One Dog Happy

Catalog Sales

1 Our parents divorced when I was nine and my sister, Melcy, was eleven. That was the year that Melcy and I moved to town with my mom and spent weekends with my dad in our old house in the country. While we were there, he would sometimes go out to do chores or errands or something, and I used that time to snoop around. At first, I only found a few things that I’d never noticed when we lived there full-time. There was an enema two-pack in the bathroom with only one of the two left. And the bedroom closet that used to be my mom’s was entirely full of Angel Soft toilet tissue, all the way up to the bar you were supposed to hang clothes on. That was funny to look at, but since my dad was a notorious cheapskate, not mysterious or anything. Catalog Sales 2 C a t a l o g S a l e s Then one day I looked through his rolltop desk and found a U.S. passport. This was strange for a couple of reasons. First, it was hard to imagine my dad going to another country. His brother, Ron, had been a foreign exchange student back when they were in high school, and my dad always said, “Ron means well, but he don’t have a brain in his skull.” Uncle Ron had wanted to go to Europe, but he got sent to Africa instead and came back weighing a hundred thirty, which is actually not very much for a tall person . My dad would bring that up at Thanksgiving, and Uncle Ron would say, “Well, it was something different, anyway,” and dad would repeat, “something different,” and roll his eyes at us. Also, there was the money. According to Melcy, it was why our parents divorced. Before the divorce, my dad used to own a farm. Afterward someone else owned it, and he cash-rented from that person. My mom used to own the Little Dancers’ Studio in town, but after the divorce she just taught there, so it was kind of the same thing, except that my mom liked to spend money. My dad didn’t. You wouldn’t think of my dad going on vacation, unless it was a place you could camp and maybe catch your own fish. I had the feeling if I kept snooping I’d find something else, and pretty soon I did: a phone bill, stuffed between some papers on his rolltop desk. “Two hundred sixty-two dollars. That’s a lot for long distance, right?” Melcy was in the kitchen making frosting, which was always the first thing she did when she was unsupervised. She liked to eat it straight from the bowl. Underneath the phone bill was a Farm and Fleet sale flyer. “Huffy Bikes for sixty-five dollars,” I yelled to Melcy. “Rollerblades , forty-eight.” “That’s too expensive,” she said. “You can get them for forty some places.” “Which can you get for forty? The bikes?” Under the sale flyer was a soft-cover catalog with a row of blackand -white pictures on it. It looked like a junior high yearbook. It was folded back to one page, and a few pictures were circled in red pen. “#45902 Cherry,” it said under one picture. “Age: 19. I am C a t a l o g S a l e s 3 pleasant friendly I enjoy cooking dancing and singing in a band. Seeking marriage with family values man and loving with responsibility.” I looked at the phone bill again. Two calls on the bill to Manila, the Philippines. “Dad’s going to the Philippines,” I yelled. Melcy ran into the room, and we started flipping through the catalog. There was more than one woman circled. Some had their hair pinned up with flowers on one side. Melcy grabbed the magazine. “I had it first.” “Stop, Tammy. It’ll rip.” I let go and read over her shoulder. Some of the descriptions said the girls liked to cook or clean house. The word “pleasant” was in two of the ads my dad had circled. I thought about that. My mom was many things, but she wasn’t really pleasant. On some days it seemed to me that she argued with almost everything anyone said. The girls my dad had circled were nineteen...