Read Online One Good Dog by Susan Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

and age, corporations are reluctant to hire people fired for such a violation as his. Only embezzlement would have been a harder crime to overcome. Time will help, counsels his lawyer. Get past the headlines, the blogs, the pillory of public discussion. Sit tight. It’ll blow over. In the meantime, his bankaccount, the only one Sterling didn’t get, is dribbling away and he is powerless to stop the constant leak. Sterling resolutely refuses to give up any of the houses, the masseuse, the flower arranger. These aren’t luxuries, but necessities; she mustn’t give up her standard of living, not for her sake, but for their daughter’s. Ariel deserves the best-possible everything. She makes it sound like if she doesn’t have access to their time-share jet, it will be Ariel who will suffer the humiliation of commercial air travel. Her young life will be ruined.
    Lying awake in the middle of the night, Adam realizes that Sterling has never wanted for anything. Not once in her gilded existence has any desire been left wanting. Ever. The basic needs so well met that luxury itself became a basic need.
    He has known the want of basic human desires: the pangs of hunger, of real hunger, when his foster mother served only what she thought a growing boy should eat and locked up the rest, the desire for affection; the basic human need to be touched gently.
    When his thoughts begin to drift in that direction, Adam finds oblivion in cheap blended scotch.
    This will help. In a year or two, working with the homeless will look like philanthropy. A break from high-stakes corporate life; not quite the Peace Corps, but, with the right tweaking, enough to gloss over the empty place on his CV.
    Oh yes, it certainly will. Cheered, Adam dusts an invisible speck of lint from the lapel of his charcoal-gray Hugo Boss suit. Just where is that solitary businessman now?
    Although Adam lives only six blocks away from the center, he drives his Lexus to Fort Street. It’s a world away from hiscurrent neighborhood, but Adam is hard-pressed to distinguish much of a difference between his street and Fort Street. A similar group of mom-and-pop businesses line the side of the street opposite the faded brownstones that are home to a host of other nonprofits serving mankind. Maybe the difference is in the check-cashing service rather than a paper store, and the pawnshop with a litter of chintzy lamps and questionable statuary in the window instead of jolly fish cavorting across a rainbow of letters.
    Remarkably, Adam finds a parking place right across the street from where he thinks the center is located. There is no sign identifying the center, just an American flag with the ubiquitous MIA/POW flag suspended beneath it, both flags barely moving in the midmorning breeze. Before parking, he wonders briefly if he should find a garage instead. The men gathered on the stoops of the brownstones eye him as he idles, but he shrugs off the worry. It’s broad daylight. Getting out of his car, he drops a couple of quarters in the meter, locks his car with an over-the-shoulder flourish, and crosses the street with a “Don’t fuck with me” stride.
    The Fort Street Center is in a building much prettier than his own, a nineteenth-century town house built in a time when this part of the city was the good part. The bow windows and brownstone stoop are black with grime, but the ornate trim and sturdiness of the building is still evident. Adam checks the address written on the index card handed to him by the judge’s law clerk against the black-and-gold number in the transom above the big black door. Number 27. This is it. As Adam puts his foot on the first step, a man swings the door open and stumbles out. He’s wearing, despite the warm fall day, a greenish snorkel jacket with bulging pockets, its orangelining exposed by tears under the arm. Even from this distance, Adam can smell the odor of him, the punky, slightly uriney smell of old clothes and unwashed body. The man