Page 81 of Forget About Me

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Baby Stick Around" - Joe Jackson

Lucy’s Catch You on the Flipside Mixtape, Song #6

BEN

“Lucky!”

Puck takes a flying leap off my lap to skitter across the tile floor of the backstage greenroom. Two little kids shriek as he leaps up to lick them in the face. Janet, the Shakespeare Boston stage manager, dodges around them to hustle over to me.

Still foggy from a between-show nap that included a dream about Lucy—who I haven’t seen in real life since she left my apartment a week ago, who won’t return my calls to her house or her service—I flinch when Janet places a hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, but this family says that Puck is their dog.”

She looks back at the small group in the doorway, a quintessential American family: mom, dad, boy and girl. And dog. “They have a picture of him with the kids, and the little girl was crying.” I’ve never seen Janet emotional before, but her drill-sergeant veneer cracks when she turns back to me. “I couldn’t say no.”

On my feet, my knees taking in the information if my head hasn’t, I mumble. “Uh, okay.”

Puck’s a friendly dog, but there’s something about how he’s interacting with them that has my battered heart plummeting.

Janet, at least a head shorter than me, pats my upper arm. When I don’t move, she steers me toward the family. “Come on. Let’s go have a chat with them.”

Next thing I know, we’re crowded into her small office, and the family is all talking at once, earnestly explaining how they’d lost Puck—Lucky, they call him—and then found him again.

“We were heartbroken when we lost him,” the mom says. They introduced themselves, but I can barely take in what she’s saying, let alone remember her name. “We were at a cookout in Boxborough for the Fourth of July. There were a lot of people and dogs there, and when it was time to leave, we couldn’t find him. We spent hours looking for him that night and put up signs everywhere the next day. We live down in Milton, but we went back the next few nights after work and kept looking for him.” Her gaze roves over the kids, then to Puck. “We’ve had Lucky since Max and Lena were two and three.”

The little girl looks up, her brown eyes huge. “He was our combined birthday present.”

I don’t know much about kids, but these guys look like they’re nine or ten. “So… seven years ago?”

The dad musses the boy’s hair. “Seven years ago. They grew up with him.”

I take a shaky breath. “And you just happened to come to the show and recognize him?”

The dad shakes his head. “We saw the article in theGlobe. We’re not subscribers, but a friend saved it—not thinking it was him, just that it looked like him—and gave it to us when we got together for dinner this week. We didn’t think there was any way it could be him since we lost him twenty miles from here and it was so long ago, but we had to find out. The minute he walked onstage, we recognized him. It wasn’t easy keeping these two from yelling out his name.”

The mom looks up, still scratching behind Puck’s ears. Just the way he likes. “Where did you get him?” Her tone is a bit challenging, like maybe I got him on some black market for stolen dogs or something.

I shove my shaking hands in my armpits. “He just showed up at my house a couple months ago. He had an injured paw. I put up signs around my neighborhood…” I trail off, not sure what else to say. Obviously, he’s their dog.

The dad clears his throat. “I guess you need him for the performances, but we’d like to take him home as soon as possible. How many more do you have?”

When I don’t say anything, Janet answers for me. “One more weekend—Thursday through Sunday. And we have another show in an hour.”

The dad looks at his watch. “We could pick him up afterward and bring him back Thursday. Would that work?”

“We can’t take him now?” the little girl asks.

“It’s just a few hours, sweetie. We’ll have dinner somewhere nearby. You’ll get to stay up late.”

She squats next to Puck, tears in her eyes. “But I’ve missed him so much!”

“I know, but Lucky has a job here.”

Janet bends down to talk to the kids. “He’ll be done at nine thirty.”

I have nothing to contribute to this conversation, so I just shove my hands in my pockets. All I want to do is rewind my life to a week ago, tell Lucy the right way and run away with her and Puck to Vegas so none of this will have happened.

Janet straightens. “Right now, Ben and Puck—uh, sorry, Lucky—need to get ready.” When no one moves, she adds, “Perhaps we can look into some sort of compensation for the rest of the run?”

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