and much better built.

  I stared in silence, my mind trying to get around what all this meant. Adam yelled to one of his workers, “Cut the hole for the transom window right there!” He was pointing above what would be the door. Transom?

  He turned around, saw me agape at the proceedings, and said, “My next life, I want to be your rooster. This is the nicest chicken house in town.”

  In town? There’s not another rooster in any of these United States that resides in the kind of splendor that Buddy would come to have in my side yard, including a transom window to make it all aesthetically pleasing and high ceilings to create a sense of space. You have got to be kidding me.

  Over the next couple of days, I would watch them install a gently sloping mahogany ramp with toeholds that led to the front of the shed. They hung tall, heavy cedar double doors that fit snugly together at night, with a latch to hold them firmly in place. They built a wide shelf across the back of the shed, which Pam eventually covered with soft quilts and blankets. Someone, I assume Pam, placed a white upholstered chair that had once held a prominent spot in my study in Boston next to the shelf. It all allowed for Buddy to climb the ramp every dusk, high-step through the regal doors, hop onto the chair, then float up onto the shelf, where he would nod off to sleep without a worry in the world. Shortly after dark, Pam or I would walk out and latch the doors shut, leaving him in perfect, protected peace. Come morning, everything would happen in reverse.

  As I said, not in America did another fowl have accommodations like this rooster.

  On day 3, the painter arrived, efficiently applying a coat of red paint with cream trim that matched our house exactly. Buddy, in essence, had the same crib as I did. Maybe it’s irrational to feel you just lost a competition that you’re not even sure existed to a rooster who might or might not have been aware of it, but it’s how I felt—defeated, and very publicly at that. Half the town was slowing to a crawl as they drove past the yard, probably wondering if it was some sort of illegal rental apartment we were putting up, or maybe a carriage house. They would soon find out. It doesn’t help when your two real estate agents, Laura Semple and Beth Hettrich, are leaving you voice mails as they’re driving past your new house saying, and I quote, “Buddy’s going to need central air-conditioning.” I never let Pam hear the message out of fear that she’d think they were right.

  There was, of course, a critical question in all this, one I asked Pam on the phone one of those afternoons while the crew of men continued to put the finishing touches on the rooster house. “How much is this costing us?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve got this one covered. I’m sure he’s giving us a good deal.”

  On the eve of our move, I swung by the house on my eternal mission to unload still more boxes as the guys were stapling wire to the split-rail fence that they had just put up. They were wrapping up, so I went over to thank them. A very nice worker named Ron gave a good tug at one of the wire pieces to demonstrate that it wasn’t going to budge. Peace of mind about the dogs, as Pam had said.

  “There’s no way any predator is getting inside this yard to get at the chicken,” he said. And with that, dawn breaks on Marblehead. Of course. That’s why Pam wanted a fence to begin with. That’s why she didn’t like the invisible fence, because it would serve only to keep the dogs in, not to keep wild animals out. That’s why she needed the mesh, to really keep the predators at bay. Basically, we had just spent a small fortune—actually, make that a large fortune—to create a safe little kingdom for Buddy to roam by day and a palace in which he could sleep at night. Giving the king a throne would surely assist with the management of his outsized personality disorder.

  16

  It happened, as some of life’s important things do, by accident. Pam was putting Caroline to bed. Abigail was sitting Indian-style on the floor of her own room, biding time until her mother came in, when I knocked softly on her open door, walked in, and sat down next to her. The first good sign was that she didn’t seem to mind.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, you’re sitting. You’re thinking. You’re daydreaming or planning or hoping or fretting. You’re doing some of that or none of that, but you’re doing something.”

  She looked up at me, less annoyed than intrigued, which, again, was a good sign.

  I definitely didn’t want to ask the next logical question, which was “What are you thinking about?” because her likely lack of a response could shut everything down right there and then, so my eyes darted about the room, looking for another direction to go in, something, physically, to grab on to.

  In walked Baker.

  “Here he is!” I exclaimed.

  “Baker!” Abigail called out, in the way she does where she lingers on the r.

  He trudged proudly between us and flopped out on the floor with a loud, laborious groan. Abigail stroked his back while I rubbed his ears and tried to stretch out the moment.

  And that’s when I saw it: her bookshelf. On it were, ahem, books. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Where was my head? I casually crawled over, scanned through some of the
titles, and pulled out a paperback on owls.

