Soon after the goat ranch a great rattle would seize the car as we drove over a wooden bridge and I would start wagging then, because I loved car rides to town and the banging rumble noise meant we were almost there.
Grandpa liked to go to a place where he sat in a chair and a man played with his hair, and Ethan would get bored and we’d wind up walking up and down the streets, looking at windows and hoping to meet other dogs, which I assumed was the reason we were in town in the first place. The best location for dogs was in the park, which was a big grassy area where people sat on blankets. There was a pond, but the boy didn’t want me to swim in it.
Everywhere in town I could smell the goat ranch—if I ever needed to catch my bearings, I would just turn my nose until the scent was the strongest, and that way lay home.
One day we were in the park and an older boy was throwing a plastic toy for his dog to catch. The dog was a black female, short, and all business—when I trotted up to her she completely ignored me, her eyes on the plastic toy, which was a thin, brightly colored disk. It would soar through the air and she would run and leap and snag it before it even touched the ground, which I suppose was a pretty impressive trick if you liked that sort of thing.
“What do you think, Bailey? Do you want to do that, boy?” Ethan asked me. His eyes were shining as he watched the little dog catch the plastic disk, and when we got home he went right to his room and got busy making what he called the “flip.”
“It’s like a cross between a boomerang, a Frisbee, and a baseball,” he told Grandpa. “It will fly twice as far, because the ball gives it weight, see?”
I sniffed at the object, which had been a perfectly good football before Ethan cut it up and asked Grandma to put new stitches in it. “Come on, Bailey!” the boy shouted.
We raced outside. “How much money can you make on an invention like this?” the boy asked his grandpa.
“Let’s just see how she flies,” Grandpa observed.
“Okay, ready, Bailey? Ready?”
I took this to mean that something was about to happen and stood alertly. The boy cranked his arm back and flung the flip into the air, where it twisted and fell from the sky as if it had hit something.
I trotted off the porch and went over to sniff it.
“Bring the flip, Bailey!” the boy called.
Gingerly I picked the thing up. I remembered the short dog chasing the elegant flying disk in the park and felt a pang of envy. I took it back over to where the boy was standing and spat it out.
“Not aerodynamic,” Grandpa was saying. “Too much resistance.”
“I just need to throw it right,” the boy said.
Grandpa went back inside, and for the next hour the boy practiced throwing the flip out into the yard and I brought it back. I could sense a building despair in him, so one time when he threw the flip and it flopped to the ground I brought him back a stick instead. “No, Bailey,” he said sadly. “The flip. Get the flip.”
I barked, wagging, trying to get him to see just how fun the stick could be if he would give it a chance.
“Bailey! The flip!”
And then someone said, “Hi.”
It was a girl Ethan’s age. I trotted over to her, wagging, and she petted me on the head. In one hand she carried a covered basket containing some sweet-smelling breads, which really got my attention. I sat down, looking as attractive as possible so she’d hand over what was in her basket. “What’s your name, girl?” she asked me.
“He’s a boy,” Ethan said. “Name is Bailey.”
I looked over at the boy because he said my name and saw that he was acting strange. It was almost as if he were afraid, but not exactly, though he had taken a half step back when he saw her. I looked back at the girl, who I really liked because of the rich-smelling biscuits in her basket.
“I live down the road. My mom made some brownies for your family. Uh,” the girl said, gesturing to her bicycle.
“Oh,” the boy said.
I kept my attention on the basket.
“So, um,” the girl said.
“I’ll get my grandma,” the boy said. He turned and walked inside the house, but I elected to stay with the girl and her dog biscuits.
“Hi, Bailey, are you a good dog? You’re a good dog,” the girl told me.
Good, but not so good as to get a dog biscuit, I discovered, even though after a minute I gave the basket a nudge with my nose to remind her of the business at hand. Her hair was light colored and she brushed at it while she waited for Ethan to come back. She, too, seemed the tiniest bit afraid, though I could see nothing that would give anybody anxiety except a poor starving dog who needed a treat.
“Hannah!” Grandma said, coming out of the house. “It’s so good to see you.”
“Hi, Mrs. Morgan.”
“Come in, come in. What have you got there?”
“My mom made some brownies.”
“Well, isn’t that wonderful. Ethan, you probably don’t remember, but you and Hannah used to play together when you were just babies. She’s a little more than a year younger than you.”
“I don’t remember,” Ethan said, kicking at the carpet.
