Read Online Traveling Light by Andrea Thalasinos - Free Book Online Page B

riddle of the last ten years had come down to one brief conversation.
    Fotis’ body shook in time with his panting. The conviction that prompted his rescue from the shelter was fresh and true despite the ridicule. But dread flooded through her. The red message light pulsed on her desk phone—probably Christoff with another slew of complaints.
    “Well,” she sighed, and stood.
    The dog stood, too.
    “Come on, Fotis.”
    His ears moved ever so slightly at his name.
    “Let’s go find a room; I’m beat.”
    She grabbed the Pets du Jour shopping bags and tucked the dog bed under her arm. Here she was, homeless, armed with shopping bags and a leashed dog, in search of a place to sleep. Tears burned her eyes. With the irony of Theo rose the sticky feel of the ocean’s salt air, the scratchiness of his black coat blanketing them. It was eerie but comforting. Maybe love was that simple, could be that simple.
    The dog followed her toward the door. The top of his head looked downy and puffy from the bath, like some of the younger birds on her window ledge.
    “Let’s go.” She mimicked the pet shop woman’s baby-talk doggie voice.
    Fotis stared deadpan at the fraudulent attempt.
    “Okay.” Paula snickered, respecting his lack of enthusiasm. Setting the packages down, she squatted to look squarely at him.
    “Hey, look—I never said I was fun, okay?”
    Paula was an adult who’d managed to escape childhood without learning to play. Vassili and Eleni didn’t play; they worked. While other kids played in the street, Celeste would try coaxing Paula into a game of either jump rope or potsy—but Paula, perpetually plagued with the fear of being no good, would shy away. “Celeste,” voices from the street would beckon. “Forget about her; come and play.”
    She declined department invitations to “Wednesday Night Scrabble.” Roger was always good for a ready-made excuse: “Oh, sorry, but my husband’s already made plans,” when in fact he spent most nights cloistered on the third floor in a dark room wearing a food-encrusted sweatshirt that looked riddled with bullet holes. The fabric was so thin you could read a newspaper through it. He sat squarely behind a computer screen, his face illuminated by colorful three-dimensional mathematical models of the time-space continuum of black holes.
    She walked toward West Broadway with the dog, heading toward a hotel where she’d frequently book rooms for visiting professors and scholars. She remembered the hotel’s Pet Friendly signs.
    In front of the hotel entrance, Fotis stopped, lifted his leg and drenched the entire side of the metal news box with a long stream of urine. Shit. Maybe the pet shop clerk had been right about getting a crate.
    The lobby was quiet; business looked slow as Paula approached the front desk.
    “Hi, would you happen to have a room for the night?”
    “How many?”
    “Me and a dog.”
    “How many nights?” He looked at her.
    “Ummm, I’m not sure. One, maybe two.”
    “I put you in for two nights,” the young East Indian–looking man speaking perfect Brooklyn English confirmed. It was a week before the onslaught of parents, before Labor Day and the start of the fall semester.
    “Perfect.”
    “A deposit of one-fifty is required for pets on top of the room charge of three-fifty per night,” he explained in an unbroken sentence while reading from a computer monitor.
    “Fine.” She leaned across the desk to try to peek at the screen.
    “If there’s no damage upon inspection,” he continued, “we’ll refund your deposit.”
    The desk clerk looked at her, shifting his weight onto another foot as he waited.
    “Damage?”
    He turned back to the screen. “Chewing, soiling, ripping up sofa cushions.” He paused as if having lost his place. “You can exercise your dog two blocks down at the dog park furnished by the City near the NYU campus.”
    They’d just passed it on their way to the hotel. She walked past the park every