Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore Page B

someone kicking a can down a road. She had not hemmed in her speaking voice, kept it tame and tended so that her singing one could fly. Her speaking voice was the same as her singing one, a roller coaster of various registers, the Myrna Loy–Billie Burke timbre of the Edwardian grandmother who had raised her, a woman who had trained at conservatory but had never had a singing career and practically sang every sentence she uttered:
Katherine? It’s time for dinner
went up and down the scale. Only her dying words—
Marry well
—had been flat, the drone of chagrin, a practical warning: life-preserving but with a glimpse of a dark little bunker in a war not yet declared.
Marry well
had been uttered after she begged KC to get a teaching certificate.
Teaching makes interesting people boring, sure
, she had said.
But it also makes boring people interesting. So there’s an upside. There always is an upside if you look up
.
    Dench’s own poor mother wasn’t able to leave him—or hissisters—a dime, though he had always done what she said, even that one year they lived in motels and he obligingly wore the identical nightgown as his sisters so that they might better be mistaken for a single child, to avoid an extra room charge, in case the maid walked in. His young mother had died with breathing tubes hooked right to her wallet, he said, just sucking it all up. Dench made a big comedic
whooshing
sound when he told this part. His father’s disappearance, which had come long before, had devastated and haunted her: when they were out for dinner one night his father announced that he had to see a man about a horse, and he excused himself, went to the men’s room, and climbed out the window never to return. Dench made a
whooshing
sound for this part of the story as well.
    “I can’t decide whether that is cowardice or a weird kind of courage,” Dench said.
    “It’s neither,” KC replied. “It has nothing to do with either of those things.”
    Motherless children would always find each other. She had once heard that. They had the misery that wasn’t misery but presumed to be so to others. They had the misery that liked company and
was
company. Only sometimes they felt the facts of their motherless lives. They were a long, long way from home. They had theme songs hatched in a spiritual tradition. There was no fondling of the gold coins of memory. The world was their orphanage.
    But when they moved in together he hesitated.
    “What about my belongings?” he asked.
    “It’s not like you have a dog who won’t get along with mine,” she said.
    “I have plants.”
    “But plants are not a dog.”
    “Oh, I see: you’re one of those people who thinks animals are better, more important than plants!”
    She studied him, his eyes large with protest or with drugs or with madness. There were too many things to choose from. “Are you serious?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said and turned to unpack his things.
    Now she rose to take the dog for his daily walk. She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.
    The sublet she and Dench were in now was a nice one, a fluke, a modern, flat-roofed, stone-and-redwood ranch house with a carport in a neighborhood that was not far from the hospital and was therefore full of surgeons and radiologists and their families. The hospital itself was under construction and the cranes bisected the sky. Big-jawed excavators and backhoes worked beneath lights at night. Walking the dog, she once watched as an excavator’s mandibled head was released and fell to the ground; the headless neck then leaned down and began to nudge it, as if trying to find out if it might still be alive. Of course there was an operator, but after that it was hard to think of a creature like this as a machine. When a wall was knocked down, and its