MY NEIGHBOR by Susan Kim Campbell
My upstairs neighbor has gotten a dog. We are not friends, my neighbor and I, but we are neighborly. This means we do things like water each other’s plants when the other is away.
He invites me in, and introduces me to his new dog. “Emma, this is Jasper.”
Jasper is spotted, with floppy ears. He doesn’t know that my neighbor is too busy for a dog. My neighbor is always out. Not that he isn’t full of good intentions. He’s brought Jasper home with a boatload of toys and a fluffy dog bed.
“No jumping on the furniture!” he warns Jasper, who hangs his head and slinks behind the sofa.
I hear my phone ring. I go downstairs to my apartment. Surprise, it’s my father. Since my mother died two years ago, he calls me three times a day. He sits in his house still full of things she left behind. Scenic calendars pushpinned to the wall, dotted with her crabbed Korean. Pots of face cream on her bureau.
Whenever I’m there, I think, this is what it smells like when time stands still. My mother had a habit of saving rubber bands, rolling them into balls. They remain, gray spheres desiccated and fused together, jamming the kitchen drawers. “I don’t use the kitchen,” my father retorts.
The next week my voicemail beeps with a message. “Please call,” sighs my father’s insurance agent. It seems that my father has gotten into yet another fender bender. The agent finds dealing with him so confounding, he calls me for help.
There’s always something to clean up. Last month my father got himself kicked out of the Sizzler, some brouhaha at the salad bar. They nearly brought charges. I don’t call the agent back.
My neighbor is never home.
I hear Jasper up there alone, pacing the floors sadly. “He howls,” I report. My neighbor says indignantly, “I’ve never heard him howl!”
Foolish man. He should know that just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean there’s not something terribly, terribly wrong.
The insurance agent calls again. “The lady in the other car said your father rammed into her in the parking lot,” he informs me. I do not disbelieve her.
Unhinged by grief is not what my father is. Unhinged is more like it.
While I’m on the phone, I look outside and see my neighbor walking Jasper. Actually, my neighbor is so busy talking on his cell phone that he doesn’t even notice he’s dropped his dog’s leash.
“Hey, watch out!’ I say through the window, but my neighbor yaks on. He paces, phone to his ear, while Jasper wanders around in the street by himself. He cocks one ear up at me.
The agent states that my father’s insurance premiums will go up again.
“Normally, this is a deterrent,” he says hopefully. Deterrent, as in criminals, garden pests and nuclear war.
“Good luck with that!” I say.
The next week I pass a professional dogwalker marching down my street. She is wearing a utility belt festooned with plastic baggies. She has six dogs on leash hooked to her belt, and I recognize Jasper as one. He is lagging behind the other dogs, as if he doesn’t like their company.
“Jupiter, come!” the walker shouts.
“Hey, Jasper,” I say as I pass by. I glimpse a mournful look in his eye.
I warn my father about what the insurance agent said.
“What a bunch of hysterics!” my father grumbles. He means me, the agent, and the lady with the dented car.
“This is not my job,” I complain to my mother, wherever she may be. I already have a job, downtown. This is not Korea and I am not a son.
But we’re all we have left, my father and I.
Jasper still howls. It’s been a month. One night I say, “Enough!” I stalk upstairs. I know my neighbor keeps his key under his welcome mat. Jasper greets me as I let myself into his apartment. I gather his organic dog food, his peppermint chew rope, his monogrammed bowl. We go downstairs together, tail wagging.
My phone rings and rings. I unplug it. Then I sit down on my sofa, a glass of wine in hand. I pat the seat next to me. “Jasper, up!” I tell him.
I wish I could feel the way he looks, barely able to believe his good fortune.
Susan Kim Campbell’s work has appeared in Mississippi Review and The 2010 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories (Web del Sol Association, 2008).