Dogs and Goddesses Read online

  Just then, something flew at her, smacking her gently in the side of the face. She grabbed at it and pulled it back—another yellow flyer. She glanced around, looking for a student with an armful who needed a serious talking to, but there was no one. Daisy glanced at the paper and started reading:

  BE A GODDESS TO YOUR DOG!

  The Kammani Gula Dog Obedience Course

  “ ‘Be a Goddess to Your Dog!’?” she said. “Now I’ve seen everything. Although it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you and—”

  “Be a what?” Peg snatched the flyer away from Daisy and read it, her eyes widening, and then …

  … she sneezed.

  “Oh, no,” Daisy said, backing away. “You go train that dog and be a goddess; I have CDs to alphabetize.”

  “Ah-chooo!” This one hit so loudly that Daisy could hear it echoing off the stone of the temple.

  “Ah, crap,” Daisy said.

  Peg reached into her tiny purse, withdrew one of her classic monogrammed handkerchiefs, and blew her nose so loudly that Bailey barked twice and hopped up in the air, ostensibly to check on her.

  “Oh, no.” Peg held out her leash hand to Daisy.

  “ ‘Oh, no,’ is right,” Daisy said. “As in ‘no.’ No way, no how, no—”

  “The doctor said that if my allergies didn’t go away from the shots, he knew a great specialist in …” Peg hesitated, tapping her foot and glancing around; then she smiled and snapped her fingers. “New York! That’s right. Manhattan. The Garment District, actually. Isn’t that funny?” Peg grabbed Daisy’s hand and shoved the leash and the flyer into it. “I’ll be back in a week or so.”

  “A week?” Daisy tried to shove the leash back into her mother’s hand, but Peg moved freakishly fast.

  “Or so!” Peg called back, scurrying across the campus. Daisy tried to run after her, but Bailey was pulling toward the step temple.

  “But … no … I can’t … ,” Daisy said, and then felt a crunch of paper under her feet. She looked down: another yellow flyer. She bent over to pick it up and Bailey yanked on the leash, but she yanked back.

  “Knock it off,” she said, then pulled up the flyer, un-crinkling them both, her eyes trailing over the text, catching on teach you to communicate with your dog while commanding complete obedience….

  “Complete obedience.” Daisy showed him the flyer. “See that?”

  Bailey barked, hopped up in the air, and landed with an ungracious splat that didn’t seem to bother him in the least. Daisy glanced at the details on the paper. The class was starting in half an hour. She could do that. She scanned for the location….

  “Crap.”

  The history department.

  Daisy looked up at the step temple while Bailey darted around her, barking, yanking her arm almost out of its socket. She wasn’t going to make it through the next week—or so—of dogsitting if something didn’t change. Maybe going into the creepy building and learning to be a goddess would help.

  She looked at Bailey, who hopped in the air again, landed, turned around twice, lifted his leg to a patch of grass even though he’d long ago run out of urine, and barked twice at nothing.

  “Certainly can’t make things any worse,” she said, put the flyer in her back pocket, and started for the building.

  In her office on the ground floor of the step temple converted into a history building, Professor Shar Summer looked at the pink metallic appliance on the desk in front of her and thought, My life has hit bottom. She was forty-eight years old, her grandmother was running her life from beyond the grave, and her lover of two years had just given her a Taser instead of a commitment.

  A cold nose pressed against her leg under her desk, and she reached down and patted her best friend, her black-and-gray long-haired dachshund, Wolfie.

  “Now you don’t have to be afraid anymore,” Ray said as he checked his watch. “Problem solved.”

  I didn’t say I was afraid; I said I didn’t like living alone. “Thank you.”

  “I got the pink one,” Ray said, evidently sensing his gift had missed on a few points.

  “Perfect.” Shar put the lid on the Taser box, trying to be fair. Maybe if she were more passionate about Ray, he’d be more passionate about her. She tried to imagine Ray passionate about anything—finding the Ark of the Covenant, rescuing a kidnapped bride, defeating a mummy—but it didn’t work. Too much tweed. Of course she couldn’t picture herself doing any of those things, either.

