Lisette Dubois has lived in Stillwater, Oklahoma for only three days when she decides she wants a dog.
She wakes up with the feeling, wakes with her forehead touching Brennan’s on the damp pillow. She turns and smiles at the popcorn ceiling of her first adult house. No parents, no roommates, just her and the man she loves in a four-room cottage with a one-car garage and an overgrown backyard. She imagines Brennan riding a lawnmower, cutting tartan patterns in the grass. When they get a dog, they’ll play fetch on the neat green carpet, grill ribeyes, invite friends for beers.
Grownup stuff.
Brennan Fugg is a tall, broad guy. He takes up most of the bed. He wraps her in a thick arm and wooly thigh. They’ve been together two years, met over self-serve jello shots in a Portland dive. Brennan was foundering. A college dropout, suspended driver’s license, tending bar two nights a week, crashing on a friend’s futon.
You saved him, his mother said.
Lisette gave Brennan her plans. Six more months of GRE prep on Sundays. A Stanford Ph.D. Tenure-track by twenty-eight.
He caught on. Re-enrolled, signed a lease, wrote a thesis.
But just before graduation, on a trip home, Brennan’s mom introduced him to an Oklahoma State donor who liked the way Brennan spoke, all confidence and easy laughter. By June, there was no need to schedule a test or edit a personal essay, no need to fill out an application or go to departmental interviews. Brennan just had to show up to Oklahoma State on August 24 and start the rest of his life.
Her life now, too.
You’re an angel, his mother said.
Lisette smiled. Angels deserve a dog.
“A dog is a lot of responsibility. A dog is expensive.” Brennan nudges his nose into Lisette’s ear, licks the lobe. She pulls away, disentangles their bodies.
“We should start smaller,” says Brennan. “Let’s get a pet that needs less attention. There are turtles all over.”
A turtle isn’t snuggly. A turtle won’t keep Lisette company while Brennan studies and she finds a job. A turtle isn’t going to explore the flat, dry town with her and chase tumbleweeds in the trails around the high school. In a few years, when they move to Palo Alto, a turtle won’t lie at her feet and snore, ignoring the tap of laptop keys and falling stacks of primary sources on her desk.
But if a turtle will force Brennan to take one more step towards adulthood, she’ll do it.
“Fine,” she says. ”We can start with a turtle.”
But she knows that even if they get the best turtle in the whole state, she will still want a dog.
~
Box turtles are everywhere in Oklahoma. Box turtles and armadillos. They are everywhere, dead. Crushed shells overturned on the highway, feet in the air like bugs on a windowsill. Every turtle they find has been split apart and is baking in the late summer sun.
It’s the first weekend in September. Lisette rides shotgun in Brennan’s Monte Carlo, traversing the dry, empty roads between Stillwater and Eufala. The sky is bright but hazy as if the clouds can’t decide what shape to take. The lack of definition makes Lisette feel unmoored. Brennan smokes a Marlboro Red, a lopsided grin pulling out the mischief in his eyes. When he’s done, he flicks the last stub of embers and soggy filter out the open window. Flinging fire at dry fields is a habit Lisette isn’t comfortable with, and she follows the butt with her eyes to make sure it doesn’t bounce into tall grasses or piles of hay.
And that’s when she sees it—a box turtle, crawling down the shoulder in a bend of the highway.
“It’s a turtle! Pull over,” she says, keeping her eyes on the passenger side mirror, on the khaki green shell. The turtle is two hundred feet back when they get out of the car and start walking towards it.
Once she catches it, they oughta turn around and head home. She’ll need to build a terrarium. She’ll have to go to Walmart for turtle food and a nice rock for it to sun itself on.
Perhaps she can leash the turtle. It will saunter around the overgrown backyard while she sips iced tea and looks for a job, perch on her purse while she grocery shops at the Supercenter. She decides to call it Sampson because that feels like a comedically grand name for such a small bit of animal.
Perhaps a turtle won’t be too different from a dog. A very lazy dog. Not as soft and not as bitey.
Cheaper, for sure.
Sampson’s still one hundred feet away, crawling along the white line that divides the shoulder from the lane, when the guttural exhalation of a semi-truck surprises her. Lisette pushes off her toes into a sprint.
