Page 21 of Child of Mine

And on they go, round and round, driving me crazy.

Or maybe I was nuts to begin with.

Whatever the status of my mental health, I am going to have to tell him. But I’m not going to sleep with him, even though little reels of the hours we spent worshiping every inch of each other’s bodies keep flashing through my brain.

In Technicolor and stereo surround sound. I mean, it was the day I finally got why people get so worked up over sex.

It was the last time you had sex!Quinn shouts.

And look what happened!Izzy yells back.

“I got Lilah out of it!” I yell this so loudly, a woman stares at me from the driver’s seat of a car stopped at a light.

Sending her a sheepish wave, I groan.

I can just see theSoap Opera Landheadline:Quinn’s not dead, fan claims. “I saw her talking to herself on the sidewalk!”

That’s all I need. May as well add,Soap Baddie Had Secret Baby! Details on page 3!

Whatever I do, I’m screwed. If only the right thing didn’t feel like such a bad idea.

My point exactly,Quinn says.

Chapter 5

“STARS AND THEIR PETS: While Don Walton (John Winston onThe Only World) can’t seem to find a girl he can set his heart on, sources tell us he’s found thedogof his dreams. The daytime hunk was seen just last weekend walking the friendly pooch through Central Park. When asked about the pooch’s breed, he joked, ‘He ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.’ What a character!”TV Tattler, June 1989

HENRY

The past couple of days have been full of meetings, getting to know the crew, and filling out paperwork, but that hasn’t stopped me from daydreaming about Izzy during every free moment. I haven’t seen her again since she ran out two days ago, so I assume she turned down the job. Guess I’ll have to add finding her to my to-do list.

Right now, I’m soaking up the last hours of precious sunshine after a long day inside. I could be flirting with any one of the young women who, like me, are hanging out watching their dogs play at the park near my apartment. House. Whatever it is. Boston isn’t full of high-rises like New York. Instead, most of the residential streets in the city are lined with two- and three-story places split up into apartments. Which is nice, even if they’re crammed way too close together from my suburb-of-Raleigh point of view. I mean, you could open your window and talk to your neighbor without even raising your voice. I am thankful the station found me a place close to GBH headquarters, and more important, one that lets me keep a dog.

My family always had a dog growing up. Or my dad did. After his last dog passed away—from grief, I swear—my mom didn’t get another one. Said she didn’t want to be tied down. When I argued that it’d be good company for her, she came right back with “Youcould get a dog.”

“Like I could take care of a dog,” I argued. “I can’t even keep a plant alive.”

She had no argument for that, so I didn’t have to admit what really kept me from putting any kind of roots down in North Carolina. Getting a pet or buying a house or seriously dating anybody meant giving up on ever getting back to New York. On ever jumping back into the high-flying, competitive world of network news where I’d be working twenty-hour days and would never make it home to feed a dog, let alone take it for a leisurely walk. I just wasn’t ready to let go of that dream. Not that I did anything to make it happen.

But then one day, I was driving to a friend’s cabin up in Lake Lure to get away for the weekend when something ran out of the woods. Right at my car. Thankfully, I swerved before I hit it. When I got out of the car to see what it was, this scruffy bag of bones and fur greeted me like I was his long-lost buddy. Skinny as a rail and full of fleas, before I could say “boo,” he’d jumped into my truck. Instead of continuing on to the lake, I drove back to the office of our old family vet.

He was just about to close for the day but let me in because he was a buddy of my dad’s. As he checked him over, he asked, “Where’d you find him?”

“’Bout thirty miles west on 64.”

“Mm-hmm. I ’spect he’s a dog that won’t hunt.”

“You mean they starved him to get him to hunt better?”

“No, they dump a dog like that on the side of the road and shoot at him if he tries to follow ’em home.”

He pointed to a spot on the dog’s scabby skin. “Press your finger right there.” After I did as instructed, he asked, “Feel that? That’s buckshot. I bet if we did an X-ray, we’d see hundreds of ’em.”

Half-starved and shot at, he was still sweet as could be. When his mouth curved in a doggy smile, I couldn’t say no. To Ribsy. In that moment, I named him after the dog in my favorite Beverly Cleary books growing up, the ones where the main character shared my name and found a scrappy stray dog. After Doc finished a thorough exam, he sent us home with flea shampoo, meds for Ribsy’s mange, and some special food to fatten him up.

That’s the funny thing. These days, Ribsy is like me: we run to fat if we don’t exercise every day and watch what we eat. Luckily, Boston has lots of parks, so we run together every morning and then come to this park in the evening so he can socialize with other dogs. He’s a chick magnet, so it’s no hardship.

Unfortunately, I haven’t clicked enough with any of the lovely young ladies he’s fetched so far for me ask them out—especially for the past two days, when daydreams of a fantasy life with Izzy have clogged my brainwaves. Interestingly, now they’re set in Raleigh. Like, what if we’d been actually dating when my dad died? Since she seems to have left her New York acting career, she might’ve come with me to North Carolina. I could be providing the grandchildren my mom’s always on about—something she seems to think you can never have enough of. Bella could act in local theater while I shoot to the top of the local TV scene. Maybe, with my own family to support, it would’ve been okay to direct and produce less-than-imaginative crap.

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