  She shoved the box to one side of her desk with the rest of the stuff she didn’t want: the green department newsletter, the yellow flyer she’d found on the floor, miscellaneous notes from her students explaining why they couldn’t turn their work in on time, the list of places she’d tried to find citations for her damn grandmother’s damn book—

  “Are you okay?” Ray said.

  No. I can’t find anything on this stinking Mesopotamian goddess my grandmother wrote about, I’m sleeping with a man who gives me a Taser instead of moving in with me, and I can’t remember when I really cared about anything except my dog. Shar rubbed her forehead. “I’m fine. I just have to find some sources for this goddess and then the book will be done, and once that’s out of the way …”

  “I don’t see why you’re bothering with it at all.” Ray checked his watch again.

  “I told you, my mother promised her mother she’d finish her book, and I promised my mother I’d finish the citations. It’s like a family curse. Most of the sources were easy to find but this Kammani—”

  “Your grandmother and your mother are dead,” Ray said, shooting his shirt cuff over his watch. “Listen—”

  “I don’t think that relieves me of the promise,” Shar said. “You don’t go back on your word just because somebody dies.”

  “You do if they don’t have a publisher,” Ray said. “Carpe diem, Shar.”

  You couldn’t carpe your diem with both hands, Shar thought, and tilted her chair back to stare at the ceiling. If this were a movie, she’d stand up and say, It’s over between us, Ray, and then she’d meet somebody fabulous; he’d walk right through her office door and say, I’ve been looking for an intelligent, mature woman with an advanced degree in Assyriology. Let me take you away from all—

  “Professor Summer?”

  Shar let her chair fall forward, back into reality. One of her grad students—pretty, procrastinating Leesa—stood in the doorway with a hi-I’m-here-to-ask-for-something smile and then came in and put some papers on the already-buried desk. “Here’s the outline you asked for, but I don’t have the chapters. I was wondering—”

  “No, you can’t have an extension,” Shar said, annoyed with her for screwing up her movie hero fantasy. “I told you your topic was too broad. Narrow it down to what you’ve already done—”

  “What’s your topic?” Ray asked, leaning against the wall, all professorial.

  “Passion and Joy in Mesopotamian Culture,” Leesa said.

  “Maybe narrow it down to one Mesopotamian culture and one idea?” Ray said. “The concept of joy in Sumerian poetry?”

  “That’s what Professor Summer said,” Leesa said. “But I didn’t want to restrain myself.”

  “Restrict,” Shar said, and then realized that Leesa probably didn’t want to restrain herself, either, but before she could say, Never mind, a beefy brown-haired undergraduate stopped in the doorway and scowled at her.

  “Professor Summer, you screwed up my test. I put Hera for Mesopotamian mother goddess and you marked it wrong.”

  Doug Essen. Wonderful. Shar said, “Hera is not Mesopotamian. She’s Greek.”

  “Well, Greece is right there, isn’t it?” Doug said belligerently. “She coulda gone next door, had a little nookie with some hot Mesopotamian god, been a mother goddess that way, right?”

  This is my life, Shar thought. This is what I’ve spent forty-eight years to achieve. She looked at Doug and suddenly he looked a lot like Ray. And Leesa. Like one more damn pothole in her dusty road
of life.

  “Yes, Doug,” she said through her teeth. “She could have walked seven hundred miles north, hung a right at the Euphrates, and had a gang bang with the entire pantheon of ancient Middle Eastern deities. But she still would have been Greek.”

  “That’s not fair,” Doug said, sounding about three. “You have to give me another chance.”

  Ray and Leesa had stopped talking to watch; definitely time to get rid of Doug. “Okay. You write me a paper with footnotes that show research proving that Hera was a Mesopotamian Mother Goddess and I’ll give you credit for that essay question.” And good luck with that, since Hera was Greek.

  “A paper,” Doug said, looking suspicious. “Where am I gonna find out that stuff?”

  “I’d start with the library,” Shar said. “Books, not DVDs, so Disney’s Hercules is out. If it’s colorful and it’s moving and it has catchy songs, you may not footnote it.”

  Doug looked at her with suspicion, but she kept her face blank, so he scowled at her and went off to pay somebody to write a research paper for him.