Brennan yells, “Watch out!” and Lisette knows it’s stupid to be running towards an eighteen-wheeler on the side of a lonely highway in the middle of the plains but she wants to show Sampson she’s making an effort.
She veers towards the grass on the left side of the road as the truck rounds the bend. The turtle takes a step into the lane.
“No. No!”
The front right wheel rolls over Sampson, crushing him in an instant, as though he was nothing more than an old grape. Four more tires follow. All that’s left is splintered and red, ground into the highway.
The truck driver continues towards Beggs. Lisette takes five deep, painful breaths before returning to the car.
Brennan turns the radio to country. It’s a song about a man whose wife left him, so he got a brand new girlfriend. Brennan smooths the back of Lisette’s hair.
She stares at her tennis shoes, off-white chucks with no arch support. Her eyes tingle. Her vision blurs. She reaches over the empty ashtray and shuts off the music.
~
Three days later, Lisette puts a rosemary and garlic chicken in the oven, rolls the trash bins to the street, and finds a dog in the front yard.
He’s sniffing around the overgrown bush. Well-fed but no collar. She thinks he is a chocolate lab but when he trots up and nuzzles her hand, she sees the light tan around his mouth, the little sprigs on his chest. Rottweiler, more like.
When she was three, her mother read her a picture book about a Rottweiler named Carl who nannied a little girl. One day, the little girl crawled out of her crib and rode on the dog’s back as his butterscotch-socked paws took them on an adventure. When they came home, Carl ran her a bath and put her to bed.
This dog looks like a Carl. She scratches the crest of his head, then crouches down. He leans into her leg.
She gets a bowl of water from inside in case he’s thirsty.
It’s getting dark and Lisette still doesn’t know the neighborhood, so she texts Brennan, Found a lost dog! and then sits on the small concrete steps in front of the house, hoping no one comes along to take Carl back.
The barn swallows are loud this evening and they must be communicating that the weather’s about to change because the temperature drops twenty degrees and the wind picks up. Soon enough, sitting outside in twilight is masochistic. She leads the dog in and chops him some chicken breast. Then the two of them laze on the couch while she looks through the classifieds, her fingers curling around and around his right ear.
Brennan texts back, Went to the Stonewall. Dog still there?
She doesn’t respond. Sitting with Carl, Lisette’s almost not angry that Brennan went to the bar without her. She’s almost not upset that she cooked him dinner in an undecorated house in a new town where she has no friends. And it almost doesn’t bother her that he didn’t send an invitation.
Brennan gets home at eleven, jolly with Jack Daniels. He has a crisp package in one hand and a Whataburger in the other.
“I won the pub quiz,” he says, mouth full. “Me and this girl Jenny from my cohort.” He unwraps the package—a large blue flag with an Osage shield in the center. He holds it up, beaming. “Now we’re real Oklahomans!”
Carl pads over. Brennan gets on his knees and pets the dog with the enthusiasm of a child at the zoo.
“We should call him Quaid,” says Brennan, because his favorite movie is Total Recall. He takes the last bite of his burger, balls up the yellow wrapper, and takes a three-point shot into the living room trash can. He envelopes Lisette in strong arms, Old Spice, whisky ginger, and Marlboro ash. She can feel a stiffness in his jeans that she takes as an apology. He herds her to the bedroom and nips at her ears and neck. He rips the front of his pearl-snap shirt open with a huge grin, and she sits down on the bed, unbuckles her jeans, unbuckles his.
He licks her, only up top. He takes her soft nipples in his mouth and sucks until they harden. He tongues his hand, prepares her, crams himself in. She wraps around him, crosses her ankles, sinks into the flannel sheets.
Quaid, formerly Carl, sleeps at the foot of the bed.
At 3 am, Lisette wakes up, shivering. The mattress is swamped with cold, whisky-backed urine. She tiptoes to the linen closet. Quaid’s ears perk. He watches her tuck towels around Brennan’s hips. He sits outside the bathroom while she washes, then follows her to the couch. He embraces her feet with his stomach while she lies in the dark.
“At least you’re house-trained,” she whispers.
The next morning, Brennan butters toast while Lisette stuffs bedding in the laundry machine.
