nap and, after a quick squat in some grass, was ready to face whatever challenge had her so worked up.
“Ethan!” she called. “Come here; I want you to meet someone.”
I looked up at her curiously. We were in front of a big white house, and I wondered if there were kennels in the back, or maybe a big yard. I couldn’t hear any barking, though, so maybe I was the first dog here.
Then the front door of the house banged open and a human being like I’d never seen before ran out on the porch, jumped down the cement steps, and stopped dead in the grass.
We stared at each other. It was, I realized, a human child, a male. His mouth broke into a huge grin and he spread his arms. “A puppy!” he sang, and we ran to each other, instantly in love. I could not stop licking him and he could not stop giggling, and we rolled together in the grass.
I guess I had never bothered to consider that there might be such a thing as a boy, but now that I had found one, I thought it was just about the most wonderful concept in the world. He smelled of mud and sugar and an animal I’d never scented before, and a faint meaty odor clung to his fingers, so I licked them.
By the end of the day I would know him not just by smell but also by sight, sound, and gesture. His hair was dark, like Bobby’s, but very short, and his eyes were much lighter. He had a way of turning his head to look at me as if he were trying to hear me more than see me, and his voice bubbled with joy whenever he talked to me.
For the most part, though, I was drinking in his scent, licking his face, chewing his fingers.
“Can we keep him, Mom? Can we keep him?” the boy gasped between giggles.
The woman squatted down to pet my head. “Well, you know your dad, Ethan. He’s going to want to hear that you’ll take care of him—”
“I will! I will!”
“And that you’ll walk him and feed him—”
“Every day! I’ll walk him and feed him and brush him and give him water—”
“And you’ll have to clean up when he poops in the yard.”
The boy didn’t answer that one.
“I bought some puppy food at the store; let’s give him some dinner. You won’t believe what happened, I had to run to the gas station and get a jug of water; the poor thing was nearly dead with heat exhaustion,” the woman said.
“Want some dinner? Huh? Dinner?” the boy asked.
Sounded pretty good to me.
To my amazement, the boy picked me up and carried me right into the house! I had never in my life imagined such a thing was even possible.
I was going to like it here just fine.
Some of the floors were soft and embedded with the same animal odor I’d picked up on the boy, while other floors were slick and hard, causing my feet to skitter out from underneath me as I pursued the boy through the house. When the boy picked me up, the flow of love between us was so strong it gave me a hollow feeling in my tummy, almost like hunger.
I was lying on the floor with the boy, wrestling over a cloth, when I felt a vibration rumble through the house and heard the sound I’d learned meant the closing of a car door.
“Your father’s home,” the woman, whose name was Mom, told the boy, who was called Ethan.
Ethan stood up and faced the door, and Mom came to stand beside him. I grabbed the cloth and gave it a victorious shake but found it much less interesting without a boy attached to the other end of it.
A door opened. “Hi, Dad!” the boy yelled.
A man stepped into the room, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Okay, what is it?” he asked.
“Dad, Mom found this puppy . . . ,” Ethan said.
“He was locked in a car, nearly dead from heatstroke,” Mom said.
“Can we keep him, Dad? He’s the best puppy in the world!”
I decided to take advantage of the lapse in security and dove onto the boy’s shoes, biting his laces.
“Oh. I don’t know; this is not a good time,” the father said. “Do you know how much work a puppy is? You’re only eight years old, Ethan. It’s too much responsibility.”
I yanked on one of the boy’s laces and it gave, sliding away from his shoes. I tried to run off with it, but it remained attached to his feet so that it yanked me back, tumbling me head over heels. Snarling, I dove back onto the laces, grabbing them and giving them a furious shake.
“I’ll take care of him, and I’ll walk him and feed him and wash him,” the boy was saying. “He’s the best puppy in the world, Dad. He’s already house broken!”
Having wrestled the shoes into submission, I decided this would be a good time to take a little break, and squatted, depositing a stool along with my urine.
Wow, did
Soon the boy and I were sitting on the soft floor. Mom would say, “George?” and then Ethan would say, “George? Here, George! Hi, George!” and then Dad would say, “Skippy?” and Ethan would say, “Skippy? Are you Skippy? Here, Skippy!”
It was exhausting.
