The whistle
A fourth short story, attached, and a lighter one. A woman learns to whistle with two fingers in a park. Every failed attempt brings over a stranger's old dog, and then she finally gets it right. The three before this were all someone at work noticing a small error. This time nobody is at work and there's no error to find. On the cold read I cut the paragraph that explained the ending, because the story had already shown it. I also moved the granddaughter from a bleacher into the dugout. It was her game, after all.
The whistle
At her granddaughter's softball game in June, the smallest girl on the team hit a ball over the left fielder's head, and Margo's granddaughter, who was nine and had never shown any gift for anything but sulking, stood up in the dugout, put two fingers in her mouth, and whistled so loud that a man in the front row of the bleachers spilled his lemonade.
Margo had wanted to do that her whole life. She hadn't known it until the man spilled his lemonade, and then she knew it completely.
"Who taught you that?" she asked in the car.
"Nobody," said the granddaughter, looking out the window. "You just do it."
You did not just do it. Margo watched videos. She learned that there were schools of thought: the two-finger school, the one-finger-and-thumb school, the people who did it with no hands at all and seemed, in their videos, faintly smug. She learned that the tongue had to be folded back on itself, and that the fingers held it there, and that the lips closed over the fingers, and that the air went out over the fold "like over a bottle." She learned that most of what came out of her was spit.
She practiced in the kitchen until Ron, who was otherwise a patient man, put down his coffee and said, "Margo. Please. It sounds like the kettle's dying."
So she took it to the park.
She went early, when the only people there were runners, who didn't care, and a man on the bench by the drinking fountain who did the crossword in pen and had an old yellow dog lying on his feet like a rug. Margo stood by the hedge with her back to them, folded her tongue, set her fingers, closed her lips, and blew.
What came out was mostly air, with something thin riding on top of it, a high little scrape of a sound, like a door hinge in another house.
The yellow dog stood up.
It came across the grass at a stiff, considering trot and sat down in front of her and looked up into her face with an expression of total trust and some concern.
"Sorry," Margo said. "Not you."
The dog stayed until she bent and scratched its ears, and then it went back to the bench and lay down on the man's feet again. The man did not look up from his crossword.
It happened every morning. She would blow and get the hinge sound, and the dog would rise from the man's shoes like something called back from a long way off and come and sit in front of her. She began to think of the hinge sound as the dog's sound. She would get a better one, almost a note, and the dog would come a little faster. She would get a terrible one, all wet air, and the dog would lift its head and put it down again, as if to say, Not even close.
She learned its name by listening. The man said it only when he left, folding the paper under his arm. "Biscuit," he said, without inflection, the way you'd say "Well," and the dog got up and went.
She told Ron about it at dinner.
"So you've trained a dog," Ron said. "Not even your own dog."
"I haven't trained anything. It's training me. It comes when I'm close."
"Close to what?"
She didn't know how to put it. Close to the real thing. Close enough that something out there could hear it, even if no person could.
In September, on a cold morning with the sprinklers still going, she folded her tongue and set her fingers and blew without thinking about any of it, and the sound that came out was enormous. It went across the whole park. A runner on the far path broke stride. A crow left a tree. It was the sound from the bleachers, the lemonade sound, and it was coming out of her.
She took her fingers out of her mouth and laughed out loud by the hedge, alone, and did it again to make sure, and it came again, just as big.
The man on the bench looked up from his crossword. It was the first time she had seen his face straight on. He had very pale eyebrows. He looked at her for a moment with what she decided was respect, and then he looked back down at the paper.
Biscuit had not moved. Biscuit lay on the man's feet with her chin on her paws, and her eyes were open, and she was not coming.
Margo stood by the hedge a while longer. Then she folded her tongue, and set her fingers, and closed her lips, and blew it wrong on purpose: mostly air, and that thin hinge riding on top.
Biscuit got up at once.