“Thank you for your understanding, and welcome to the neighbourhood,” the card said. “See you around. The treats are Avi’s way of saying sorry. I do hope you and he can become friends. Best, Andrea & Avatar.”
So I wasn’t imagining things. He remembered the pre-dawn scrabble he’d heard outside the camper. Then nothingness when he swung open its door.
She moves like a shadow.
Well, he revised his interpretation of the event, reverse thrusting from the realm of romantic poetry into the orbit of mundane reasoning. Shadows don’t rustle leaves or crunch gravel in passing.
The card, a portrait of Andrea and Avatar seated on a beige leather sofa, had been attached with a silver ribbon to the lid of a mason jar filled with what looked like dog biscuits—the baked bone shapes that entice canines to sit, heel, and come on command.
They’d struck noble poses, the two of them, Avatar facing his mistress with what Buddy took to be the expression of a faithful retainer, Andrea complementing her hound with a courtly pose. He sensed humour in her disposition, as if she was gently mocking her own extravagant attachment to her companion.
Or am I imagining that too?
He unfastened the mason jar’s metal latch, peered in at the charnel contents, extracted one of the biscuits, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, sniffed at it. Shortbread, he thought. It smells like my mom’s shortbread cookies. Same texture, too. Cautiously, he nibbled at one of the symbolically rendered ball-jointed ends of Avi’s treats. It is shortbread! he grinned. Avi! You sure do know how to nuzzle your way into a man’s heart!… when you’re not trying to rip it out of his chest, that is.
Buddy took another bite and munched, the granular flavour reminding him of Christmases past. Was that Andrea’s intention, a plausible explanation for this jar of baked bones she had left on the threshold of his camper?
Bernice and Harry’s camper, he corrected.
Was Avi a ruse, a decoy? Was he meant to imagine Andrea in her kitchen, mixing flour, butter, and brown sugar into a lump of dough, the molecular structure of the ingredients changing as she kneaded the mass; her hands—strong and slender—folding and refolding until it softened, became pliable; her rolling out the sweet globule into a flat slab, then pressing the tin cookie cutter into the fleshy substance to create actual shapes, and the negative spaces where they had once existed on the brink of possibility?
He hooted out loud at his own fantasy. Give it up! he condemned his perverse investigation into the origins of shortbread doggie treats, just as their pale forms were about to be thrust into the hot oven for baking. Getting a bit quirky, he was forced to admit. Still, he couldn’t help wondering, even as he savoured the down-home flavour of Avi’s gift, where his daydream might have landed if he hadn’t censored the intriguing details of Andrea, baking, for me!
Next: No place like home