“Your impact on people.”

  “People? Meaning you?”

  “Exactly.” There was a silence. “Let me take you to dinner tonight,” JayB suggested suddenly. “Give me an opportunity to talk you out of leaving Odin and me.”

  Alana nodded mockingly. “Sounds good. You, me, Maddy, your dad. We could go to Walter’s restaurant—I’ll bet we can get a table. We’ll Zoom with Rodney doing his journey to the center of the earth.”

  “Or,” JayB countered, “what about just you and me?”

  They were both smiling.

  JayB’s phone made a chirp. Frowning, he reached for it.

  “It’s my dad,” he informed Alana and put the phone to his ear. “I’m kind of busy, Dad. What’s up?” He frowned. “When? Oh. Bye.” JayB put his thumb on the phone. He looked to Alana. “That was Walter. He’s on his way here. Actually, he’s here. He just pulled in.”

  With that, the front door opened and I wagged over to greet Walter, the friendly, treat-less man. Spartan and Odin elected to eye him from the floor.

  “Hey, Dad, pretty short notice.”

  Walter was smiling. “And there’s beautiful Alana,” he observed delightedly, then switched his gaze to JayB. “I called you in advance, just like you asked.”

  “Yeah, from my driveway.” JayB looked over Walter’s shoulder out the front window. “Where’s the Ferrari?”

  “Oh, the Ferrari,” Walter answered, waving his hand.

  “Or the Cadillac?”

  Walter made the same gesture.

  “So, what’s going on?”

  “Well, I kind of lost my license.”

  “You mean you left it somewhere?” Alana asked.

  Walter shook his head. “No, it was sort of revoked. I was on I-35 and I lost track of my speed.”

  “How fast were you going?” JayB asked.

  “Well, they said a hundred and fifteen, but I don’t trust those radar things.”

  “You were going a hundred and fifteen on I-35,” JayB repeated.

  Walter nodded. “Yeah. Twice.”

  “You mean you got two tickets for going over a hundred miles an hour?” Alana asked.

  “It’s okay,” Walter told her and held up his phone. “See? Rodney programmed my phone so that whenever I want to go somewhere, one of his friends will come pick me up.”

  “That’s just Uber, Dad. I have Uber.”

  Walter frowned. “Jago, look, I realize there’s a little bit of competition between you and Rodney, but he’s your oldest friend.”

  JayB groaned softly.

  “You and Rodney seem to have gotten close, Walter,” Alana observed carefully.

  Walter beamed. “Rodney’s like the son I never had.”

  JayB blinked. “What does that make me?”

  “You,” Walter responded evenly, “are the son I had.” Walter turned to Alana. “Jago was always so serious. He had everything planned out. He made spreadsheets of his homework assignments when he was in high school.”

  “How would you know that?” JayB interrupted. “You weren’t even here when I was in high school.”

  “Because I know people. That’s what makes me so successful. Plus, Rodney told me.”

  “I am so comforted to think you and Rodney have been discussing me.”

  Alana laughed.

  “Rodney understands life is meant to be lived,” Walter continued. “Go for the moment, at the moment. He’s a risk-taker, just like me. Anyway, I came over because I need your help.”

  “My help with what?”

  “Yeah, well…” Walter hesitated. “Maddy fired a waitress for being fat.”

  Dear Diary:

  Every time we return home from wherever we’ve been, whether a car ride or a walk, I hope Kelsey will be gone. I can’t really explain to myself how she could leave or where she might go, but I comfort myself with the idea that JayB will push open the door and her odor will have vanished from every room.

  Thus far, I’ve been disappointed.

  I’m not being selfish—I’m looking out for JayB. A dog is loyal, but a cat is not. A dog can’t wait for a person to return from being somewhere else, but a cat doesn’t care in the slightest.

  A dog’s biggest fear is being abandoned by his person, but a cat seems to live in a state of self-imposed abandonment.

