A Dog's Purpose

“Want to go for a car ride, Bailey?” the boy asked.

Of course I did! We went home, and there was some more quiet talking, and they fed me and I was content to fall asleep on the living room floor while the girl and the boy wrestled silently together on the couch.

We had a new dog door now, from the back door right out into the yard, and no one ever tried to suggest I should have to sleep in the garage anymore. I was glad I broke the family of that habit. I went outside to relieve myself and was astonished to find a piece of meat lying in the grass by the fence.

The funny thing was, it didn’t smell right. There was a sharp tang to it, an odd, bitter odor. Even more strange, Todd’s scent was all over it.

I picked up the piece of meat and carried it to the back patio, where I dropped it, the bitter taste causing foam in my mouth. Then I sat and looked at it. It was a pretty bad flavor, but then, it was a nice hunk of meat. If I chewed it fast enough, I could probably swallow it without tasting it.

I poked the meat with my nose. Why, I wondered, did it smell so strongly of Todd?

{ FOURTEEN }

When Mom came outside the next morning and saw me, I hung my head and tapped the patio with just the tip of my tail. For some reason, though I had done nothing wrong, I felt really guilty.

“Good morning, Bailey,” she said. Then she saw the meat. “What’s that?”

When she bent over to look more closely at the meat, I dropped onto my back for a tummy rub. I’d been staring at that piece of meat all night, it seemed, and I was exhausted and needed reassurance I had done the right thing, even if I didn’t understand why. There was just something wrong, here, and it had prevented me from taking advantage of the free meal.

“Where did this come from, Bailey?” Mom stroked my belly lightly, then reached over and picked up the meat. “Ugh,” she said.

I sat up alertly. If she was going to feed it to me, it meant it was okay. Instead, she turned away to take it into the house. I rose up on my back legs a little—now that she was removing it, I’d changed my mind; I wanted to eat it!

“Yuck, Bailey, you don’t want that, whatever it is,” Mom said. She dropped the meat into the garbage.

Hannah sat in my seat for the car ride to the giant silver school buses, and I sat alone in the car for a long time while Ethan and Hannah stood and hugged. When the boy came back to the car, he felt sad and lonely, so I put my head in his lap instead of sticking my nose out the window.

The girl came back to visit again the day after the family sat around the indoor tree and tore up papers for Merry Christmas. I was in a bad mood because Ethan gave Mom a new black and white kitten, named Felix. He had no manners whatsoever and attacked my tail when I sat down and often lunged out at me from behind the couch, batting at me with his tiny paws. When I tried to play with him, he wrapped his legs around my nose and bit me with his sharp teeth. Hannah paid way too much attention to the kitty when she first arrived, though I had known the girl longer and was obviously the favorite pet. Dogs have important jobs, like barking when the doorbell rings, but cats have no function in a house whatsoever.

One thing the kitten couldn’t do was go outside. The ground was coated with a thick layer of snow, and the one time Felix ventured to put a foot into the stuff he turned around and ran back into the house as if he’d been burned. So when Hannah and Ethan built a big pile of snow in the front yard and put a hat on it, I was right there with them. The boy liked to tackle me and drag me around in the white stuff, and I let him catch me for the sheer joy of having his arms around me, the way he’d played with me every day when he was younger.

When we went sledding, Hannah sat in the back and I ran alongside the sled, barking and trying to pull the mittens off of the boy’s hands.

One afternoon the sun was out and the air was so cold and clean I could taste it all the way down my throat. All of the children from the neighborhood were there at the sledding hill, and Hannah and Ethan spent as much time pushing the younger ones as riding themselves. I soon grew tired of running up and down the slope, which was why I was at the bottom when Todd drove up.

He looked at me when he got out of the car, but he didn’t say anything to me, or reach out his hand. I kept my distance.

“Linda! Come on, time to come home!” he shouted, his breath whipping out of his mouth in a steamy cloud.

Linda was on the slope with three of her little friends, coming down in a saucer-shaped sled at about one mile an hour. Ethan and Hannah flashed past them on their sled, laughing. “I don’t want to!” Linda yelled back.

“Now! Mom says!”

Ethan and Hannah came to a halt at the bottom of the hill, tumbling out of their sled. They lay on top of each other, giggling. Todd stood and watched them.

Something in Todd came to the surface, then. Not anger, exactly, but something worse, something dark, an emotion I’d never felt from anyone before. I felt it in the way he stared at Ethan and Hannah, his face very still.

Ethan and the girl stood up, wiping snow off each other, and came over to see Todd, their arms still intertwined. They radiated such love and joy it blinded them to the hate-filled currents emanating from Todd.

“Hey, Todd.”

“Hi.”

“This is Hannah. Hannah, this is Todd; he lives down the street.”

Hannah reached her hand out, smiling. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

Todd stiffened a little. “Actually, we already met.”

Hannah cocked her head, wiping hair out of her eyes. “We did?”