She should ask Brennan why he drinks until he pisses himself, tell him it wakes her up, that it worries her. But she knows what will happen. She’s tried it before. He’ll say, “I don’t want to talk about it,” lock himself in the bathroom, ignore her, leave the house in a rush.
It’s easier to forgive him when she doesn’t push him to do things she will need to forgive.
Someone knocks. Quaid follows Lisette to the door. It’s a man in dirty Carhartts and a ball cap. He’s been watching a dog for some friends and it jumped his fence sometime yesterday. The man has a collar and a leash. The tag says Brownie.
“You made me late for work, dog,” says the man.
Lisette crouches down and takes both of Quaid’s ears in her hands, pulls them back, massages his head. He pants and searches her eyes.
She wonders if he loves her.
~
The Stonewall looks like an Indian War bunker and smells of stale Budweiser and sweat. The music is all country and the televisions all football. Brennan leads Lisette through crowds of chattering undergrads until he spies his two friends leaning on a tall table in a back corner.
Jenny and Tom have been dating sixteen days. Tom fixates on the NFL replays on TV like a coonhound who’s seen a squirrel. Jenny smiles and invites Lisette to grab a drink.
They pass a pool table on the way to the bar and Lisette absorbs the layout. One of the players swings his arm back and hits Jenny in the tit. She yells out.
“You couldn’t check?” says Lisette.
“My bad.” He re-positions. His angle on the six is dangerous. The cue ball will ricochet off its mark and land in the corner pocket.
“You’re going to scratch,” Lisette tells him, then leads Jenny to the bar. She listens for the hard clack of resin, the player’s yell. When it comes, Jenny looks at her like she’s a magician.
Lisette shrugs. “I spent a lot of time in the Reed pool hall.”
“Badass,” says Jenny.
“I used to be.”
They order vodka Diet Cokes, lean against cracked-leather barstools. Jenny says she’s from Nebraska and feels at home in grasslands, under the boundless sky. Lisette tells her she misses Mount Hood rising above the misting mornings during college in Oregon. She longs for the Flatirons and Indian Peaks and the cold, cloudless creeks of Colorado.
Lisette doesn’t say the expansive flats of Oklahoma feel like a trap, that she yearns for a rocky backbone to orient herself, to keep her safe while she scans for semi-trucks barreling down the road.
~
By the end of September, the News Press offers Lisette a job in customer service for $7 an hour. Her boss, an aggressively upbeat woman who only wears purple, hovers over every phone conversation and gives her notes on how to be personable. In the first three days, she has eleven conversations about Noah: The Musical because a fellowship group from Life Church is heading to Branson, Missouri and they all need to pause their deliveries. Her boss says that once Lisette gets more involved with the Christian community, she can be a bit more proactive.
By the Friday of her first week, Lisette tells Brennan it’s time. She’s gotten a job, she can afford a dog. Tomorrow morning, they’re going to the pound.
Only one woman is working at the shelter, which is a low brick building surrounded by cinderblock retaining walls in the front and chain-link fences in the back. She greets them and asks what they’re looking for and Brennan says, “Got any English Bulldogs?”
Lisette can’t believe they haven’t had this conversation earlier.
She heard once that English Bulldogs are so head-heavy that all puppies are delivered by C-section. They spend their lives wheezing in pain, defenseless. Dependent.
The woman, whose haircut makes Lisette think of ‘80s Iron Maiden, laughs and shakes her head. Lisette has never felt more relieved. “I’d like to find a hound dog. Maybe a basset or beagle,” she offers. She grew up with hounds, slept with them through childhood, felt safe in bed when their hot breath tickled her hand.
“Now that, we can do,” says the woman, and she leads the couple to the back of the building, points to the cages in the yard. “We have a two-year-old foxhound mix in the far corner. Be gentle. Poor girl can’t seem to bond right. And there’s a set of puppies in the back that I’m not sure what they are, but they’re cute as baby angels. There’s a leash in the office if you want it.”
The puppies bounce over one another to lick Lisette’s fingers, their rusty coats gleaming in the sun, biting and pulling at her hair. Their paws are giving them trouble when they walk, tripping them into the sides of the cage. She looks into their eyes to see if any of them need her, but they are more concerned with eating her shoes, peeing on the cage, pouncing at each other.