  Love,

  Clancy

  Fifteen

  I sensed that Walter had just said something alarming. JayB and Alana exchanged a glance.

  “She did what?” JayB asked.

  “Fired someone for being fat. So, would you mind coming down to the restaurant and sprinkling your HR dust around, get everybody settled down? Nobody wants to do any work right now. They’re all pissed off, just standing around complaining.”

  “Where’s Maddy?” Alana wanted to know.

  “She locked herself in the room where we store the wine.”

  “That does not sound good,” JayB observed. “So, what about Rodney? He’s the boss, right? Why don’t you ask him to sprinkle the HR dust?”

  Walter shook his head. “Rodney’s in Canada working on our gold-mining project. We’re partners.”

  “Partners. How much money is Rodney putting in?”

  “Rodney’s share is sweat equity.”

  “So, Rodney has a shovel and is walking around Canada, digging up dirt, looking for gold nuggets?”

  Alana laughed.

  “No,” Walter said testily, “not like that.”

  “So basically, you came over here to tell me Rodney is the son you’ve never had and you need me to help you with your new restaurant business.”

  Walter beamed. “Exactly.”

  JayB turned to Alana. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to give you your dog walker training today. I was really looking forward to it.”

  Alana smiled. “Me, too. There’s so much I don’t understand. Like, do I put the leash on the dog or on me?”

  “I’ve found it works better on the dog.”

  “Right, right, on the dog,” Alana acknowledged with a nod. “Man, this is complicated. No wonder you need an advanced degree.”

  “Do you want me to call one of Rodney’s friends or do you want to drive?” Walter asked.

  Jay B sighed. “I’ll drive.”

  We took a car ride without Alana and Odin. I was in the back middle seat and Spartan was all the way in the back. My person drove and Walter sat next to him.

  “I may only be the son you’ve always had, but I can read you, and I can tell something’s going on,” JayB observed.

  “What do you mean?” Walter responded innocently.

  “You seem … tense. I can tell the difference between your fake happy and your real happy.”

  “Fake happy.” Walter snorted.

  “No, I mean it. Like when I was a kid and you lost your job, but still went to ‘work’ every day? You’d come home all jolly. I knew something was up.”

  “I was looking for work. That’s the same as work.”

  “Sure. You want to tell me what’s bothering you?”

  Walter sighed. “It’s just that business is not good. We don’t seem to serve food.”

  “I’d agree that serving food is one of the things that restaurants are supposed to do.”

  “It’s like the place is off the beaten path a little bit and no one thinks to go there.”

  “So, are you losing too much money, Dad?”

  “Heck, I don’t know. That’s not my thing. I asked DesMoines to give me some of the printouts. I thought I’d let you look them over. I’m more of the big-picture guy.”

  “Big picture,” JayB repeated.

  I lifted my nose because I smelled a familiar place. I realized we were returning to the building with the food smells and what I had come to think of as our personal dog park. I glanced to see if Spartan registered the odors and, of course, got nothing but a stony face full of wrinkles in return.

  “But it doesn’t really matter, does it?” JayB asked. We stopped in front of the building, and I got to my feet, wagging. Spartan stood too, but he didn’t wag. “I mean, the restaurant’s just a placeholder. The big money comes from the development, right? Multimillion-dollar project, hundreds of condos, rollercoasters, indoor water skiing, catapults. You’ll make, what? Half a billion dollars, each, you and the Rodster, right?”

  There was an edge to JayB’s voice that I did not recognize, and I wagged again, this time uneasily. Walter was staring out the window, silent.

  JayB reached over and tapped Walter on the shoulder. “Hey, what is it you’re not telling me?”

  A tense silence followed.

  “Well,” Walter finally muttered, “it got all fouled up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, as it turns out, even though this is America, I’m not free to put up my condominium buildings on my own property. There’s a zoning rule against it. Something to do with the swamp.”

  “The wetlands?”

  Walter didn’t answer.

