Kite and the Lost Dog

The dog nearly gave me a heart attack. I was driving my last delivery of the day, the one that always goes out past the rail yards, and this big golden retriever comes flying out of the weeds by the grain elevator like the devil was after him. He ran straight at the van. I had to slam the brakes.

"Well, hey there, buddy! Where'd you come from?" I said, leaning out the window.

He just bounced around the front of the van, tongue out, tail going like a windshield wiper in a hurricane. No person anywhere. So of course I got out. Of course I did. He jumped on me with both front paws and I ended up sitting in the gravel with two hundred pounds of happy dog on my chest, laughing like an idiot.

He had a collar with a tag. Just one tag, scratched all to heck, and I had to squint to read it. Neptune. No phone number that I could see. Great. A lost dog named after a planet, out by the creepy old grain elevator, at five thirty on a Tuesday.

So I hauled him into the van. He rode shotgun with his head out the window even though the window wasn't down all the way, and I mean he fought for that. I gave up and rolled it down. Dog wins, every time.

I took him straight to the shop. Ralph's tattoo place is on Main Street, right between the pawn shop and the noodle place, and it's got that big green door you can't miss. I walked in with a golden retriever and Ralph looked up from a sketch he was inking on paper and just started laughing.

"Okay, so, explain this," he said, putting the pen down.

"There was a dog by the elevator! He ran at the van! What was I gonna do, leave him?"

"His name is Neptune," I added, showing him the tag. "Which means the universe has opinions."

Ralph is twenty-nine and he thinks everything is a sign. He once told me our parking spot being open on a rainy day meant we should buy a lottery ticket, so I take his cosmic readings with about a pound of salt. But he crouched down and let Neptune lick his whole face and said, "You know what this is? This is a gift from the elevator. That place has been waiting for us to do something out there for years."

"It's a dog, Ralph."

"It's an opportunity, Raquel."

Neptune laid down on the shop floor like he owned the place. One of Ralph's clients, a guy getting a cover-up on his forearm, asked if the dog was part of the design. Ralph said only if he wanted a golden retriever on his bicep. The guy laughed and said maybe. Anyway, I took a photo of Neptune, wrote up a post, and put it on the town board and a couple of the lost pet pages. Found near the old grain elevator, big friendly male, tag says Neptune. Then I mostly forgot about it because we had dinner and laundry and life, you know how it goes.

* * *

My phone buzzed around nine the next morning while I was eating toast. Unknown number. I almost sent it to voicemail, but something made me answer.

"Hello?"

"Hi. Is this Raquel? This is going to sound so weird, but, um, it's Adrianna. Adrianna from college? From the dorm?"

I dropped my toast. Butter side down, obviously.

"Adrianna. Oh my god, hi. How do you even have my number?"

"Your post. The dog. Neptune is my dog, he got out of my advisor's fence yesterday when I was helping her move some soil samples, and I've been driving around losing my mind, and then somebody shared your post and I saw your name and I thought, there's no way, but there is a way."

"You're in grad school here? Since when?"

"Since fall. Agronomy. I keep meaning to look people up and then I chicken out, you know how I get. Can I please, please come get my dog?"

"Come get him. I've got him at my husband's shop. Fair warning, Ralph has already decided the dog is a sign from the grain elevator."

There was a pause and then she laughed, that same laugh I remembered from two years of dorm walls thin enough to hear it through. "That sounds exactly like something a tattoo guy would say."

We set it up for that afternoon. Adrianna is twenty-eight now, same as me, and when she walked into the shop with her hair pulled back and dirt on her knees from whatever soil thing she'd been doing, my stomach did the thing. The old thing. The thing I hadn't felt since we were twenty-one and twenty-two and sharing that dorm room where she'd stay up talking about plants until two in the morning and I'd pretend I wasn't hanging on every word.

Because here's the part I've never exactly put in a post: I had a crush on Adrianna in college. A real one. Two years of it. And I never did a single thing about it, and then she moved away, and I met Ralph, and it was over. Except it wasn't, apparently, because the second she hugged me hello I felt twenty-one again.

"This is Neptune," she said, crouching down while the dog lost his mind all over her. "You bad, bad, wonderful boy."

Ralph watched the whole thing from behind the counter. I could feel him watching. Later, after Adrianna had thanked us with a six-pack and stayed three hours, after we'd traded numbers and made plans to walk the dogs together like normal adults, Ralph sat me down at the kitchen table with two beers and a face on him.

"So," he said. "You gonna tell me about college, or do I have to guess?"

"You already know about college."

"I know you had a thing for her. I've known since our second date, you told me at the bar by campus. What I don't know is if it's still there."

I looked at my beer. "It's still there."

"Yeah, I figured. You get this face."

"I do not have a face."

"You absolutely have a face. It's fine. It's actually kind of great." He turned his bottle around on the table a few times. "So here's my idea, and you can tell me it's insane."

"Tell me it's insane."

"Adrianna has a field survey to finish on the riverbank by the elevator, and she wants to fly a kite so she can photograph the high grass from above. Kite, camera on the line, the whole deal. She asked if we'd help, and she's bringing Neptune."

"Okay? That sounds like fun, actually."

"And I think we should make a game of it."

I should say here that Ralph and I have been married two years, since I was twenty-seven, and he is the least jealous man alive or possibly the most secure, we've never decided. So when he said make a game of it, I didn't panic. I got curious, which is worse.

