Seven The Hound’s Tooth

I’m out in the living room when Joanna gets home because that’s where the only TV in our house is. Cartoon Network plays in the background while I draw Beckett’s face again and again in my sketchbook, adding her signature splashes of color into her hair while the TV throws splashes of color into the room.

The volume is low so I can hear Joanna pull into the driveway, and I swing my feet to the floor seconds before she comes through the door. She’d lose her mind if she ever saw me using her cheap estate sale coffee table as a footstool.

We mumble hello to each other.

“Homework all done?” she asks on her way to the kitchen.

“Yup.”

I listen for the familiar thud of her purse being dropped onto the one dining chair no one sits in anymore. Bottles of mineral water clink together in the fridge as she pulls one out, the cap hissing when she twists it off.

The oven door squeaks open.

“Dinner smells good,” she says.

“It’s almost ready. You have time to shower first, if you want.”

She always showers after work to wash off the smells of the mortuary. She says death has a tendency to cling.

I start plating our food when I hear her move from the bathroom to the bedroom, so that by the time she comes back into the kitchen, dinner is on the table. She sets her mineral water to the left of her plate, and I set my tap water to the right of mine, and we simultaneously pull our chairs out. We have this choreography memorized by now.

“Did you bake this chicken?” she asks.

“Mm-hm.”

She pushes the meat and vegetables around on her plate, like the elephant in the room might be hidden underneath a wayward bell pepper.

“I never thought to make fajitas in the oven,” she says. “Clever.”

“Thanks. The rice was from a box.” I don’t know why that seemed important enough to say out loud.

This time she doesn’t take my hands but turns hers palms-up on the table and bows her head.

“Thank you, Lord Jesus, for this beautiful meal. Bless this food to our bodies, and our bodies to Your service. Amen.”

It goes quiet again—nothing but the clink of forks against plates as we eat. The silence is too much after a while.

“How was your day?” I ask, just to break the tension.

“I worked on a ninety-year-old woman who passed in her sleep at the nursing home. We should all look that good at ninety.”

“Cool.”

I wait, half expecting her to ask me how my day was. But she doesn’t. We’ve never even circled back to what happened at O’Ring on Sunday. But I want her to know I heard her. I hear her. I’m trying. So I go, “There was a Great Wait meeting at school today.”

“Mmm,” she says without looking up.

“I went.”

That gets her attention. She goes, “Oh? How was it?”

“They mostly talked a lot about prom coming up. Their version of prom. And I’m not interested in going to that, so...”

Her fork goes loose in her fingers. “Why wouldn’t you?”

Uh-oh. That took a hard left. “I don’t know. It’s kind of late now—”

“It’s never too late, Daya.” She takes a bite of her chicken while I wonder if we’re really talking about prom, or if prom is code in Joanna’s mind for something else.

“The more opportunities you open up to,” she adds, “the closer you come to getting right with God.”

There it is.

And then...

“Sometimes, it takes a while to get comfortable with the idea that we need redemption.”

“Why do I need redemption?”

“All sinners need redemption.”

I push back against my seat.

“How am I a sinner?”

“Honey...” She shakes her head like I’m totally missing the point. “We’re all sinners—”

“No, but you’re saying it like... like you think there’s something wrong. Like if I go to a couple of Great Wait meetings or whatever, it’ll fix whatever’s wrong with me.”

“I’m not saying The Great Wait will fix you. I’m saying it’ll bring you closer to God. And being closer to God gives you clarity in your relationships.”

My relationships?

“The young people at this church are so full of light and hope.”

“Yeah, but—”

“That’s all I want for you. To let that hope and light lift the veil of confusion—”

“I’m not confused,” I say. “I don’t need to be fixed. I’m not broken.”

With everything I say, she recalibrates, looks for a new way in.

“This soul we carry...” she says, forming the shape of an imagined soul with her hands. “It’s so very fragile, and... things can sneak up on us when we’re the least prepared for it.”

“What things? What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about choices, Daya. Even our smallest choices can get out from under us without our even realizing it.”

The air in the room has a life of its own. Heavy heartbeats and thick breath that expand and contract around us.

“You don’t really mean choices. You mean sin,” I say. There’s nothing subtle about her Grace Redeemer–charged subtext here.

