end of the corridor, a door marked Staff Only. She flipped the latch on Queenie’s kennel and clicked a lead onto the dog’s collar. “Ready for a walk, girl?”
Queenie, despite her tired legs, looked ready. You could see it in her eyes.
“Sometimes,” the woman said, “I hate my job.”
So get another one, I thought. What I said was, “You don’t like dogs?”
“You kidding? I love dogs. What I don’t like is that we just got ten more in this morning. Ain’t no room; ain’t no money. Ain’t never enough money. And Queenie’s been here the longest.”
I watched them leave, and I saw Queenie’s whole life in a flash. She was a newly whelped pup, suckling at her mother’s teat, nestled together with brothers and sisters. She was rolling in grass as high as her little legs, warming herself in the sun. She was playing with a ball, with a squeak toy, with one of those hard rubber things you stick peanut butter in. Her head out the car window, she was tasting air as it whistled by. She was curled in a corner, head down, knowing she shouldn’t have peed on her master’s rug, knowing she couldn’t help it. She was being walked into the sterile, bleach-scented SPCA, sitting obediently while forms were filled out, signed. She was watching out the window as the young man who once named her Queenie drove away.
I couldn’t cry on the drive home. And I was harsh with Anne, telling her to shut up after she’d complained about all the sucky dogs I took her to see. Roads and trees blurred together as I steered through late-afternoon traffic. All I really wanted to do was howl and scream at the humans around me. But I didn’t do that, not with the girls in the backseat. I waited until we pulled into our driveway, and I made some excuse before running to my bathroom, turning the tap on full, and bawling until I didn’t have any tears left.
FIFTY-EIGHT
“Slight concussion, but I think you’ll be all right,” a voice says. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, only that it’s soft, and that it rounds off the edges of the pain on the left side of my head. For an amount of time I can’t measure, all I know is the voice.
New sensations come in, slowly, one following the other. Something like ice close to my temple. The pressure of fingers opening my eye wide. Another eye, only an inch from mine. Girlish sounds, thick with the strains of Appalachian English, worrying, ordering me to lie still and hush.
Concussion or not, I need to move, and I need to speak. Ruby Jo’s right hand disagrees, keeping me down on the sofa while Lissa talks, telling me what she believes. “Yeah, we’ve been tracking the Fitter Family assholes for a while now. Trying to find out where the money comes from, who they’re backing for seats in the legislature, what their plans are. Bonita Hamilton’s been on them like flies on shit, and all we come up with is a fistful of nothing. But she’s got a theory.”
“Eugenics,” I say.
“Bingo.”
“Most people don’t know about it,” Lissa says. “I taught history for almost thirty years and never saw a textbook mentioning the Human Betterment Foundation or the Eugenics Research Association. Not a single one. Like it’s our dirty little secret, an embarrassment we think we can get away with not talking about by sweeping it all under a rug.”
She boils water on the small stove and pours a double dose of coffee grounds into the filter-lined funnel, while I listen to facts, numbers, the movement of oodles of money from Progressives like Rockefeller and Carnegie and Harriman, the Ivy League scientists who mangled data.
“It was huge,” Lissa says. “And really got rolling in 1912 with that paper.” She nods toward the kitchen table.
“It says—” I begin, my voice shaking. “It says euthanasia.”
“We don’t think the FF will go as far as a lethal solution,” Lissa says. “They didn’t try it a century ago. Not here, anyway.”
“That’s reassuring,” I say.
Ruby Jo frowns. “They did so. My granny said they did all kinds of things. Most