Brennan gets the leash for the foxhound. The dog scans the tree line then points her nose at the ground and leads Lisette and Brennan in a circuitous path around the block. She’s uninterested in treats. She’s looking for a job to do.
“I think I could like her,” says Brennan.
Lisette tilts her head from left to right, trying to imagine what the foxhound will do in the middle of the night when she moves from the bed to the couch. She pictures the dog sitting in the dark, ears alert to the raccoons in the street, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
She walks back inside and hangs up the leash, not noticing at first the furry tricolor mound on top of the Iron Maiden’s desk.
“I found your dog,” the woman says to Lisette, her eyes crescents. The puppy raises his head.
He’s some hound mix. Young. Too young to have been away from his mother. Too small to fend off the yipping coyotes in the brush. He’s the size of a small bunny, and just as soft. He mewls.
“Brand new,” says the Iron Maiden. “Dropped off at the trailer park this morning. No charge if you take him, I haven’t put him through intake yet. Why don’t you sit outside, see how he likes you?”
Lisette picks up the puppy and holds him like an uncooked egg. He sniffs at her hair but doesn’t bite it. He leans into her. He knows she will protect him. He trusts her like she trusts the mountains. She takes him out front, into the sun.
The man who brought the puppy to the shelter is in his sixties and wears Wranglers and a white Hanes tee-shirt. He looks, to Lisette, like the perfect Oklahoman. He sits on a low stone bench, mound of Copenhagen stuffed in his lower lip, watching two dogs in front of him. One is old and jowled and must follow the man around like dark stains of chaw spittle. The other is the sibling of the baby nuzzling Lisette’s breast. Slightly more black spots, maybe. Slightly less brown.
“Like him?” the Oklahoman calls.
“I love him,” Lisette replies.
“This is his brother.” The man points with his chin at the darker puppy. “He looks less basset. That one has the ridge in the center of his head. That’s how you tell. They’re good ones. Loyal. I’ll keep this guy, but that’s all that’ll fit in the trailer. Already got seven dogs.”
Brennan comes out front. “What have you found?” he asks.
Lisette puts her puppy on the pavement to lets him explore. He paws his brother, licks the work boots of the man, chews at Brennan’s shoelaces, then runs back to her as if he’s worried she might leave without him. He whines three times in a quick staccato and leaps for her hands.
“Is this the one you want?” asks Brennan. It’s the same cadence he uses when he asks what cut of bacon to buy.
She cups the puppy’s chest and returns him to her bosom. ”He’s mine.”
That’s when she notices all the fleas. They congregate in the inner corners of the dog’s hazel eyes, in the soft folds of his drooping ears. But she doesn’t squirm. Seeing them makes her want to bathe him in oatmeal, shampoo his fur, brush them down the drain.
~
They need to pick a name.
Brennan wants to call the puppy Quaid, but Lisette refuses. He was impulsive and careless and now the name belongs to Brownie, whose family—she hopes—appreciates him as much as she did.
Her family dog when she was born was named Thirteen, after her father’s favorite number. She looks at the puppy. Could he be Fourteen? she wonders. But Lisette is not a mathematician like her father, who thinks in Fibonacci sequences and space-filling curves. She is a historian who finds comfort in the past.
Plus, the puppy looks as though if it were named for a number, it should be odd.
“What about Turtle?” she says, rolling down the window so the puppy can feel the dry breeze on his ears.
“Weird,” says Brennan.
“But then we haven’t changed the plan,” she counters. “We’ll start”—she doesn’t say our family but that’s what she means—”with a turtle. We’ll just also start with a dog.”
Brennan grins and reaches for his Marlboros. Turtle puts his front paws on the door and revels in the salty odors of Whataburger and Conoco. Stroking his soft fur, Lisette thinks that maybe she could change her plans, too. Maybe they’ll stay in Oklahoma.
~
In November, Lisette invites Jenny to walk around Lake Boomer, and they stroll along the banks under a sky whose horizon is rimmed on all sides by leafless trees and parking lots.
Turtle’s grown in the last few months and every day he gets stranger looking. Only seven inches tall but a foot long, with a pointy, doleful face and flopping ears that reach his chin.