“Yes.”

“You mean his sin,” I whisper. “His choices. The way he was broken.”

For a moment, neither of us moves. I crossed the line again, bringing up my dad—I know I did. But I’m not wrong. I’m not.

For the longest time, she doesn’t move. Not a fingernail. Then she gets up without a word, slips her purse off the empty third chair—the chair my dad used to sit in.

I follow her to the living room.

“Mom.”

She ignores me. Gets her keys out.

“Mom!”

She turns at the door, her eyes blazing with anger and hurt.

“We’re all broken, Daya.” She shakes her head and adds, “The sooner you acknowledge that...”

It’s the last thing she says before closing the door behind her. And she doesn’t even finish the thought.

I stand in the living room, staring out the cracked pane of glass in the door that my dad was supposed to replace before he left. After a while, I go into the bathroom and wash the tears off my face. I clean up the dinner neither of us finished. I wander to my room. Stand just inside the door, look at the Adelita statue, at the bedspread where Beckett Wild sat earlier—where I fantasized about her after she left, without worrying if masturbating over a girl I can never be with is a sin.

Joanna was right. This house is full of brokenness. Broken promises. Broken relationships. Broken hearts. For the first time, I understand a sliver of how it must have felt for her these last nine years. Our house is a tomb. It physically hurts to be here.

I grab my messenger bag and my phone and let the back door slam behind me.

“Welcome to the Hound’s Tooth, proudly serving the Hair of the Dog That Bit You. What can I get started for you this evening?”

B’Rad is Cheshire-Cat-smiling from his perch at the kiosk window.

“Are you ever not cheerful?” I ask.

“Not without good reason.” He winks from behind his busted glasses. “You here to eat, or did you come to accept my prom offer?”

“Option C, actually.”

“Oh yeah?” he says. “What’s option C?”

I smile, hoping it’s a good enough substitute for an answer. Option C should have been to call Stella, but she was in such a mood this morning, she may not be able to hear me around my Joanna drama right now.

“Is it okay that I just showed up here? I took the bus and everything.”

He throws me rock-star hands and says, “Sounds like option C is a friendly face with a side of hot dog.”

B’Rad motions for me to go around to the back of the kiosk. He opens the door, pokes his head out, waves me inside.

“Won’t you get in trouble?” I ask.

“Doesn’t matter. I’m the only one here. Plus, they freaking love me.”

“Who loves you?” I say, hiking the three steps up into the kiosk.

“The owners. They appreciate my work ethic.”

“Ah.”

Once I’m inside, the first thing I notice is that it’s stuffy as hell in here. The second is that everything is gunky if you make the mistake of touching it. The metal cabinets, the counters, even the floor.

A smoky tang hangs in the air, the unmistakable mix of hot dog, mustard, relish, and onions. If memories have a smell, this one brings me back to a little roadside hot dog stand on a trip to California with my grandparents and Joanna not long after my dad left. Joanna wasn’t eating much back then—all she got was a Diet Coke. My grandmother just sat there shaking her head like she’d never eat anything off a food truck, least of all a hot dog. But I wanted my mom to eat. I wanted her to be happy again. I challenged my grandpa to a hot-dog-lightsaber duel, and we laughed as we battled it out. It still wasn’t enough to make Joanna hungry.

“Wow,” I say, sniffing back the memory. “Those onions are brutal.”

“I must be immune,” he says. “Hey, wanna learn how to make a Hair of the Dog That Bit You? It’s our signature dish.”

“Sure.” I nab a couple condiment packets when B’Rad isn’t looking and slip them into the side pocket of my cargos, next to the ones I stashed there at lunch earlier. Emergency relish. They always give you way too many ketchup packets at Sonic and not enough of anything else.

“So, what you have to know about making a Hair of the Dog That Bit You is—”

“Are you sure this is cool, though?” I ask.

He goes, “Daya. It’s chill. Take a risk once in a while.”

“Something tells me you do enough risk-taking for the both of us.”

B’Rad leans back against the dinky metal counter and uses his hands to help explain the situation to me.

“Here’s the dealio. If I make a mistake on someone’s order, I have to log it in as waste and toss it, plus it comes out of my check. But if I’m training someone and they make a mistake, I can let them eat it. I don’t know why. It’s just company rules.”

