Page 10 of Shake the Habit

The dog stood and ran over, and Caleb got involved in talking to him about being a good boy and how he wasn’t allowed to jump on anyone. We would see if those lessons were absorbed, but I bet not.

Then Caleb looked at me as I opened the door and he held Sir back with his knee. “Thank you for lunch, Kayleigh.”

“Sure,” I replied. “Thanks for driving me around today. Good luck with your farm.”

“Sure,” he echoed.

The dog and I went to the front window to watch his truck drive away.

Chapter 3

“It’s not a secret.”

“No, honey, of course not,” my mother answered. “You don’t have to keep secrets, not ever. Never,” she emphasized. “I was just thinking…you don’t have to lead with it, either.”

Well, I didn’t go around and announce to people that I was a drunk first thing off. “I really don’t do that,” I told her. “But he deserved to know, just like I would want to know it about him.”

But when I’d thought about it later, I wasn’t exactly sure why I’d opened my mouth and allowed all that information to pour out to Caleb. I was supposed to be honest about my addictions—reckoning with how I’d behaved was part of recovery. But there’d been no need to tell a near-stranger practically the worst thing about me within twenty-four hours of meeting him.

My mama also pointed that out. “Would you actually have been angry if your positions were reversed, and you found out about his history on your third date instead of your first?”

“It wasn’t a date—my Lord!” I dropped my phone as Sir surged forward. “No! Stop it,” I ordered. “You’ll never catch that squirrel!”

Finally, he gave up the chase. I’d had his leash, the new one I’d bought at the pet store, wrapped around my hand and I unwound it to shake off the damage. We found my phone and I told my mom that I was still there, and I was fine. “And that wasn’t a date,” I said, finishing my earlier thought. “Caleb had come by to check on Sir.”

I heard her smothered chuckle. The whole situation had become somewhat of a joke in the family on the previous Sunday at church. The story had spread from relative to relative of how I had mistakenly named my dog and how I had adopted him in the first place, and how Caleb Woodson had helped me evict him from my car. But I hadn’t told any of them exactly how we had met up later, when Caleb had come over. I imagined that their reactions to that information would have been exactly like mine, if any of my female cousins had told me the same story:

Aria/Cassidy/Aubree/Amory/Sage/Dasia/etc.: A man I met only once and who I don’t know from Adam showed up at my house, because I told him my name by mistake and he’d hunted up my address. He insists that he’s not a murderer or worse.

Me: My Lord! Run away as fast as you can, faster than Sir when he sees a squirrel!

It wasn’t something that lent itself to explanations, but I had felt that Caleb was a very normal person, and I maintainedthat opinion. It had been a week since that had occurred, and nothing else had gone on, anyway. No one had broken in and no one had even dropped by to say hello and check on the dog again.

A few things not Caleb-related had occurred. Sir had run away and I’d driven around for hours looking for him, before I’d finally come upon him frolicking in a park miles from our home. I’d been crying and fully carrying on by that point, and I’d been so relieved that I hadn’t even scolded him. He’d been sleeping with me in the bed, taking up way more than his fair share, and he’d been making regular deposits in the front and back yards (which I’d gotten a lot better about cleaning up). My next-door neighbor had seen me at least once while I was doing that, and he’d nodded but then had gone into his own house without mentioning the hundred-and-something pound dog that was scampering around next to me.

We’d been doing a lot of scampering. To make sure that Sir got enough exercise, I’d been taking him for walks many times a day, like when we got up, during my lunch hour, after we got home from the office, then again after dinner. He really did seem to need that much to settle down, and yesterday I’d ordered several new sports bras that looked sturdy enough to give me the support I needed if he suddenly took off running and brought me along with him. That happened frequently and he wasn’t the best about listening when I used words like no, stop, halt, and please.

I had to hang up with my mom and get back to work since my lunch hour was over. Marc, my boss, didn’t care much aboutwhen I started and stopped, but it wasn’t fair for me to take advantage of our family relationship. He’d been great about me bringing Sir to our office and he’d been the one to tell me how much hilarity my dog’s name had caused at the after-church meal at his sister Michaela’s house. I hadn’t been able to attend, myself. I’d been afraid to leave Sir home alone for so long and it wouldn’t have been fun for him to be trapped in the car while I was at the service. I also hadn’t felt comfortable about inviting him into Michaela’s with the wonderful buffet, since he’d shown himself to be very sneaky and greedy when food was left out. Twice, he’d gotten my breakfast.

So I’d hurried back home after church and had found him asleep on my bed, but he’d also destroyed one of the couch pillows (and, I found later, peed on the garbage can. Notin, unfortunately, buton).

“Kayleigh?”

I hung Sir’s leash on the back of the door and wiped his paws so he wouldn’t muck up the office. It was still muddy outside. “Yeah?” I asked my cousin.

He was looking at his phone. “Do you know a guy named Woodson? Is this the same person who everyone was talking about last Sunday?”

“My Lord! Were they? I only saw him twice!”

“So, you do know him?”

“Only slightly, because he helped me with Sir,” I reminded my cousin. The dog leaned against my knee, soaking my jeans withthe water stuck in his beard after taking a good drink from his bowl.

“And his people are from Signal Mountain. Aunt Paula knew his mother,” Marc remembered.

I’d suspected that someone in my family would have heard of Lara-Lee Woodson, Caleb’s mom. Aunt Paula, who was actually a cousin to our grandfather, had heard the news of my tire and dog. She had provided some background information before we found our seats in the pews. According to her, the Woodsons had lived on Signal Mountain forever and owned a big place in the Old Town area, overlooking the Tennessee River below.

“What ever happened to Lara-Lee?” Aunt Paula had asked me. “She was strange.” Then she had said, “Well, we’re all old now,” when told that strange Lara-Lee was dead.

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