  “Have you read this?” I asked.

  “What is it?”

  “Who.”

  “No, what is it?” she said.

  “Who.”

  “What?” She was annoyed now, which I didn’t mind.

  “I’m telling you what. Who. It’s about owls.”

  She laughed, admittedly not particularly hard, but a nice, sincere little giggle. To me, it might as well have been gold.

  “Do you want me to read it to you?” I asked.

  She was looking over at the book, scratching Baker’s chin, and she said, “You can read it if you want.”

  “No, do you want me to read it out loud?”

  She said, “If you want.”

  Rather than get frustrated, I read. I read about owl habitats. I read about the difference between snow owls and white owls. I read about how owls stalk their prey, about how they see in the night, about how they relate to other birds.

  At first, Abigail was noncommittal about the whole exercise, not wanting to give too much away. But as I kept going, reading in an animated voice, she scooched over so she could see the pictures, and gradually we found ourselves sitting on the floor side by side, our backs against her bed, Baker softly snoring in front of us.

  “Last page,” I said, wondering what had happened to Pam.

  “No! One more chapter,” Abigail pleaded.

  So one more chapter it was. I’d had no idea that owls were this interesting. I’d had no idea that reading aloud was this much fun. Abigail was now engrossed, leaning against me, making comments about the miracle of how far they can rotate their heads.

  Finally, I dramatically snapped the book shut. The bedside table clock said it was 9:15, well after the hour she should have gone to sleep, and I theatrically announced, “Bed!”

  Abigail laughed again. “Brushing my teeth,” she said, scampering from the room. I used the break to slip down the hall into Caroline’s room, to see Pam passed out beside her in bed, the two look-alikes fast and deeply asleep. Oh, boy.

  I beat Abigail back into her room. Bedtime always involved their mother tucking each of them in, spending time with them until they fell asleep. This would be interesting and I assumed would end with me waking Pam up to send Abigail off to dreamland. And sure enough, as Abigail climbed onto her twin bed in her footed pajamas, she asked in exaggerated fashion, “Where’s Mommy?”

  “She fell asleep with Caroline,” I said. “Why don’t I read another couple of pages to you.”

  She thought about that for a long moment, and I was fairly certain she was about to reject the proposal, until she said happily, “Two pages.”

  She stretched out. I sat on the edge of her bed. We read four more pages, truth be known, until I could see her eyelids grow heavy and her look grow spacey, and I dog-eared the book where we left off, shut off the light, and whispered good night.

  “Don’t leave yet,” she said.

  I didn’t. I sat in the dark for five, ten, fifteen minutes of quiet bliss. I sat in total silence until I could hear her breathing grow steady, pronounced, and rhythmic, and then I slowly pulled myself up from the bed without making any noise. Baker struggled to his feet to follow me.

  It was a weeknight. I needed to be in the newsroom early the next morning to help make decisions on who might go if we, the Globe, needed to lay off staffers—painful decisions that I didn’t want to be rushed or out of sorts when I was making. In other words, I needed to get back into Boston that night. So I quietly crept into Caroline’s room and touched Pam gently on the wrist. She roused quickly.

  I think mothers might be the lightest sleepers of all time, always on the alert even when they aren’t.

  “I’m taking off,” I whispered.

  It was dark. Pam was disoriented. She looked at Caroline beside her and then back at me as she got her bearings. She squinted as she asked, “Where’s Abigail?”

  “She’s asleep,” I said, unable to prevent a small smile.

  “She’s asleep?” Pam’s hair was tangled. One side of her face was red from being smooshed into a pillow. She looked, in a word, adorable.

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” I said.

  I gave Pam a quick kiss. I gave Baker a long nuzzle on his forehead, whispering “You stay here and make sure everyone is okay.” He seemed to understand, because as I tiptoed out, he sat down on the rug in Caroline’s room and simply watched.

  I quietly slipped out the front door into the cool night air for the drive back to Boston. Truth is, I didn’t even need my car. I could have floated home.

  The next afternoon, at about five o’clock, deadline in full bloom, there were stories that needed to be overhauled, a page-one editor who needed to be sold on our best work, reporters who needed a few minutes of time, and some breaking news spilling forth from the omnipresent police scanners on the city desk. In other words, a typical day in the newsroom. The phone rang in my office. Pam was on the other end of the line.

