“No,” he said. “I said Amy wanted me to look at the electricity.”
“Right this way,” Sophie said, leaving Amy to handle the mess on the porch. Five minutes later, she was in the dark farmhouse basement, wishing she was back on the porch. At least in the sunlight she could see what the mayor was up to. “Uh, what are we doing, Mr. Tucker?”
“Phin,” he said. “And this is your fuse box. We’re looking at it to see if it’s going to burn your house down.”
“Where are the little switches?” Sophie squinted around his shoulder in the dim light. She’d expected to get a whiff of some expensive cologne as she leaned closer, but instead he smelled of soap and sun, clean, and she swallowed and concentrated on the fuse box.
There were no switches, just little round things that looked sinister.
“Switches would be circuit breakers.” Phin said. “For which you need circuits not fuses. This is the old way.”
“Is this better?”
“No. But it’s more exciting.”
“I don’t want exciting.” Sophie took a step back. “I want functioning, non-shocking, neat little switches. I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. You do it.”
“That’s the problem with you city folk. No sense of adventure. Let me explain how this works.”
“No,” Sophie said firmly. “I don’t want to know. I want switches. I know how they work.”
“You can’t have switches. Get over it.”
Sophie shook her head. “I’ve heard about these things. You stick pennies in them, and they shock you.”
“You do not put pennies in them.” He sounded as if he were trying not to laugh. “If you put pennies in them, you deserve to be shocked. Not to mention have the house burn down. Do not put pennies in them.”
“Not a problem. I’m not going near that thing.” Sophie started up the stairs. “Thank you very much, but no.” When she realized he wasn’t following her, she stopped. “You can come up now. The electricity lesson is over.”
He grinned at her in the light that filtered down the stairs from the kitchen. “Quitter,” he said, and her pulse skipped a little at the challenge in his voice.
“Only on the stuff that will get me electrocuted,” she told him. “I believe in safety first.” She escaped back up the stairs and put on Dusty in Memphis to calm her nerves.
Phin followed a few minutes later.
“They’re all working,” he told her, washing his hands at the sink. “If you have trouble, yell, and Wes or I will come out and fix it.”
Sophie blinked at him. “That’s extremely nice of you.”
“We’re extremely nice people.” Phin smiled at her, and Sophie had a brief moment where she thought he might be a good guy after all before he said, “So tell me about this movie,” and she took a step back.
“I told you, it’s just an audition tape,” she said. “It was Clea’s idea, and she hired us because we did such a good job filming her wedding. Amy’s shooting it on the porch because it’s easier to light.” Even as she said it, the lights in the kitchen went out, and she heard Amy out on the porch say, “Oh, damn.”
“If there was a switch,” Sophie said, “I could go throw it now.”
“But there’s a fuse instead.” Phin pointed at the basement door. “So you can go replace it. Like an adventurous adult.”
“Not in this lifetime,” Sophie said, and Phin sighed and went downstairs, shortly after which the porch lights evidently came back on because Amy called, “Thank you!”
“You do very nice work,” she told him when he came back upstairs, trying to be nice since he wasn’t Chad. Exactly. “For that, you get lemonade.”
“You know, a little adventure in your life wouldn’t kill you,” he said as he sat at the table. “Especially if it’s just replacing a fuse.”
“I had enough adventure as a child,” Sophie said firmly as she poured. “I’m having a staid adulthood to make up for it.”
“That’s a waste,” Phin said. “Do you make staid movies, too?”
Sophie slapped a glass of lemonade down in front of him so that some of it slopped out on the table. “What is it with you and this movie?”
“What is it with you and this hostility?” He got up and pulled a paper towel off the roll by the sink and mopped up the spill. “You’ve been tense from the minute I said hello.”
“It was the way you said it,” Sophie said. “And I’ve told you. The movie is a short, improvised film for Clea which Clea asked us to do because she likes Amy’s work.”
“Not your work?” Phin sat down and sipped his lemonade. “This is very good. Thank you.”
“Don’t patronize me, just drink it,” Sophie said. “Clea wants Amy because I don’t do improvised. I shoot all the necessary parts of the wedding and manage the business, and Amy gets the weird stuff around the edges and cuts the video. She’s the artist.”
“ ‘Weird stuff’?” Phin said.
Sophie folded her arms and leaned against the sink. “People can get the stuff I shoot from any video company, but they can’t get the stuff that Amy finds. But if they only got what Amy shoots, they’d be mad because people like things like their vows in their wedding videos. So we work together.”
“And why is Clea making this video?”
Sophie scowled at him. “Why do you care so much about this movie?”
“As long as you’re out of here before Wednesday, I don’t.”
“Well, we’re out of here on Sunday.”
“Fine,” Phin said. “And I wasn’t patronizing you, the lemonade really is good.”
“Thank you,” Sophie said, feeling slightly anticlimactic.