  JayB sat for a moment. “So,” he mused, “you can’t build. Didn’t you make that part of the purchase agreement? Your plan to develop the land had to be approved, as one of the contingencies?”

  “No,” Walter huffed. “Of course not. We didn’t want them to find out our secret. If they’d known our plans, they wouldn’t have sold us the property.”

  “Okay, so how much are you out? I mean, what’d you pay?”

  “I know this is going to be hard for you to understand, but in business there’s this thing called ‘blue sky.’”

  “I know what blue sky is. It’s a higher price paid for an asset, based on profit potential and not the actual value.”

  Walter shook his head. “No, it’s the price of optimism. If you know things are going to go well, you pay more because you don’t want to lose the deal. No clouds, no silver linings, just blue sky.”

  “Okay, sure. So, you paid a lot in blue sky, then?”

  “Well, I mean, if it weren’t for these crazy regulations confining my ability to develop my own land in America, I would be making millions and millions of dollars right now.”

  “Now? I don’t think you know the speed at which Rodney works.”

  “Well, okay, not now,” Walter corrected himself irritably.

  “Bottom line: you paid more for the operation than you can sell it for,” JayB translated.

  “Yeah, and it turns out you can’t really sell a business that’s losing money.”

  “You can if the buyer’s my father.”

  “The thing is, I don’t want to run a restaurant. It’s too much routine. It would drive me crazy. Every day you do the same thing over and over again.”

  “Like a job,” JayB suggested.

  Finally, we got out of the car. JayB held both our leashes while Spartan and I marked different areas of the parking lot.

  Walter came around the car to be with us dogs. “I need your help, son. I need you to make the business profitable so I can get out from underneath it.”

  “That may not be possible. I can’t conjure up customers. Are you saying you’re worried about money?”

  “Not worried. Nobody’s worried. I may have maybe bitten off more than I can chew, is all.”

  “You said you were fine; you had millions and millions of dollars from your wise investments in lottery tickets.”

  “I do have millions, but I don’t want to blow it all on this dump.”

  “Then you might have to shut it down.”

  “No. No,” Walter flared. I shrank back from his anger. “And fire everybody? I would never do that. I will never be that guy, lay everybody off just because of money. You know what that’s like? To lose your job because of management decisions? No, Jago. It’s not the employees’ fault nobody eats here. I’d rather jump from a cliff than lay people off.” He sighed. “Please? This thing is just bleeding money and your girlfriend keeps calling me with all these questions.”

  JayB frowned. “Alana’s calling you about the restaurant?”

  “Alana? No. Maddy.” Walter stared at JayB. “What are you saying here, son? I say girlfriend and you say Alana? You do know Rodney’s sweet on Alana, don’t you?”

  “Everyone seems to know that.”

  Walter held up a finger. “Don’t steal another man’s woman, Jago. Don’t do to him what Howie did to me.”

  I’d never heard JayB laugh the way he did now. It was a bit of an ugly sound. “What are you talking about? Celeste met Howard two years after your divorce.”

  “That’s what she says now, of course,” Walter said icily, nodding to himself. “But how else can you explain why she left me? Had to be because of Howie.”

  “Dad, you were in prison.”

  “No.” Walter shook his head. “No, I was in lockup. Briefly.”

  “For kiting checks.”

  “Yes, but I got off on a technicality, remember?”

  JayB groaned.

  “I would think you’d want your parents to get back together,” Walter observed coolly. “I would think you’d want to help your father’s business.”

  “I thought your other son Rodney was going to run the restaurant.”

  “Rodney has bigger fish to fry right now. This is why you went to grad school, isn’t it? I tried to talk to the employees, and I think I got Maddy calmed down, but everyone else is really angry.”

  “You do realize that since you made Maddy part of management, anything she does is in your name. This woman she wrongfully terminated could sue you.”

  “I don’t know what the world has come to,” Walter lamented.

