chewed the plastic anyway.
I was outside waiting when the bus pulled up, and although Chelsea and Todd both got off, there was no sign of the boy, which meant he would be arriving home with Mom. I went back into the house and pulled some shoes out of Mom’s closet, though I didn’t chew on them much because I was feeling pretty lethargic from all of the snacks Smokey had given me. I stood in the living room, trying to decide whether to lie on the couch, which no longer had any sun on it at all, or lie in the patch of sun on the carpet. It was a tough decision, and when I finally chose the sun I lay down uneasily, not sure I’d picked the right thing.
When Mom’s car door slammed I tore through the house into the garage and was out the dog door in an instant, wagging at the fence so no one would be the wiser. Ethan ran straight over to me and came into the yard to play with me while Mom went up the walk, her shoes clicking.
“I missed you, Bailey! Did you have fun today?” the boy asked me, scratching under my chin. We gazed at each other in adoration.
“Ethan! Come look what Bailey did!”
At the sound of my name, pronounced so sternly, my ears fell. Somehow, Smokey and I had been found out.
Ethan and I went into the house and I approached Mom with my tail in full wag so she’d forgive me. She was holding one of the shredded bags in her hand.
“The door to the garage was open. Look what he did,” Mom said. “Bailey, you are a bad dog. A bad dog.”
I hung my head. Though I’d technically done nothing wrong, I realized that Mom was mad at me. Ethan was, too, particularly when he started to pick up the bits of plastic off the floor.
“How in the world did he even get up on the counter? He must have jumped,” Mom said.
“You are a bad dog, a bad, bad dog, Bailey,” Ethan told me again.
Smokey strolled in, leaping languidly onto the counter. I gave him a glum look—he was a bad cat, a bad, bad cat.
Amazingly, no one said anything to Smokey about his role as instigator. Instead, they gave him a fresh can of food! I sat expectantly, figuring I should at least get a dog biscuit, but everyone was still giving me cross looks.
Mom pushed a mop around on the floor, and the boy carried a bag of trash out into the garage.
“Bailey, that was bad,” the boy whispered to me again. Apparently, everyone was having a much harder time getting over the incident than I was.
I was still in the kitchen when I heard Mom shriek, “Bailey!” from the back of the house.
I guessed she had found her shoes.
{ TEN }
Over the course of the next year or two, I noticed that when the children all played together Todd was often excluded. When he came around, an uneasiness went through the children, a mood change that Marshmallow and I could sense as easily as if one of them had screamed. Girls usually turned their backs on Todd, and the boys accepted him into their games with a noticeable reluctance. Ethan never went over to Todd’s house anymore.
Todd’s older brother, Drake, rarely came outside except to get in his car and drive away, though Linda soon learned to ride a bicycle and pedaled it down the street to be with little girls her age almost every day.
I took my cue from Ethan and never went near Todd again, though one snowy night when I was out in the backyard doing my business before bed I could smell him standing on the other side of the fence, back in some trees. I let out a warning bark and was pretty pleased when I heard him turn around and run away.
I didn’t much care for the concept of school, which was what happened most mornings at home. I liked it better when summer came and Mom and Ethan no longer had school and we would go to the Farm to live with Grandpa and Grandma.
Whenever I arrived at the Farm I took off at a run, checking to see what was different and what was the same, marking my territory, and reacquainting myself with Flare the horse, the mysterious black cat in the barn, and the ducks, who had irresponsibly decided to produce another batch of ducklings. I often could smell the skunk in the woods but, mindful of the unpleasantness of our last meetings, elected not to chase her down. If she wanted to play, she knew where to find me.
One summer night the whole family sat with me in the living room far past normal bedtime and everyone was excited, though Mom and Grandma were also afraid. And then they yelled and cheered and Grandpa cried and I barked, swept up in all the emotions. Humans are so much more complex than dogs, with such a broad range of feelings—though there were many times I missed the Yard, for the most part I was now living a far richer life, even though I often didn’t know what was going on. Ethan took me out into the night and gazed at the sky. “There’s a man on the moon right now, Bailey. See the moon? Someday, I’ll go there, too.”
He radiated such happiness I raced over and got a stick for him to throw for me. He laughed.
“Don’t worry, Bailey. I’ll take you with me when I go.”
Sometimes Grandpa would go for a car ride into town and the boy and I would accompany him. Before long I had memorized a scent map of the entire trip—there was a moist smell that carried with it the distinct odor of stupid ducks and delicious rotting fish, followed a few minutes later by a powerfully pungent scent that filled the car.
“Phew,” Ethan often said.
“That’s the goat ranch,” Grandpa would always reply.
With my head out the window I often spied the goats who were responsible for all the wonderful smells, and I would bark at them, though they were so dumb they never once fled in terror but just stood there, staring like Flare the horse.
