Dogs and Goddesses Read online

  Just then, something flew at her, smacking her gently in the side of the face. She grabbed at it and pulled it back—another yellow flyer. She glanced around, looking for a student with an armful who needed a serious talking to, but there was no one. Daisy glanced at the paper and started reading:

  BE A GODDESS TO YOUR DOG!

  The Kammani Gula Dog Obedience Course

  “ ‘Be a Goddess to Your Dog!’?” she said. “Now I’ve seen everything. Although it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you and—”

  “Be a what?” Peg snatched the flyer away from Daisy and read it, her eyes widening, and then …

  … she sneezed.

  “Oh, no,” Daisy said, backing away. “You go train that dog and be a goddess; I have CDs to alphabetize.”

  “Ah-chooo!” This one hit so loudly that Daisy could hear it echoing off the stone of the temple.

  “Ah, crap,” Daisy said.

  Peg reached into her tiny purse, withdrew one of her classic monogrammed handkerchiefs, and blew her nose so loudly that Bailey barked twice and hopped up in the air, ostensibly to check on her.

  “Oh, no.” Peg held out her leash hand to Daisy.

  “ ‘Oh, no,’ is right,” Daisy said. “As in ‘no.’ No way, no how, no—”

  “The doctor said that if my allergies didn’t go away from the shots, he knew a great specialist in …” Peg hesitated, tapping her foot and glancing around; then she smiled and snapped her fingers. “New York! That’s right. Manhattan. The Garment District, actually. Isn’t that funny?” Peg grabbed Daisy’s hand and shoved the leash and the flyer into it. “I’ll be back in a week or so.”

  “A week?” Daisy tried to shove the leash back into her mother’s hand, but Peg moved freakishly fast.

  “Or so!” Peg called back, scurrying across the campus. Daisy tried to run after her, but Bailey was pulling toward the step temple.

  “But … no … I can’t … ,” Daisy said, and then felt a crunch of paper under her feet. She looked down: another yellow flyer. She bent over to pick it up and Bailey yanked on the leash, but she yanked back.

  “Knock it off,” she said, then pulled up the flyer, un-crinkling them both, her eyes trailing over the text, catching on teach you to communicate with your dog while commanding complete obedience….

  “Complete obedience.” Daisy showed him the flyer. “See that?”

  Bailey barked, hopped up in the air, and landed with an ungracious splat that didn’t seem to bother him in the least. Daisy glanced at the details on the paper. The class was starting in half an hour. She could do that. She scanned for the location….

  “Crap.”

  The history department.

  Daisy looked up at the step temple while Bailey darted around her, barking, yanking her arm almost out of its socket. She wasn’t going to make it through the next week—or so—of dogsitting if something didn’t change. Maybe going into the creepy building and learning to be a goddess would help.

  She looked at Bailey, who hopped in the air again, landed, turned around twice, lifted his leg to a patch of grass even though he’d long ago run out of urine, and barked twice at nothing.

  “Certainly can’t make things any worse,” she said, put the flyer in her back pocket, and started for the building.

  In her office on the ground floor of the step temple converted into a history building, Professor Shar Summer looked at the pink metallic appliance on the desk in front of her and thought, My life has hit bottom. She was forty-eight years old, her grandmother was running her life from beyond the grave, and her lover of two years had just given her a Taser instead of a commitment.

  A cold nose pressed against her leg under her desk, and she reached down and patted her best friend, her black-and-gray long-haired dachshund, Wolfie.

  “Now you don’t have to be afraid anymore,” Ray said as he checked his watch. “Problem solved.”

  I didn’t say I was afraid; I said I didn’t like living alone. “Thank you.”

  “I got the pink one,” Ray said, evidently sensing his gift had missed on a few points.

  “Perfect.” Shar put the lid on the Taser box, trying to be fair. Maybe if she were more passionate about Ray, he’d be more passionate about her. She tried to imagine Ray passionate about anything—finding the Ark of the Covenant, rescuing a kidnapped bride, defeating a mummy—but it didn’t work. Too much tweed. Of course she couldn’t picture herself doing any of those things, either.

  She shoved the box to one side of her desk with the rest of the stuff she didn’t want: the green department newsletter, the yellow flyer she’d found on the floor, miscellaneous notes from her students explaining why they couldn’t turn their work in on time, the list of places she’d tried to find citations for her damn grandmother’s damn book—

  “Are you okay?” Ray said.

  No. I can’t find anything on this stinking Mesopotamian goddess my grandmother wrote about, I’m sleeping with a man who gives me a Taser instead of moving in with me, and I can’t remember when I really cared about anything except my dog. Shar rubbed her forehead. “I’m fine. I just have to find some sources for this goddess and then the book will be done, and once that’s out of the way …”

  “I don’t see why you’re bothering with it at all.” Ray checked his watch again.

  “I told you, my mother promised her mother she’d finish her book, and I promised my mother I’d finish the citations. It’s like a family curse. Most of the sources were easy to find but this Kammani—”

  “Your grandmother and your mother are dead,” Ray said, shooting his shirt cuff over his watch. “Listen—”

  “I don’t think that relieves me of the promise,” Shar said. “You don’t go back on your word just because somebody dies.”

  “You do if they don’t have a publisher,” Ray said. “Carpe diem, Shar.”

  You couldn’t carpe your diem with both hands, Shar thought, and tilted her chair back to stare at the ceiling. If this were a movie, she’d stand up and say, It’s over between us, Ray, and then she’d meet somebody fabulous; he’d walk right through her office door and say, I’ve been looking for an intelligent, mature woman with an advanced degree in Assyriology. Let me take you away from all—

  “Professor Summer?”

  Shar let her chair fall forward, back into reality. One of her grad students—pretty, procrastinating Leesa—stood in the doorway with a hi-I’m-here-to-ask-for-something smile and then came in and put some papers on the already-buried desk. “Here’s the outline you asked for, but I don’t have the chapters. I was wondering—”

  “No, you can’t have an extension,” Shar said, annoyed with her for screwing up her movie hero fantasy. “I told you your topic was too broad. Narrow it down to what you’ve already done—”

  “What’s your topic?” Ray asked, leaning against the wall, all professorial.

  “Passion and Joy in Mesopotamian Culture,” Leesa said.

  “Maybe narrow it down to one Mesopotamian culture and one idea?” Ray said. “The concept of joy in Sumerian poetry?”

  “That’s what Professor Summer said,” Leesa said. “But I didn’t want to restrain myself.”

  “Restrict,” Shar said, and then realized that Leesa probably didn’t want to restrain herself, either, but before she could say, Never mind, a beefy brown-haired undergraduate stopped in the doorway and scowled at her.

  “Professor Summer, you screwed up my test. I put Hera for Mesopotamian mother goddess and you marked it wrong.”

  Doug Essen. Wonderful. Shar said, “Hera is not Mesopotamian. She’s Greek.”

  “Well, Greece is right there, isn’t it?” Doug said belligerently. “She coulda gone next door, had a little nookie with some hot Mesopotamian god, been a mother goddess that way, right?”

  This is my life, Shar thought. This is what I’ve spent forty-eight years to achieve. She looked at Doug and suddenly he looked a lot like Ray. And Leesa. Like one more damn pothole in her dusty road