  “Jeez,” Leesa said, watching him go. “So about my extension—”

  “No,” Shar said.

  Leesa stopped. “Uh, okay, look, I’ll talk to you later. I’ll, uh, call.” She backed out of the door, clutching her sliding books, and as she waved good-bye to Ray and disappeared, a yellow flyer fluttered down to the floor.

  Ray picked it up and put it on Shar’s desk. “That wasn’t like you.”

  “That was exactly like me.” Shar shoved herself back from her overflowing desk. “The real me, not the good sport. I’m tired of the book; I’m tired of this job—” I’m tired of you….

  “What are you talking about?” Ray said. “Do you feel all right?”

  “I’m great.” Shar put her head on her desk.

  “You’re not tired of your job; you love it. Don’t do anything dumb like quitting. You’ve only got five years to go to retirement. And they’ll go fast. The first twenty-five years went fast, right?”

  She lifted her head and stared at him, appalled, but he wasn’t the problem. She was. She straightened in her chair and faced the truth: she had to change. It wasn’t too late, she could still set herself free—okay, her hair had gone gray and she was pushing fifty, but she could find joy and passion; she was not trapped. She could do anything she wanted; she could even decide to not look for Kammani Gula anymore. That thought gave her a sudden, giddy sense of freedom. The hell with my grandmother and the hell with Kammani Gula. Nobody has ever heard of her; Grandma probably made her up. I’m going to just delete her—

  “Don’t get perimenopausal on me,” Ray said.

  Shar glared at him and then realized that if she could delete Kammani Gula, she could delete Ray, too. “I think we should see other people.”

  Ray stared at her. “I just got you a Taser.”

  “You can have it back.”

  “It’s pink.”

  “I—”

  A yellow paper blew through the window and splatted on her desk. “What the hell?” She picked up the flyer and read it for the first time. “ ‘Be a Goddess to Your Dog! The Kammani Gula Dog Obedience Course’ … Oh, hell.”

  “Shar, are you listening to me?”

  Kammani Gula. Right there. She looked up at Ray with her heart sinking. “Somebody else besides my grandmother knew about Kammani Gula.”

  “Who cares?” Ray said, looking mad. “Are you serious about breaking up with me? Because I have to tell you, it’ll be a lot easier for me to find somebody else than it will be for you.”

  “Damn it,” Shar said, staring at the flyer, feeling the weight settle over her again.

  “Exactly,” Ray said. “I know you’re feeling down, but don’t—”

  “I was going to delete her, but now here’s somebody else using her name. She must have been real.” She looked at the flyer again. The dog class was in the auditorium, right across the hall, and it started in five minutes. She had no excuse for not checking it out. “I have to go to this damn class so I can find out where Kammani Gula came from. Damn it.”

  “I was talking about you ending our relationship,” Ray said stiffly. “But since you’ve made a foolish decision based on a spur-of-the-moment hormonal surge, I’m going to my six o’clock class. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  “Oh, good,” Shar said miserably, but he was already out the door.

  Wolfie pressed his nose against her leg again.

  “We’re going to a dog obedience class,” Shar told him, pushing back her chair so she could look into his soft brown eyes. “We’ll find out who this Kammani Gula was, I’ll make some notes, and then we’ll go home and eat popcorn and watch a movie. That’s our evening. Can you stand it?”

  Wolfie barked once and it sounded like approval, so Shar let it ride.

  She stacked the papers on her desk, put the box with the Taser in her purse, and found Wolfie’s leash to take him across the hall to the auditorium, trying not to feel defeated. It was a good thing that she was keeping her promise to her grandmother. And as for Ray …

  “We can change our lives slowly,” she told Wolfie as she hooked his leash on his collar. “Forget popcorn; we’ll have pretzels tonight.”

  Wolfie barked again, and she was pretty sure this time she heard contempt in his voice.

  That’s fair, she thought, and dragged him across the hall.

  TWO

  Aside from the stone walls and the harsh echo of Bailey’s toenails scratching against the floor, the inside of the step temple wasn’t as creepy as Daisy had expected. Even though it was June, the few students who stayed for summer classes gave it some life, and the recessed lighting that had been carved into the ceiling made the hallway seem a lot like all the other academic hallways on campus—slathered with the slightly intimidating air of academia but otherwise normal.