  “It’s Abigail,” Pam said, a tone of mild surprise in her voice. “She wants to know what time you’re getting down here tonight.”

  I thought of the night before, of her pleas for another chapter, another page, another paragraph. I thought of her drifting off to sleep slowly and quietly. I thought of how good it had all felt, tranquil and purposeful. I also felt another presence and looked up to see two people waiting at my door for me to get the hell off the phone.

  “Tell her as soon as I can, but I’ll get there by bedtime,” I said. “I will.”

  And I was, and we did the whole thing all over again, a few more chapters, some easy laughs, and an odd and sudden fascination with owls by both of us. With me sitting on the edge of her bed in the dim light of her room, she fell asleep this time without even asking for her mother. It was pure bliss.

  And so it was that a routine was born. We read more books in the series, about dolphins and lions and, yes, chickens, all of them checked out of the school library by Abigail. We went on to a serial featuring the lead character, Katie Kazoo, who would routinely be transformed by a magic wind that occasionally blew through her life. We read the entire Puppy Place series, which involves the Peterson family fostering dogs from the local shelter, always successfully finding just the right owners. I found myself regularly haunting the children’s section at Barnes & Noble, studying the shelf that held the Newbery Award winners. I steered Abigail toward the classics, which were probably more riveting for me than for her, but she was good enough to accommodate. Pinocchio allowed me to constantly pronounce the name of the father, Geppetto, with great flair, an Italian accent that I didn’t actually have. Abigail smiled at first, until she didn’t, which is when she simply rolled her eyes.

  It got to the point that I looked forward to our bedtime routine with greater anticipation than I’d had for that nine o’clock postwork, postworkout beer and burger with the guys. It was somehow more gratifying, and much less fattening.

  We were just beginning another classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a book that had me especially intrigued. It had been my favorite movie as a kid—and, okay, as an adult. I had read many other books in L. Frank Baum’s often overlooked series but not this, the best-known one. The first couple of chapters were a little rocky. Abigail was skeptical of liking something that involved such an evil witch, not to mention graphic death, but we survived that and were introduced to the Scarecrow, and prospects were looking up. Back in the newsroom my phone rang. A friend named Richard was on the other end of the line.

  “Picture yourself sitting in the tenth row of the Garden tonight,” he said, adding “I’ll even buy the beer.”

  On that particular night, the Celtics were playing the Lakers in the NBA finals, an extension of their storied decades-long rivalry. This wasn’t just the toughest ticket in town, it was probably the toughest ticket in the United States that night.

  “How the hell did you get a pair?” I asked.

  “A customer
,” Richard said. Richard was a restaurant general manager, one of the best in the city, and people tended to take care of him.

  In my head I was already flipping through the highlight reel that would be this night—the ice-cold pregame oysters and smoked salmon at the nearby Oceanaire, the pageantry and celebrity that are the NBA finals, the fraternity of being with a good and old friend, the beer, the action, the view, the whole entire blissful scene of being part of such a critical moment. I had been following the Celtics religiously since I was old enough to heave a basketball toward a ten-foot rim, which was probably around the third grade. I’d spent so much of my youth shooting basket after basket on the hottest summer nights and the coldest winter afternoons in the narrow confines of our driveway, constantly calling the game under my breath, the hero in my running narrative. McGrory fakes right, dribbles left, stops, pumps, shoots, scores! How does he always do it? How does he have that knack for making every critical shot at every critical time? Ladies and gentlemen, the crowd is so crazy you can’t even hear yourself think.

  I played varsity ball for two years in high school. In college, I lived for the Celtics-Lakers rivalry. And now, more than a quarter of a century later, here was the chance to sit in Boston Garden and watch the greatest rivalry in the NBA. I thought I couldn’t be any luckier than this.

  But then I thought about something else. I thought of Abigail, the look on her face when Pam informed her I wouldn’t be around to read that night. I thought of her heading into her room without me, looking at the copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz sitting on the table by her bed. Would she read it alone, struggling to understand the poppy fields or the actions of the Cowardly Lion? Would she be able to get to sleep? Would she think I’d let her down?

  I swallowed hard. I think I had sweat dripping from my brow. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said to Richard, my tone having lost about 90 percent of its altitude from two minutes before, “but I can’t make it.”