“And for whatever I did in a former life to make you so damn mad, I apologize.” Phin smiled at her, clearly used to charming everyone in his path. “Now, will you please stop spitting at me?”
“Considering that former life, an apology is not nearly enough. ‘My name is Inigo Montoya’ on this one.”
“Who?” Phin said.
Sophie picked up the pitcher and said, “Lemonade?”— sounding more threatening than she meant to.
Phin pushed his glass back. “No, I’ve had enough, thank you.”
He got up and went back to the porch, and Sophie felt a little guilty for taking her frustrations out on him. She put his lemonade glass in the sink and went out onto the low, wide, back porch to calm her nerves. If she could get just get rid of that constant feeling that something awful was bearing down on her—
Something furry brushed her leg and she looked down and screamed.
There was an animal there —a big one, it came halfway up to her knee— and it had matted red-brown fur on its barrel-like body and short white legs with little black spots on them, and Sophie had never seen anything like it in her life. It was crouched now that she’d screamed, in the attack position she was sure, and when it moved, she leaped back against the wall of the house and screamed again.
Phin slammed the screen door open as he came out onto the porch. “What?” he said, and Sophie pointed down. He let his shoulders slump. “You’re kidding. You scream like that for a dog?”
That’s a dog? “They bite,” Sophie said in her own defense. It seemed feasible.
“Some do,” Phin said. “This one appears not to.”
Sophie followed his eyes down to the dog, which had rolled over on its back with its four stumpy white legs in the air. “It looks weird.”
“It’s built like a Welsh corgi.” Phin craned his head sideways to get a better look at the prostrate animal. “And a few other things mixed in to keep it interesting.” He squinted at it. “God knows where the black spots came from. It’s probably a highway dog.”
“A highway dog.” Sophie looked down at the dog, which was now looking up at them from its back. It was splashed with mud and quivering, possibly the ugliest living thing Sophie had ever seen. Its huge, black-ringed brown eyes stared at her pathetically, and she felt bad for thinking it wa
s ugly.
But dear Lord, it was.
“People dump the dogs they don’t want along the highway,” Phin said, a thread of anger in his voice, neatly repressed like everything else about him. “They think the dogs will be free and wild, but most of them get hit right away, looking for their owners’ cars.”
“That’s terrible.” Sophie stared down at the dog, outraged, and the dog stared up at her, upside down with those huge, melting brown eyes, comic and pathetic. “Is it hungry?”
“Probably, but if you feed it, you’ll never get rid of it.”
But there were those eyes. Sophie watched the dog for a minute while it watched her back, still upside down, and then she went into the kitchen to get some ham.
Five minutes later, Sophie was sitting on the back-porch steps, cautiously feeding ham to the grateful dog. “I never had a dog,” she told Phin.
“We always did.” Phin leaned against the porch post. “My dad never turned a highway dog away. If we had too many, he found homes for the ones we couldn’t keep.”
Sophie held out another piece of ham, and the dog took it gently. It looked up at her with the ham dangling from its mouth like an extra tongue, and she laughed because it looked so funny and sweet with its brown snout and black-ringed eyes. “Too much mascara, dog,” she told it, and the dog opened its mouth and barked at her, dropping the ham. “Goofus,” she said, and fed it again while the dog looked at her adoringly, completely ignoring Phin. Sophie held out another piece of ham.
“That dog’s a real politician,” Phin said. “Goes right to the pork barrel and hunkers down.”
“Maybe I could keep him a couple of days, until we leave.”
“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t name it. That’s always fatal.”
“Okay,” Sophie said. “Here, dog, have some more ham.”
Phin’s voice was casual when he spoke again. “So do you take care of the whole world, or just dogs and Amy?”
“Just Amy and my brother.” Sophie fed the dog again.
“And who takes care of you?” Phin said, and Sophie looked up, startled. “You’re here because Amy and Clea want to do the video, and you’re feeding ham to a dog you’re not sure you like. Who takes care of you? When do you get what you want?”
“I take care of me,” she said, scowling at him. “I take very good care of me, and I always get what I want.” Back off, buddy.
“Of course you do.” Phin straightened. “Lots of luck with the dog.”
He went back to the front porch, and Sophie felt guilty for driving him away again, but then the dog nudged her hand with his nose, and she went back to feeding him. When the last of the ham was gone, Sophie patted the dog gingerly on the top of the head and the dog looked at her as if to say, You’re new at this, aren’t you? “I never had a dog,” Sophie told it, and it sighed and settled in next to her, smearing mud on her khaki shorts. She patted it again and then went back into the kitchen and opened her PowerBook to block out a plan for the video now that the Lutzes were creating some story conflict on the front porch. The dog sat outside the screen door and watched her, and she sat behind her PowerBook and watched it back.
She couldn’t remember ever having wanted a dog. It would have been impossible on the road anyway; the last thing she and her mother had needed was something else to take care of. And then she’d been stuck in that little apartment at seventeen, trying to raise Davy and Amy, and a dog was really the last thing she’d needed.
