Here to Stay by Margot Early Page A

Teddy and Whiteout, who had determined they were friends, were sniffing the baseboards.
    Mrs. Workman turned to Sissy, clasped her hands and said, “Oh, I’m so glad. Oh, how lovely.” Then, “But…” She looked toward Elijah.
    Elijah knew what was coming. Matthew, the brother just below him in age, was in a Trappist monastery and they were expecting him to be ordained the following spring. “We’ll speak to a priest, see if we can have the marriage blessed, Mom.”
    She still seemed uneasy, but nodded, willing to leave this detail to Elijah.
    Elijah’s teenage sister, Maureen, sat at the kitchen table in her waitress uniform, ready to go to work at one of the lakeside fish places. “Congratulations, Elijah. It’s nice someone will have you.”
    Which earned her an ice cube down the back from Elijah’s water glass.
    Sissy felt accepted and was glad. She’d visited the immaculate but very simple house many times before when she and Elijah were teenagers. She liked the Workmans, though when they were all together, they made a crowd. She wasn’t used to that.
    Nervous, she watched Whiteout put his front feet up on the counter. She gave his leash a sharp jerk. “Off!”
    Maureen said, “At least one of you will know what she’s doing.” And she gave Sissy a friendly wink.
    Lake of the Ozarks

    A N HOUR LATER , while Sissy and Elijah sat on the front deck of their honeymoon cabin, the dogs lay at their feet, each with a bone. The escape from Sissy’s parents’ house, had been made more unpleasant by the discovery, when they returned to the car, that Whiteout had jumped out and begun digging up her mother’s rose bushes.
    Then, there was her mother’s fury at Sissy’s taking Teddy, in the end the only way she could fully unleash her anger at her daughter’s marriage.
    Sissy moved to sit on Elijah’s lounge with him. She grasped his closest hand, his left, with the ring that matched hers. “I don’t have a wedding present for you.”
    “Or I for you,” he said, pulling her against him. “This chair’s not quite big enough for both of us.”
    “We’ll just have to get closer. Okay, let’s make a bargain. We’ll each name a gift we want. And I won’t ask for anything you can’t give me, and I know you won’t, either.”
    “Like making love five times a day?”
    His warm eyes delved into hers, and Sissy couldn’t help kissing him. “I love you,” she said.
    “I have everything I want,” he told her, “but what is it you want?”
    She sat up suddenly, urgently, and gazed at him. “A kennel. I want to raise and show shepherds as my parents do. But I want it to be our kennel, yours and mine.”
    Elijah’s heart sank. Sissy, who knew how expensive it was to show dogs in conformation, let alone to raise them, thought he could afford this. Even if he made enough money…
    He thought uneasily of Barbara and of everyone else at the Humane Society. It briefly occurred to him that his job might actually be in jeopardy if he did this. Trying for tact, he said, “Wouldn’t you rather stay with your parents’ kennel? Show with them? Otherwise you’d be competing against them.”
    “I want to compete against them,” Sissy answered, her voice fierce. “I want to meet my mother in the German shepherd ring, and I want to win.”
    Warily Elijah watched her eyes focus on some far-off victory.
    “Don’t you see, Elijah?” she said, turning to him. “She thinks I’m coming down in the world in every way, that even Teddy will suffer from our marriage. She wanted to breed me to Clark Treffinger-Hart—I know that sounds crass—but you’re my choice, Elijah, and she said the most horrid things about the life we’re going to have together. We have to have our own kennel, and by God it’s going to leave hers in the dust.”
    Elijah met her eyes. “Sissy, you might be comingdown in the world in some ways. I don’t make that kind of money.”
    “But I have ideas. You see, I’m a really good