  “Old auditorium, old auditorium,” Daisy mumbled as they descended the stairwell to the ground floor, Bailey straining on the leash the whole way. “Where is the old auditorium?”

  “Are you on your way to the obedience class?”

  Bailey gave two sharp barks and Daisy looked up to see a tall man with dark hair looking down at her. For a moment, she felt stunned. He wasn’t an undergrad, that was for sure; the smile lines around his eyes crinkled a bit deep for that. But, taking in his worn black T-shirt and sun-bleached blue jeans, he didn’t seem a professor type, either.

  “Um … yeah,” she said. “How’d you know?”

  Bailey barked again, and the guy met her eyes with a deadpan expression. “I possess a rare intuitive gift.”

  “Right,” Daisy said, tightening her hold on Bailey’s leash. “Duh.”

  If I’d known you were here, I would have come into this building sooner.

  “Follow me.” He led her deeper into the belly of the building, finally pushing open one of a pair of heavy wooden doors and holding it for Daisy and Bailey. “Class is going to start in just a minute. You guys have a seat.”

  “Okay.” Daisy watched him as he led the way into what looked to be a large old-style auditorium, the kind that had rows of folding chairs. The windowless room had a square dais set up on shallow stone steps with a big—stone block? sacrificial altar?—podium in the center. Behind the podium hung a heavy black curtain, which obscured what Daisy figured was the other half of the room (the cute guy disappeared behind it, so something else was back there) and in front of it were seven folding chairs organized in a half circle. Five of them were filled, and Daisy chose the empty seat in the middle, between a skinny brunette and her huge black bear of a dog, and a gray-haired professor type with her black-and-gray wiener dog. Bailey hopped and barked and strained while the black bear stood still and the wiener dog whined and skirted under his mistress’s chair.

  “Sorry,” Daisy said, reaching out to grab Bailey’s harness. “He’s not my dog.” She turned her eyes on Bailey. “Bailey, stop.”

  Bailey jumped up and licked her
face and she shouted, “Ugh!” and swiped at her mouth. The room went quiet and Daisy heard a mutter of disgust come from the right end of the semicircle; a wraith of a girl with straight black hair and bug eyes glared at Daisy while the creepy black Chihuahua in her lap breathed a heh-heh-heh–sounding growl. Daisy recoiled a bit, then felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see a smiling teenage girl offering her a stick of gum; at the girl’s feet stood a foxhound that kept his cool even as Bailey skittered around him, barking like a maniac.

  “Hi, I’m Gen; this is Ziggy,” the girl said as Daisy took the gum. “It’s so gross when they French you, isn’t it?”

  “Oh my god, totally,” a voice said from behind Gen. Daisy leaned forward to see another teenage girl with a round face smooching at her fat, ancient poodle, who was wearing what appeared to be a tiara and a pearl necklace. “Isn’t it, Baby? Yes, it is. It’s so gross.” She smiled at Daisy. “Hi, I’m Bun.”

  “Thanks.” Daisy tucked the gum in her pocket as Gen moved back to take her seat at the left end of the circle, followed by Bun and Baby. Bailey yipped in mourning as Ziggy retreated with Gen; then, recognizing the limits of his leash, he darted under the professor’s seat and did something to which the wiener dog objected mightily.

  “I’m so sorry,” Daisy said, pulling Bailey back on the leash. “He’s not my—”

  “You are welcome to this place.” A husky female voice came from behind the altar—no, podium, podium—and Daisy looked up to see a big-busted, wasp-waisted, dark-haired woman in a long, tight linen wrap dress emerge from the curtain and look down on them. She was extraordinarily beautiful in a piercing-dark-eyes, stern-full-lips, jaw-like-a-commando kind of way.

  She could make a fortune as a dominatrix, Daisy thought as the woman said, “I am Kammani.”

  She said this as though announcing that she was Madonna or the Pope, obviously expecting a reaction, but only the bug-eyed girl lowered her head in reverence. The teenagers giggled, the skinny brunette and her huge dog seemed unimpressed, and the professor sighed and shifted in her seat as if exasperated.