But there was something in the patient way this dog looked through the screen door at her, not trying to get in, just watching her. From the outside.
It rolled over on its back outside the screen door so all she could see was four stubby white feet pointed to the sky. “Okay,” Sophie said, and let him in. “But you’re covered with mud, so don’t get on the furniture or anything.” The dog sighed and lay down at her feet, and when Amy called her name and she went out to the front yard, it followed her.
Amy was standing behind the camera, talking to Phin, but she stopped when she saw Sophie coming. “We’ve got a problem,” she said as Sophie got close, and then she saw the dog. “Cool. A dog.” She looked at it more closely. “I think.”
The screen door slammed as Wes came out. “You now have a new bathroom showerhead,” he said to Amy as he came down the steps. “But the shower drain still needs work. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
“Oh, well—” Sophie began, but Amy said, “Fantastic.”
“Your guests need work, too,” Phin said, and Sophie turned to look at the porch, where the Lutzes were having one of those intense, whispered conversations that married people have before they kill each other.
“Yeah, that’s the problem I called you out here for,” Amy said to Sophie. “We may have pushed this too far.”
“I’m blaming this on you,” Phin said. “Before you got here, they only did this when they’d had too much to drink.”
“Good,” Sophie said. “Now they’re out in the open. We’re clearing the hypocrisy out of Temptation.”
“A little hypocrisy never hurt anyone,” Phin said.
“So were you born a politician?” Sophie started off for the porch. “Or did you have to work to achieve this level of immorality?”
“Oh, I was born to it,” Phin said, sounding a little grim.
Sophie went up the porch steps to the Lutzes, with the dog at her heels. “We were so grateful that you were helping us with the filming that we forgot to feed you. Can I make you a sandwich?”
“Oh.” Georgia straightened a little. “Oh, no, we have to be going anyway. But how nice of you to offer.”
“Well, we’re supposed to cater to the talent.” Sophie smiled at her, and Georgia flushed with pleasure and smiled back.
“That’s a good one.” Frank looked at his wife with contempt.
“Amy says you both looked great on camera,” Sophie lied. “Maybe you can come back out tomorrow.”
“You bet.” Frank perked up, and even Georgia began to look less fried around the edges.
“We’ll do anything we can to help.” Georgia looked at Sophie with unqualified approval. “And maybe you can use Rob, too.”
Sophie looked into the yard to the minivan, where Clea was laughing up at a dazzled Rob. “I’m sure we’ll be using him,” she said flatly.
“That was kind of you,” Phin said, when the Lutzes had gone and Sophie was sitting on the porch steps with the dog at her side surveying the yard as if it belonged there, its mascaraed eyes half-lidded in complacency.
“I’m a kind person,” Sophie said, her chin in the air.
“You know, all evidence to the contrary, I think you are.” He leaned over to pat the dog, his face was close to hers, and Sophie’s pulse kicked up. “What I can’t figure out is why you’re so damn nervous.”
“I’ve been under a lot of stress.” Sophie scooted up a step, and the dog climbed to stay with her. “And I come from a very tense family.” She thought about her father and Davy and Amy, all of them absolutely nerveless, and honesty made her add, “Well, some of the Dempsey women have been high-strung.”
“A weekend in the country should take care of that,” Phin said, still watching her as he scratched the dog behind the ear. “There’s nothing stressful in Temptation.”
Just you, Sophie thought, and he grinned at her as if he’d read her mind.
“Nice seeing you, Sophie Dempsey,” he said, and straightened to go out to the car where Wes was waiting for him.
“Same to you,” Sophie said, as her pulse slowed again. “And if I don’t see you again, thanks for all your help.”
“Oh, you’ll see me again,” Phin said without turning around.
“Terrific.” Sophie watched him go, appreciating the fact that he was leaving while admiring how good he looked from behind.
Amy came to enjoy the view with her. “Helluva day, huh?”
“Explain to me again,” Sophie said, “what happened to ‘just the three of us’?”
Amy shrugged. “You’re the one who invited the dog.”
Sophie looked down at the dog who looked back up with its Cleopatra eyes, adoring her.
“The dog stays for a while,” Sophie said. “The mayor goes.”
When Sophie took her shower that night, blessing Wes the entire time for their new flexible showerhead, the dog put its feet on the edge of the tub and whined. It was covered with dried mud and looked so pathetic that Sophie said, “Oh, okay,” and hauled him in with her, hosing him down while he squirmed in ecstasy under the water, and then sudsing him up with eucalyptus-and-lavender shampoo. Half an hour later, they both sat blow-dried in the kitchen, enjoying the semi-cool night air that came in through the screen door, the dog keeping one eye on the Dove Bar Sophie was eating. Sophie licked the ice cream and worried again about the accident, the movie, and the mayor.