Protecting Marie: Chapters 6–9

Interspersed with those familiar noises was a soft, sharp ringing sound.

Be intrepid, Fanny told herself. Intrepid. It was a word that Henry had taught her, a word that meant unshaken, dauntless. To be intrepid, Henry had said, was admirable.

“Lie down,” Henry commanded, and immediately Dinner’s head disappeared with a doleful sigh and the rattle of her tags.

It seemed as if she had materialized out of nowhere.

On the floor, a shopping bag teeming with parcels rose up to her knees like a small, sturdy house.

Intermittently, the voices were clear.

Both of her parents were subdued, and their faces showed traces of postargument stress—tight cheeks, sharp eyes, flushed skin.

On their way home from these outings, Henry would invariably say something like, “Now, wasn’t that better than McDonald’s? One-of-a-kind places have much more character.”

Henry laughed again, and everything about him that could be imposing fell away.

“I’ll get a knife and forks and plates. But we don’t have to wait for the coffee—that machine is so temperamental. It’ll be a while.”

Dinner’s soft, thick, brindled coat was mostly a creamy tan color with patches of black and brown across her back and on her tail and sides.

...Henry tipped his head to Ellen, his eyes fleetingly sad...

“My perspective was all shaken up...and there was something so simple and common and striking about that dog...something about the whole thing that, like I said—just seemed right.”

Henry crept over to the fireplace to poke at the smoldering remains and put a new log on.

Two days in which time seemed to have been measured in a haphazard fashion; two days in which unreal and unpredictable things had become common.

While Henry locked the doors, Fanny gathered some of Dinner’s things to take up to her room—a rawhide bone, a rubber snowman, a dilapidated dove-colored afghan with holes as big as quarters—and waited at the foot of the stairs.

While Dinner sniffed around the bedroom, Fanny prepared a space for her between the dresser and the radiator, folding Dinner’s afghan into a rectangle as best she could, given the afghan’s shabby state. “There,” she said, patting the afghan. “This is your bed.”

She was crestfallen when she realized what the sounds truly were, when she realized that Dinner had risen and left the bedroom.

The angels were hidden behind snow-laden pine trees. The angel for the twenty-fourth day was taller than the rest, and slender. More solemn looking, even rueful.

She would have protested—at least with a sigh or momentary sullenness—even the smallest changes or imperfections.

Fanny’s newly acquired attitude faltered only once, and briefly.

She was always slightly apprehensive when this part of the morning came upon them, because she wanted to please him, and he was difficult to please.

His paintings were carefully rendered arrangements of bottles, cups, saucers, vases, and bowls.

Sometimes he would place something discordant, like a rusty knife, in an exquisite, clear hand-blown vase, or paint a vase that had just been broken.

Sometimes there would be a sere, saffron landscape behind the table.

The vessels were usually opaque, and the perspective from which they were painted was such that one couldn’t see the insides of them.

She was wearing three of her gifts—a bulky wool sweater patterned with an intricate design of cables and ribs, mittens that Ellen had knitted, and a mother-of-pearl bracelet that looked like a ring of iridescent seeds.

When they had first come out, Henry and Fanny passed a hockey puck back and forth while Ellen skated backward, limning the edge of the rink.

Her steamy breath curled around her neck and dissipated.

Fanny did, however, sleep at Jessie Bayer’s house one night, along with three other girls; and she went sledding the following morning with a passel of classmates.

Now, on her outings with Dinner, Fanny couldn’t help but think of Nellie, and she wondered if Dinner would have frightened her with her bulk and exuberance.

On and on they meandered, and on and on Fanny talked.

She lurched forward spasmodically, anticipating the ball.

It was when her sense of dread dwindled that she would make her trips to the dining room.

The top of the dining room table looked to Fanny like a Lilliputian town seen from above and afar.

A small mountain of pâté surrounded by juniper sprigs and kumquats was the focal point.

“These are the best,” Stuart said, holding up one of the bacon-wrapped oysters by its toothpick and twirling it with a flourish.

The name conjured up a drastically different image in her mind.

She leaned toward the house, away from Stuart, and surreptitiously wiped her nose on her mitten.

Immediately, the words seemed indelicate to her ears and she could feel herself blush.