Dog War by Anthony C. Winkler Page B

wriggling bookends of her granddaughters.
    Henrietta giggled. “Yes! You wanna see it, Grandma?”
    “But don’t tell Daddy,” Cheryl-Lee warned. “Or he’ll tell us not to do it.”
    “Don’t worry,” Precious whispered back. “Knowing your father, he might want to bathe de lizard to get it ready for Timothy Pigeon’s pants.”
    Both children cackled gleefully at this idea, shaking so hard on the tiled floor that they vibrated Precious between them.
    “Everybody still cozy under there?” Henry sang out in the daybreak treble of the capon.

Chapter 8
    Every home is a honeycomb of intersecting routines, private ceremonies, and personal habits. And so was the one in which Precious now lived and to which she tried to adapt. The children had their fixed schedules of school and play; Shirley had her bizarre police work that gave her the nocturnal habits of an owl, departing in the evenings for night patrol and returning early in the morning when the children were first stirring; Henry had his beauty shop where he gave perms and managed a staff of five beauticians, requiring him to leave shortly after the children caught the school bus and just as Shirley was settling down for her day’s sleep.
    For the first week Precious was caught up in adapting to this hustle and bustle of intersecting domesticity without getting in anyone’s way, but after only a few days she had such a good grasp of who should be awake when, who should be rushing out of the door, who should be settling down for a day’s or night’s sleep, that she could contribute to the smooth running of the household in little helpful ways by settling down this one, fixing a snack for that one, or playing the cuckoo clock for any who overslept. Having served her domestic apprenticeship under the most cantankerous man to ever step foot across threshold, Precious was grimly of the opinion that no man or woman born was her match when it came to mastering household quirks and complicated timetables.
    That Henry was a beautician struck Precious as suspiciously odd if not downright unmanly, but she was careful to keep a straight face and offer no unwanted criticism. She just knew in her heart that she would never sit down and chat about women’s hairstyles or perms or hair straightening with Henry no matter how hard he begged. If he wanted to discuss the criminal mind, slaughter in Africa, or the guttersnipe tactics of English football hooligans, she was more than willing to reply to the extent of her ability to hold intelligent conversation on these male topics. But if he should broach the subject of perms or dyes or hairstyles to her, she intended to yawn politely and remind him of his manhood.
    During her first few days in America not an hour passed when Precious did not stumble upon a stupefying sight that made her just feel to stop and stare. America struck her as vast, strange, bizarre, and its exotic newness would have overwhelmed her senses and made her giddy had she not determined ahead of time to sternly repel geography. Of course, she knew that her-foot now walked the shores of a far-flung continent, but she-would still not allow herself to be bullied by the atlas. She remembered that Theophilus had told her that when he was in America, for one whole day all he could think about was, “Rass, dis place big, you know!” and that even as he stood at a urinal he had found himself silently and obsessively muttering, “Rass, dis place big, you know!” over and over again. But that was Theophilus. He was willing to kowtow to geography. Precious, on the other hand, knew who she was and what she was and was determined that no amount of continental land mass or foreign spectacle would reduce her to spatial muttering in the toilet.
    Still, the first few days stunned her with such an unexpected array of sights that for nearly a week all she could do was gape and gawk. If she was not careful, migration was going to turn her from a decent Christian woman into a