He smiles.

I smile too.

“But you’re not training someone,” I say.

His head tips to one side. “Aren’t I, though?”

I look at him for a second, but he just stands there, looking at me right back. Nothing seems to throw B’Rad Anderson off balance.

“Okay, sure,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

It turns out, a Hair of the Dog That Bit You bears a striking resemblance to Anything Daya Keane Likes on a Hot Dog, menu be damned. In this case, those ingredients include: mustard, ketchup, onions, and lots of shredded cheese. B’Rad says there’s a fixed set of toppings for the Hair of the Dog That Bit You, but my version is close enough.

I’m genuinely salivating at the aroma of my Anything Daya Keane Likes on a Hot Dog, filling the tight quarters inside the Hound’s Tooth Hot Dog kiosk. Meanwhile B’Rad’s doing such a great job training me that he accidentally makes a second training dog.

“Here’s a weird thing I just noticed,” I say, looking up at the handwritten chalkboard menu. “There’s something up there called To Thine Own Self Be True. It says your dog, your way. So how is that different from my customized Hair of the Dog?”

“Look, I know it’s only your first day,” he says. “But details matter. Try not to get overwhelmed with everything you still need to learn.”

As B’Rad throws paper wrappers around the two “mistake” dogs he just made, I dip down to look out the service window. That’s when I catch a glimpse of Beckett Wild leaving her dad’s Vespa dealership across the parking lot.

She’s right there, directly across a stretch of asphalt from me.

And she’s carrying a bag from the Hound’s Tooth.

My brain is trying to connect these unexpected dots. Beckett, placing that bag on the seat so she can strap her helmet on, throwing one long leg over the same scooter she drove to my house earlier. Giving the Vespa some juice before riding off into the literal sunset. I picture myself trading places with that bag tucked between her legs.

“She ordered the Jackson Pollack,” he says. “Her dad owns this place too.”

My stunned gaze drifts from out the window to back inside the kiosk, landing on B’Rad.

“...She what?”

“The Jackson Pollack. It’s a splattering of ketchup, mustard, and our famous sauce. I can teach you how to make the dog, but not how to make the sauce unless you really did work here. That’s the only thing that would for real get me fired.”

I stare at him.

I stare at the chalkboard menu behind him.

I stare at the words: The Jackson Pollack—a splattering of ketchup, mustard, and Hound’s Tooth’s own best-kept-secret sauce.

I turn back to B’Rad, who has the strangest look on his face, like he just got caught telling me the super-secret-sauce recipe.

He goes, “I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Are you okay, Daya?”

I can’t get the image of her out of my mind, can’t make myself stop thinking about her.

I’m all flame and no oxygen.

“You want to talk about it?” he asks.

“No.”

The word hits the thick air a little too hard and quick.

“Okay,” he says.

Something about seeing Beckett here has me twisted. She went from secret crush to in-my-house in the span of a few hours. Then, after her galaxy and mine comingled for a brief moment in time, after the fight with Joanna at dinner, after coming here, hanging out with B’Rad, having a good time... boom. Beckett. Again. Knowing her dad is B’Rad’s boss. Knowing how I feel about her, what I’ve imagined doing with her. Things that would definitely shock Mr. Wild, not to mention the rest of the congregants at Grace Redeemer. It’s all kind of messing with my head.

“I... I guess I should probably get going,” I tell him.

“What do you mean? You just got here.”

I don’t know what I mean. There are too many thoughts in my head, all getting bottlenecked trying to find their way somewhere else.

“I got in a fight with my mom earlier, and...” I let the thought trail off, since I don’t know where it’s going anyway.

“I had a feeling it was something like that. Because of yesterday?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

He looks out the window and we both watch as the lights go out at Wild Rides Vespa Dealership.

“I have a bold proposal. There’s only about ten minutes left on my shift, so.” B’Rad unties his apron and hangs it up on a hook near the door. “If you have to go home, can I at least drive you?”

“Are you sure? Don’t you need to do some end-of-shift ritual or something?”

“It’s been dead all night,” he says. “No one will care if I close up fifteen minutes early.”

“I thought you said ten.”

He ignores me. “Gimme a hand putting things away. I’ll wipe everything down real quick. No one will ever know.”