“What is he?” ask passersby, crouching down to stroke the puppy’s velveteen brows. Lisette makes up a new mix of basset every time—border collie, beagle, cattle dog, Dalmatian—and every time the admirers nod their heads and say, “Of course!” as if the breed they’d been looking for had just escaped them momentarily.
“You decided on grad school?” asks Jenny, who must have heard Lisette’s news.
“Finally took the GRE. Got into History. I’ll apply to Stanford once I’m done. Once I have a Masters.”
“A Ph.D. program?” Jenny’s tone seems pessimistic, like she doesn’t believe Lisette could do it.
“It was my dream before it was his.”
Jenny looks at the ground. “How are things with Brennan?”
“Amazing,” Lisette says. “Moving here really brought us closer together.”
“Think you’ll get married?” Jenny asks.
“I think this summer he’ll propose.” Lisette tugs on Turtle’s leash.”And the wedding would be back in Colorado.” The puppy sniffs at the shore, then backs away from the water. He must sense that bassets sink when they try to swim.
“Good. He’d said”—Jenny won’t meet Lisette’s eyes—”just, he knows you want it. I hope we’re invited.”
“Of course! You’ll be a bridesmaid,” Lisette says. She’s giddy with the idea that Brennan is planning a proposal. Giddy, too, that they talk about her when she’s not around.
She reaches and takes Jenny’s hand, squeezes. Because Jenny is her best friend in a 600-mile radius and she’s sure nothing will change that.
~
One night in February, playing pool at the Stonewall, Brennan brings up marriage. Eyes heavy with whisky, he says he expects his future wife to take his name.
Lisette looks at Jenny, who is leaning against the granite wall behind the pool table, drinking her fourth vodka diet. Jenny lifts her eyebrows and smiles. Lisette pulls at the bottom hem of her dress, banks the eight in a corner pocket, then stands up and tells Brennan she’ll never do that.
It’s a matter of principle. Her name is her name. Her parents thought about its weight and musicality. They made it lilt and dance when said altogether. Lisette Katrin Dubois. It would be stilted and wrong if it ended any other way.
“You hate my last name,” says Brennan.
“It has nothing to do with you,” she says, which is true—she never planned to change her name—but masks a lie. She does hate that his surname ends in a glottal stop, like an annoyed middle-school girl. Fugg. Fugg-uh.
It hurts to speak. Lisette Katrin Fugg. It’s not her.
She doesn’t say any of that out loud, of course. At least, she thinks she doesn’t, but she’s pretty drunk. And whatever she does say results in him shattering a pint glass on the floor and stomping to the men’s room.
“OMG, are you okay?” whispers Jenny.
Lisette’s back feels tight, her neck aches. Heat rises to her temples. “Tell him I went home.”
There’s nothing to block the winter wind in Oklahoma. The trees have no leaves, the buildings are low, the Great Plains are flat on all sides. Lisette’s cheeks go numb and she pulls at the collar of her sweater. She should have worn a coat, but she doesn’t have one that looks right with this dress. If she was in Colorado right now, she would have friends to call for a warm ride and a slice of anchovy pizza. But her only friends here are all back at the bar.
She glances over her shoulder when she reaches the intersection of Knoblock and University. Brennan is not running after her to apologize, wrap her in a hug, tell her he’ll stop drinking, he needs her, he loves her.
Even so, she checks again at every cross street until she reaches the house.
Turtle bounds to her the moment she walks in the door. He licks the salt from her cheekbones and curls into her chest. In the dark moments of an Oklahoma morning, she inhales his feathered fur with every fevered breath.
~
In January, Lisette quits her job at the News Press and begins grad school full-time. All day, she ferries books between campus and home, interspersing dog walks with coursework.
Every evening, she checks in with Brennan. What are you up to? she texts.
Stonewall. Jenny’s here. You should come! he responds.
And sometimes she goes because it feels like she might lose him if she doesn’t. But often she stays in, hoping he feels the same anxiety in her absence that she feels in his.
~
Jenny comes to the house in March and says, tearless, that she and Tom broke up.
“Oh, baby,” Lisette says and wraps her in a hug.
“It was time.” Jenny seems completely unbroken.
