All stories › Fantasy › Clean and Dry › Episode 2
Gray Wool Pants
Episode 2 of 3 of Clean and Dry by Mitchell Haas · free to read
The pants were gray wool and pressed, and Celia held them out to her brother without looking at him.
“Put these on,” she said. “Those sweatpants are a cry for help.”
“They’re his,” Vaughn said.
“Then give them back to him.”
Vaughn took the pants into my bathroom. Celia stayed at my counter with her coat buttoned and looked at me like I had backed into her car.
“He’s my brother,” she said. “And he’s a dog, and we like it that way.”
“He seemed to want an hour.”
“He always wants an hour. You’re his seventh groomer, Garrett. Five said no. One said yes and moved two towns over.”
“Why?”
“He told her to raise her prices. She did very well.”
Vaughn came out in the gray pants and my shop T-shirt. They looked better on him than anything had ever looked on me.
“I never told her to move,” he said.
“Tell him why,” Celia said. “He paid with his nose.”
“I was an accountant,” Vaughn said. “A hundred hours a week for fifteen years. Two hospital stays before I turned thirty-nine, and I answered email from both beds. Then I made my arrangement.”
“And before he made it,” Celia said, “he made me promise. Whatever he says in the tub, the answer is no. The first thing he does with an hour is find something to fix.”
“I fixed his prices.”
“You read his appointment book for twenty-five minutes.”
At 12:30 my T-shirt and the gray pants dropped to the floor, and a standard poodle stepped out of them and shook. Celia folded the pants flat, put them back in her purse, and clipped on his leash.
“Every fourth Saturday at nine,” she said. “Same groom. Same answer.”
Four Saturdays later, she didn’t leave. She sat in my waiting chair with her purse on her knees and watched me lift Bishop into the tub like I was a roofer she didn’t trust.
“Good morning, Celia,” Vaughn said.
“Don’t.”
I worked the lather into his topknot and kept quiet. I had groomed for divorced couples who shared a beagle. I knew when I was furniture.
“As a dog,” Celia said to me, “he naps in every patch of sun in the house. He thinks the mail carrier is a miracle. I’ve never seen him happier. I’m not trading that for an hour of spreadsheets.”
“One hour,” Vaughn said. “Right here, where you can see me. If I touch a phone or that appointment book, you can find an eighth groomer.”
Celia looked at me.
“It’s your nose,” she said.
I thought about the cat from Wednesday. I thought about Opal’s sausage.
“Yes,” I said.
At 11:40 I finished the last nail, and the poodle on my table became her brother. Celia handed him the gray pants from her purse without looking. I handed him my shop T-shirt. The bleach bucket hit me like a slap, and I went and breathed by the door.
Vaughn walked right past my appointment book.
“Walk with me,” he said to Celia.
“Where?”
“End of the plaza and back.”
She took his arm like it might be a trick. They went out and down the sidewalk, past the laundromat and the donut shop and the pizza place, slow and in step, all the way to the glass doors of the banquet room at the end.
I watched through my window. I could smell the pizza ovens warming up, Opal’s fryer, a dryer sheet trying very hard to be a meadow. I could smell, faintly, that Celia had put on her good perfume on a plain Saturday morning.
They stood at those glass doors a full minute. Then they walked back.
“That,” Celia said, “was very nice.”
“Four weeks from today, at four,” Vaughn said. “I could walk you in.”
That was how I found out. Celia was getting married in that banquet room, to a periodontist who laughed at everything, and Bishop was the ring bearer.
“No,” she said. “You’d be dry at four and a poodle at five, in front of eighty guests and his whole family. His mother faints at card tricks.”
“I’d be gone before five.”
“You’d be giving a toast about my retirement account.”
“It is underfunded.”
“No,” she said.
At 12:40 the man in the gray pants became a poodle again. Celia clipped on his leash, said thank you to me like she was signing for a package, and went out.
She had left the gray pants folded on my chair.