“Isn’t that what you said about your gramps just before he came back early from his fishing trip?” I ask, putting the lids he hands me onto the condiment trays.

B’Rad ignores me again, but he does it with a smile. He does everything with a smile. Only this smile has famous last words plastered all over it.

We spend a few fast minutes cleaning the kiosk, since it would take a chisel and a lot of prayer to fully remove the years of gunk on everything. Then we lock up.

B’Rad says, “See? Took half as long to close as when I do it myself. We should totally work together,” he adds as we walk out to his car. “We make a pretty good team.”

He manually unlocks the car doors, and I pull open the creaky passenger side of his old VW wagon and get in.

“Do you care if I eat my Hair of the Dog?” I ask. “I’m starving.”

“Nah,” he says. “Hand me mine.”

“I love your ride, by the way,” I say, mouth full of hot dog, as we head out of Greenville. “Looks like something out of your granddad’s junk pile.”

“I rescued it from the junk pile,” he says.

“Seriously? Was it even running?”

“Nope.” He turns onto the Strip that runs north to south through town. “I watched a bunch of videos online to figure out how to fix the engine, and voilà.”

My mouth pops open. “You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not.”

“Man, you really are MacGyver. You’re all that and a tank of Hound’s Tooth’s Best Kept—” Before I can finish, I go, “Hey, pull over real quick.”

He whips to the side of the road with lightning-fast reflexes, and as we roll to a stop, I lean out the window.

“Stella. Stells!”

Stella looks up from where she’s sitting on the curb.

I go, “Dude, what are you doing?”

“Shaving my legs,” she says. “What does it look like?”

“Well, it looks like you’re hanging out on a street corner waiting for your pimp, but that can’t be right.”

She pushes to her feet, bending over enough to see who’s in the driver’s seat. Her eyes do a whole three-hundred-sixty-degree rotation when she sees B’Rad behind the wheel, stuffing the tail end of a hot dog into his mouth.

“Goddess, give me strength,” she mumbles.

“We can give her a ride, right?” I ask him.

“If she’ll get in,” he says.

I open the door for her, lean forward so she can climb in behind me while he puts on a smile like he’s about to take her order at the kiosk window.

“I’m B’Rad,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve ever officially met.”

“I know who you are,” Stella says as she slithers into the back seat. “And, no, we’ve never officially met.”

Just that fast, the air in the car changes, like when your hair stands up during a lightning storm. Something’s off with Stella. Something’s been off since this morning, when she went on that rant about her mom.

“Is she going home with you?” B’Rad asks me.

I’m not sure how to answer. Now that Stella’s here, I don’t actually want to go home.

“Can we crash at your place?” I ask her.

Her face twists up. “Fuck no.”

Oh man. It’s her mom—I’m one thousand percent sure.

I turn back to B’Rad. “Can we just chill with you for a while?”

Stella’s breath fogs up the grimy back window, but she doesn’t openly object.

B’Rad kicks another look at her through the rearview mirror.

“I’m not... I mean, I don’t usually bring people home,” he stammers.

“It’s not a sex thing, Be Weird,” Stella says against the window. “I’d be down to just go somewhere I can look up at the stars for a while, so I can erase any lingering doubt about how petty and insignificant everything is.”

Yikes.

He looks over at me and I shrug back at him.

He goes, “We can do that at my place, I guess.”

As we drive in the direction of the electric fields, the evening sky goes from robin’s-egg blue to cobalt. When the sun dips below the horizon, it throws a rose-gold tint over everything in its path. Something about the color reminds me of Beckett.

Who am I kidding?

Everything reminds me of Beckett....

If I were anyone else, I’d have grossed myself out about it by now.

But it’s not my fault. Tonight’s sunset is a near-perfect color match of her hair, which, please God no, don’t let me become one of those pathetic, cream-filled, piney-eyed girls.

I shiver against the unsettled energy all around us. It’s not just the crackle coming off Stella. Or the unstable air from inside my house earlier. Or the low-grade hum as we get closer to the towers flanking B’Rad’s place...

I can’t put my finger on it, but... it feels like dread. Like something about tonight wants to break loose and run feral around B’Rad’s junk ranch.

The thought of it sends a shiver straight through me.