“Let’s get you a drink,” says Brennan and grabs two beers out of the fridge.
They’re drunk on Coors and Evan Williams when Lisette notices Turtle has found something in the corner of the living room and is scarfing it down. Just before he swallows, she sees the glint of tin foil and yellow paper: a balled-up Whataburger wrapper.
“Drop it!” Lisette yells.
“I feel sick,” Jenny says behind her.
Lisette pries Turtle’s jaws open. His eyes are wide. The ball of trash is so large that she worries it might block his windpipe and he will die right there, while she strokes his soft ears and tells him it’s alright.
She sticks her hand in his mouth. She trusts he won’t bite her, though he could easily hit the vein if he’d tried. She feels down his gullet and wraps her fingers around the tin foil. She pulls it out. Turtle whimpers.
“Are you trying to kill our dog?” Lisette yells and turns around. But no one is there.
She calls out, “Guys?” and walks towards the back of the house. The bathroom is locked. She hears vomiting.
“It’s okay,” Brennan says from inside. “You’re okay.”
She wonders whether Brennan is holding Jenny’s hair and rubbing her back. She wants to bang on the door, kick it in, catch them in the act of caring too much, of forgetting her.
But she worries that doing so might push them closer together.
~
In April, Lisette doesn’t think she can stand a summer without mountains. She applies to an internship back home in Boulder, gets it, invites Brennan.
“But it’s fun here in the summer,” says Brennan. “Fish out the lake, bring beers. Turtle can learn to swim.”
“The dog’s coming with me,” says Lisette.
~
She starts her drive west at the end of May, Turtle in the passenger seat. Her eyes are crusty. Before she left, Brennan held her while she sobbed into his cold pearl-snap buttons.
“You’re the one leaving me,” he said, sounding frustrated.
I’m not sad that I’m leaving, she doesn’t say, I’m ashamed that I stayed.
Turtle curls into the backrest, head pressed hard into the corner crease, snores.
She stops in Salina, Kansas, to get sliders at The Cozy Inn. She feeds the dog two. An hour later she exclaims, “Holy hell! Your farts could kill a moose!” and she rolls down every window in the car. Turtle spends the next three hours watching the vast sea of undulating grain pass by.
When the Rocky Mountains swell on the western horizon, Lisette can feel herself breathe again. For nine months her ribcage hasn’t completely relaxed. It’s strained from protecting itself on all sides. She wants to snuggle into those mountains like her grandmother’s bosom and rest.
She tells Turtle, “Look, that’s your home. You’re a Colorado dog now.”
He sniffs at the breeze. Juniper and pine. Otters and elk. Hail you can suck like a gobstopper and blizzards that fall soft over log cabins and families of aspen. This is where we belong.
~
On the first morning in June, she calls Brennan. He doesn’t pick up. Later, he texts, Hanging with Jenny. Call soon.
By nightfall, she hasn’t heard from him, so she dials again. Brennan answers. In the background is honky tonk music, rolling laughter. He yells into the phone. It’s too loud. He can’t hear. He’ll call back.
Lisette goes to the Sundown Saloon and plays pool with wolf-like focus, comes home $190 richer. She cranks open her bedroom windows and beckons the cold, dry air, forty-six degrees. On its back is sage, ponderosa pine, fluttering aspens. In bed, Turtle presses against her stomach, sighing and stretching long and solid under a heavy quilt. To him, she is the mountain.
It’s early morning, but she’s angry. She dials Brennan again. She shoves the phone beneath her ear, not wanting to gift him the effort of holding him up.
The first thing she hears when he picks up is Jenny’s voice yelling hello, thumped over by country music.
“What. Would you think. Of an open relationship?” Brennan slurs.
“We’re done,” says Lisette, and she feels more like an adult than she ever did in Oklahoma, folding flannel sheets and roasting chicken.
The prairie stretches vast and black out Lisette’s eastern bedroom window. She pictures Stillwater in the distance, dry grass tendrils shuddering in the wind. Marlboro ash, Whataburger, whisky ginger, urine. Jenny’ll make sure Brennan gets home safe. He’ll dig up an Arkansas diamond. She’ll take his last name.
They can have her old plans. She and Turtle will find new ones.