  “All right. All right. Since Rodney is off frying fish, I’ll see if I can fix anything. But that’s it. I’m not going to run this restaurant for you.”

  A few minutes later, we were sitting at an outside table. It was a beautiful, warm spring day, marred only by the scent of Spartan sitting under a tree. JayB was talking to Maddy, whose legs were bouncing under the table. I’ve learned that when there’s no food smell on the table and people’s legs are bobbing up and down, there will be no treats given, no matter how good a Sit a dog might execute. I sprawled in the dirt.

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened,” he said to Maddy.

  “What happened,” Maddy declared forcefully, “is I was giving direct orders and the waitress, Savannah, refused to obey so I had no choice.”

  “All right, what were the orders you issued?”

  “I mean,” Maddy complained, “what is it with this place? Savannah, DesMoines, am I going to have to change my name to Green Bay? Rapid City?”

  “Just walk me through it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Okay, but don’t listen to anybody else. Everybody’s got a big fat opinion right now that’s polluting the crime scene.”

  “Well, we’ll see. So what happened? What were the orders?”

  Maddy folded her arms, scowling.

  “Maddy?” JayB prodded. “What did you tell her to do?”

  “I don’t see the point in answering that until there’s a full investigation. I have more experience than anyone you know—I’m still having experiences, in fact. I know my rights.”

  “Why don’t we regard this as a full investigation, then.”

  Maddy stared at him. “An investigation? Are you saying I need an attorney? Because I’m not paying for that.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Please. I need to understand what’s going on. Tell me your side of things.”

  “I’m running this whole operation here and not getting any support from headquarters. Like, isn’t there supposed to be a 1–800 number for me to call for mental health? My last job had one. I called it all the time.”

  “I’ll look into that. Just, please, tell me what happened.”

  Maddy sighed, and I closed my eyes, thinking of what a waste of a table this was, to sit and talk without dropping any food for a dog.

  “Okay,” Maddy finally agreed, “I’ll spill the beans and rat out everybody else, but if I waive my fifth amendment, you have to promise not to be mad.”

  “Okay. I won’t get mad.”

  “That’s because you never get mad, not because you love me,” Maddy pouted.

  “What was it you asked Savannah to do?”

  “I told her my car needed an oil change,” Maddy mumbled, her eyes sliding away.

  JayB stared at her.

  “Look, if you don’t change the oil, the engine blows up or something. I don’t know. I just know that there’s a sticker in my windshield that was never there before.”

  JayB held up a hand, “Okay, I get it, you needed an oil change. But why would you ask Savannah?”

  “Because she reports to me,” Maddy exploded. “She has to do whatever I tell her.”

  “Actually,” JayB corrected her patiently, “that’s not really true. She has to do things related to her job description, but vehicle repairs aren’t on that list.”

  “Of course you would say that,” Maddy snapped. “Of course there’s a list. You never wash my back. You should be taking care of me as your number one responsibility always, first thing, before you even open your eyes in the morning.”

  “I know … the eight simple rules for remodeling JayB Danville. I’m just saying you fired her for no good reason. You can’t do that.”

  “That’s not true. I get fired for no good reason all the time.”

  “From what I understand, Savannah’s a good employee. She’s been here for two years.”

  “Good employee.” Maddy snorted. “Right. Have you seen her socks?”

  “Sorry?”

  Maddy’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t the real issue here that you’re trying to steal Rodney’s girlfriend to get back at me?”

  “No, I can honestly say that’s not the real issue.”

  “Oh, I just caught you in the biggest lie since sliced bread. Did you really think Rodney could keep your secret in his pants? I thought I was throwing up when he told me your ploys. I couldn’t see it more clearly if I had my eyes open. So, no.”

  “No?”

  “No to Alana.”

  “I see.”

  Maddy stared off for a minute and then turned back. “Well, that’s it then. You don’t need 1–800 to see how hard this is for me mentally. I’m taking my sabbatical, starting now. Paid, obviously—I don’t work for free.”