Tomilyn Hannah Rupert

“That’s a nice looking bitch.”

Joanie curls the thin metal chain around her hand. It is only slightly less delicate than the one around her neck. She is sure he is talking about her dog, but she is dressed in the pink tweed pencil skirt and the way he hunches. The way he leans.

He bends over, pats the dog down. Feels her ribs with his palms wide. He is an old man in a navy suit and as he has gone down the line of competitors, thin solitary swoops of golden strands have begun to mark it. Evidence it.

He stands up, straightens his back. Moves on to the next girl. Then they are trotting in a circle and she is again being signaled to the front of the line. She bends down and stacks her girl, aligns her paws back from her hip, the same way her yoga instructor does to her. Daffodil stands strong, knows the pose. 

They both exit the ring, she grasps the small ribbon in her hand. Another one. The purple satin is soft and feels like plastic.

Outside of the ring she is relaxed, Daffodil is relaxed. Her friends give her hugs, give Daffodil an easy pat. 

The judge exits shortly after, approaches her, “Has she had a litter?”

“One. Last year.”

He nods, appraises the two of them. “I’ll keep my eye open for the next one.”

She gives a tight lipped smile. There will be no next litter, but Joanie doesn’t need to clarify to this judge. He’s in from Georgia for the show, and she’s in from Minnesota, and here they are in some Kansas town to collect or give points. In two weeks, she and Daffodil will drive to Chicago. In a month to Albany. The month after they will cross the border to Regina. 

Daffodil is already a Champion. She has already qualified for Westminster. 

She should stop showing her since she won’t breed her again. No more value to add. 

But she keeps registering for shows. 

Keeps registering even as she monitors her bank account. More going out than in, but only just, she justifies. Paychecks as a fourth-grade teacher in St Cloud were never going to make her wealthy. At one point she thought the dogs might add a little cushion.

It started early, junior handler, when they got Boston and his breeder tried to buy him back after seeing a photo of how nice he was growing up. She was the only girl at shows over fourteen not coerced by her parents. In college, she kept it up, living at home, with her big showy Newfoundland with strands of drool like pearls, as his face slowly edged into grey. No longer winning any shows. Then her own place, her own dog. First a fox terrier. Then a second. They did alright. But it was when she got her first Golden Retriever that she started winning real shows. 

And now she wore the same variations of skirt suits as her teenage self. The nylons. Court heels. Her legs aged with the rest of her, ankles disappearing as her feet melded to her calves uninterrupted. 

For a while, in her early thirties, there was a guy. A human one. He made fun of her ribbons, all pinned in a row to a piece of string that eventually encircled the whole of the living room. But his teasing was gentle. Admitted to his hobby of collecting wine costing as much, at least. Whatever brought her joy, he used to say, kissing first her on the forehead, and then the dogs, on their foreheads. 

Daffodil tugs at the lead, spots her litter mate, Damson, on the border between the grass monoculture of parkland and the wide puddle of asphalt of the parking lot. Joanie allows herself to be led. Everything feels flat, even the sky. All of Kansas must have the same weather. The sun beating down uninterrupted, not even a child’s drawing of a cloud to break up the sky. 

Damson’s owner’s operation is slicker than hers, an RV compared to her minivan. The grooming table never needs folding up, the blow drier never needs unplugging. But Shelley wore her wealth lightly, and Joanie couldn’t help but like her.

“I didn’t see Damson in the ring,” she keeps her voice light, friendly. 

“Hi beauty,” Shelley crouches down to Daffodil’s level, saying hello to her happy face first. She is rewarded with a lick, Daffodil’s tongue reaching the length of her cheek. “Oh no, I’m not showing her today, just Brisket in the dogs and little Donut. But Dammie feels left out if I just take the other two!”

All three are happily lazing in the shade of the canopy extended from the side of the RV, Damson wagging her tail slowly, deliberately at the sight of her friend.

“Nice to be at an outside show, I hate it when we’re in those sterile convention centers.”

She nods, even though she doesn’t really agree. Shelley stands up to her level, “When are you going to breed her again?”

Joanie shrugs, a small headache building from the tightness of her bun and the glare of the sun. Makes a note to give Daffodil some water.

Shelley continues, “It’d be different a second time.” Her handler, Robert, and his wide paisley tie, comes by then. He holds no room for small talk, is tense, “Whiskey ready?”