"What kind of game?"

"One afternoon. The search. While the kite is up in the air, you can act on the thing. Kiss her, touch her, whatever you two want, whatever she says yes to. The rule ends when the kite comes down. When the string's in and the kite's on the ground, it's done, and everything after that is just regular friends again, unless all three of us decide otherwise some other time. And I'm there the whole time. I want to watch. I want to see you finally get your shot, even if it's for ten minutes under a kite."

I stared at him. "You're serious."

"Dead serious. And before you say anything, I've thought about it a lot. It doesn't scare me. It kind of does the opposite. And nothing happens unless she's into it, obviously. If she says no or gets weird, it's over and we never mention it again."

"And if she doesn't get weird?"

"Then you fly a kite with a girl you've been thinking about for seven years."

Neptune was sprawled under the table with his head on my foot, breathing like a furnace. I scratched his ear and thought about it for a real long time. Like, a genuinely long time, long enough that Ralph finished his beer.

"If I do this," I said, "you have to be the one who tells her. It's your idea, you explain it. And if she laughs in your face, we buy her dinner and never speak of it."

"Deal," Ralph said, grinning like he'd already won something.

"You're insane," I told him.

"Probably. But it's a good kind." He tapped his empty bottle against mine. "One afternoon. Kite up, kite down. That's the whole rule."

God help me, I said yes.

Saturday came around fast. Ralph closed the shop early, I took my van, and we drove out to the river path with a kite bag the size of a small body and a cooler of drinks. Adrianna was already there, waiting by the trailhead with Neptune on a long lead, wearing these rubber boots that came up to her knees and a ball cap that said SOIL IS ALIVE, which is the most agronomy thing I have ever seen in my life.

"Nice hat," I said when I got out.

"It was a gift from my department. I promised myself I'd never wear it in public."

"And yet."

"And yet," she laughed and hugged me, and yeah, okay, my pulse did the thing again. Two years of marriage and one hug from Adrianna and my heart was acting like I'd chugged three espressos. Get a grip, Raquel.

The afternoon was hot but dry, which apparently was perfect kite weather. I don't know anything about kites. I thought you throw them in the air and run. No. There's technique. There's line management. There's something called a drogue, which I heard wrong the first time and will not repeat here.

Adrianna laid everything out on a tarp like she was doing surgery. "Okay, so the camera goes here, on the line, about sixty feet up. It takes pictures every ten seconds and we stitch them together later. It's called kite aerial photography. It's how my department surveys test plots when drones are booked."

"Your department sounds fun."

"My department sounds like four guys who argue about drainage," she said, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the tarp.

Ralph carried the kite itself, a big red delta wing thing, out toward the open flat ground between the path and the elevator. The old grain elevator stood over everything, this huge concrete giant with the paint peeling off in sheets, and the rail yards sprawled out beyond it all quiet on a Saturday. It's weirdly beautiful out there in a rusty way. I drive past it every day for work and I never once looked at it until that afternoon.

"Alright," Adrianna said, unspooling line. "Raquel, you hold the kite up and walk backward when I say go. Ralph, you're on launch assist. Neptune, you're on morale."

Neptune wagged. He was extremely qualified for morale.

We got the kite up on the third try. The first try it just flopped in the grass like a dying fish, and the second try it went up sideways and Ralph had to chase it, and Adrianna was dying laughing, this real honking laugh I'd forgotten about, the one where she snorts at the top. God, that laugh. Then the wind shifted, came up the river steady, and the third try it just rose. It climbed like it meant it, string humming, the red wing getting smaller and smaller against the sky until it was hanging way up over the elevator and the camera clip ticked up the line.

"Perfect," Adrianna said, feeding line off the spool. "That's a textbook thermal ride. It'll sit there for hours if the wind holds."

We got the camera anchored and Ralph cracked a drink and flopped in a camp chair in the shade of the tarp. Neptune flopped next to him. And then it was kind of just the two of us standing there, me and Adrianna, holding a spool of string between us while a kite flew a few hundred feet over a dead grain elevator.

I want to tell you I planned what happened next. I didn't. I'd thought about it for a week, sure, Ralph had laid the whole thing out, the rule, the kite up kite down thing, but I hadn't planned the actual moment. There's no planning a moment like that. There's just you and the string and her hand reaching across to take the spool from you, and your fingers brushing, and the jolt that goes up your arm like you grabbed a fence wire.

"Oh, sorry," she said.

"That's okay," I said, way too fast.

She didn't take the spool. Her fingers stayed on it next to mine. "Raquel."

"Yeah?"

"Is there a reason your husband keeps looking at us and smiling?"

Oh boy. Okay. Deep breath. This was it, this was the door, and Ralph had told her the whole deal the night before on the phone, I knew he had because I'd listened from the hallway like a coward, so I knew she knew, but knowing a thing and standing in it are two different animals.

"Because there's a game," I said. "And we're in it."

"I know." She was looking at the kite, not at me, and her ears were red under the cap. "He told me. I didn't sleep much, thinking about it, honestly. I kept going back and forth. And then I decided."

"Decided what?"

She turned and looked at me then. Twenty-eight years old, dirt on her boots, same brown eyes as the dorm, and I swear the whole rail yard got quiet. "I decided that I spent two years at twenty-one and twenty-two wanting to kiss you and being too scared, and I'm not doing that math