In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,30
for the stink, and JT silently chided himself. Of course the dog would get spooked by the camera! Of course he would bolt! If he, JT, had thought to leave the dog with Abo in the first place, this never would have happened.
So much for thinking he could convince one of the motor trips to run the dog down to Phantom.
The delay held them up enough so that they were still at the dam site when the kayakers pulled in. Not surprisingly, they had a lot of questions about the dog, and JT wasn’t really in the mood to engage in a lengthy explanation. But the arrival of the kayakers presented an opportunity, for JT happened to notice that their youngest member, a girl of ten or eleven, was busting out of her life jacket.
“I’ve got something that might be a little more comfortable,” he said. “And yours might fit the dog a little better than the one he has. If you’re not attached to it, that is.”
The girl had indeed outgrown her life jacket, both physically and emotionally, it being bright green with dancing purple frogs. She wanted very much to trade—in fact, she wanted to take a picture of the dog wearing her old life jacket, but JT wasn’t going to put any life jacket on the dog until the dog had had a more thorough wash. He clipped it to the boat.
“Call the warehouse when you get out,” he told the man with the white beard. “I’ll mail this one back to you, if you want. What’s your name again?”
“Bud. How’s the tunnel?”
JT grinned. “Dark.”
As the kayakers straggled up the path to the tunnel, JT had a duplicitous thought. What if they simply rowed off without the dog? The kayakers seemed a good bunch; they’d find some way to fit him in their mule boat, and he, JT, could just play catch-me-if-you-can the rest of the trip.
Would that he could be so devious. Besides, Sam had in the meantime found a small towel with which to rub the dog dry, and he was paying special attention to his ears and the straggly beard; and it didn’t take much imagination for JT to know that Sam would never, ever let him get away with it.
16
Day Three, Evening
Mile 47
Maybe tonight, Susan thought as she helped unload the boats at the end of the day. Maybe tonight, instead of helping the guides prepare dinner, she and Amy could go sit on a rock, alone, and just talk.
Was that really so much to wish for?
Susan knew things could be strained between mothers and daughters, that the last person a seventeen-year-old girl wanted to talk to was her mother. And she knew that everything she herself said came out sounding just as lame as the things her own mother had said thirty years ago. But maybe down here on the river, Amy would open up. Because she felt like she knew so little about her daughter these days! Did Amy have friends—true friends, the kind who would lie for you? Or who would listen without arguing when you needed to say an awful truth out loud? Nobody ever came over to the house; nobody called to ask about a homework assignment. It broke her heart, particularly because back in high school she’d hung out with a big crowd; there were always parties and shenanigans and ditch-days, and she always had a boyfriend, except for two weeks before the start of her junior year. How could her daughter be so different? Where did she come from?
And how did she end up so … large?
Exactly what I’ve been asking all this time, said the Mother Bitch.
During these first three days, Susan had made an extra effort to give Amy the space she needed to get to know people on her own, so they could all see Amy as her own person and not merely Susan’s daughter. But she was also determined to take advantage of being down here in the canyon, to perhaps pierce some of those heartbreaking barriers.
Maybe a little alcohol would help, Susan thought. And so late that afternoon, as soon as the boats were unloaded and Dixie had opened up the drink box, Susan retrieved her bladder of white wine and went off in search of Amy, whom she found at the water pump.
“No thanks,” Amy said, filling her bottle. “I’m going to wash my hair.”
“Maybe I should wash my hair too,” Susan said brightly.