As the two shuffle the dogs around she gives a wave farewell, then takes Daffodil further into the parking lot to her own vehicle. The car keys feel weighty in her hand, she presses a button, and the trunk unlatches, unfurling. All the seats have been taken out of the back, and it takes some stretching to reach and get out the metal bowl. She fills it with water from her bottle. Joanie feels a strike of gratitude that it’s a breed specialty show, no need to wait around another day even if Daffodil sweeps the next round. The air from the van feels stuffy, even with the trunk open, and she sits on the sun warmed bumper watching her dog lap at water in a way that can only be described as dainty. 

Everything she does seems lady like. In the summer they’d go to lakes together, her doggy paddle slicing through water like dragging a spoon through fresh whipped cream. Last year when the heat of the days got too much, Joanie found a use for the plastic kiddie pool as heat relief for her. She set up a lawn chair in the backyard and stuck her feet in and the dog would splash and run and bring tennis balls for fetch, watching them bob in the few inches of water with demure anticipation.  

She checked her watch. It was almost time to go back for the next round. She grabbed a brush and began softly going over Daffodil’s fur, though it had hardly moved in the hours since the morning’s groom. 

Her watch was an elegant thing, black leather strap thin and the face of it small. There was almost nothing left from that relationship, it’d been seven years now, but she still had the watch. An anniversary present. He’d wrapped it tenderly in blue tissue paper and they’d had a giddy dinner with her wine glass filled only with water. 

A week after that she was in the emergency room, a man with silver hair asking her when her last period was. If this had ever happened before. She kept not answering, just asking if there was a way to stop it, and he kept shaking his head no. She was given a gown. Laid back. Let her abdomen be felt by a series of gloved hands and felt her flesh give way and resist and dimple and smooth back out. When she sat back up the thin white paper covering the plastic bench was stained red. It would be another week before she stopped bleeding. 

She changed to asking if this would always happen. Remembered it happening when she was twenty. Only then the sensation was pure relief. That she wouldn’t have to tell her boyfriend, wouldn’t be stuffed in an airless marriage. The guilt at that thought. She attended church every Sunday for the next year. 

Now it was only devastation. The man came to the first follow-up appointment. But not the rest after. And then all she had was the watch, the tissue paper it had come wrapped in long since recycled. 

Outside the ring she rolls the sticky paper up one arm and down the other, then hands it back to Robert. Brisket has done well. Robert will be pleased, she knows, once his game face comes off. Last night at the Holiday Inn they got dinner and he complained about his husband and parking enforcement in Cleveland and they both ordered a third vodka tonic. But when Robert has a dog showing, he is impassive. She smiles at him all the same and then they are all filing into the ring and it is time to trot. 

They go round and the grass flattens and springs back underneath their dress shoes and thick heels and paws. A temporary fence has created the rectangle and outside stands a few spectators. Losers from earlier in the day, mostly, still in their skirt suits and slacks and their dogs have gone back in crates but they are lingering. 

The line of people and retrievers stop, and they all strike their pose. The man in the navy suit is looking at them and looking at her specifically. He starts at the top of the line, and she holds her posture as he makes his way down. 

He spans his hands again over Daffodil’s ribcage. He is firm but she does not react, as though no one is touching her at all. Daffodil was misnamed really. Not a shade of yellow that the flower implies, but a crisp white blond more reminiscent of Rice Krispie Treats. Right now, she looks stoic.

Last spring, she lay on her side in a kiddie pool that had been layered with blankets and towels and panted and whimpered. Joanie had taken her to the vet at all the right times, everything should have been fine. And then out came just three puppies, not a single one breathing.

She called the vet in a panic, describing everything she could think of, desperately trying to remember any first aid class she’d ever taken. When she received assurances that all signs for her dog looked fine, even though she kept whimpering, she hung up the phone. Joanie crawled into the plastic ring and lay beside her crying and stroking her until the whimpering slowed, stopped and her breathing returned to an even pace. Last spring, Daffodil sat and watched as she dug a hole in the garden and buried the three puppies with dahlia tubers on top of the small bodies and then turned to her and promised she would never make her do it again. 

The judge looks at her now, the sun is making him sweat in his wool suit. “You have a run in your stocking.”

She gives him a terse smile, an empty smile. 

He continues down the line, and then she is walking briskly again, following Robert and Brisket and watching the swish of Brisket’s amber tinted tail. She leaves the ring with another ribbon. Reserve Winner’s Bitch.