“Have to lower the price, I guess,” Colonel remarked a few days later. “Shame, that.” I didn’t even raise my head or run over to him to try to convince him not to be disappointed in me, which he apparently was.
In truth, I was feeling heartsick. I just couldn’t understand what was happening to me, why I was a puppy again. The idea of going through training, of learning Find with someone other than Maya or Jakob, of living another life, simply defeated me. I felt like a bad dog.
I didn’t race over to the fence to see people when they visited, not even when they had children—I didn’t want to do that again, either. Ethan was the only child I would ever be interested in.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he ill?” I heard a man ask one day.
“No. He just prefers to be off by himself,” Colonel answered.
The man came into the kennel and picked me up. He had light blue eyes and regarded me kindly. “You’re just a mellow fellow, is that it?” he asked me. I sensed an eagerness inside him, and somehow knew I would be leaving the kennel with him that day. I wandered over to my new mother and gave her a farewell lick on the face. She seemed to know it, too, and nuzzled me in return.
“Give you two fifty,” the man with the blue eyes said. I felt a sharp surprise in Colonel.
“What? Sir, this dog’s paternity—”
“Yeah, I read the ad. Look, it’s for my girlfriend. She’s not going to take him hunting; she just wants a dog. You said you’d make a deal. Now, I have to figure, if you’ve got a three-month-old puppy and breeding dogs is what you do, there’s some reason people don’t want this one. I don’t think
A little while later, the man was loading me into the backseat of his car. He shook hands with Colonel, who was letting me leave without so much as a farewell pat on the head. The man handed Colonel a small piece of paper. “If you are ever looking for a good deal on a luxury automobile, give me a call,” the man said cheerfully.
I sized up my new owner. I liked that he was letting me be a front-seat dog, but when he gazed over at me I felt nothing like affection coming from him but rather a complete indifference.
I soon found out why: I would not be living with the man, whose name turned out to be Derek. My new home was with a woman named Wendi, who screamed and jumped up and down when Derek brought me into the house. Wendi and Derek immediately started wrestling together, so I found myself exploring the apartment in which I now lived. There were shoes and clothes scattered everywhere, and boxes with dried food stuck to the insides sitting out on a low table in front of the couch. I licked these clean.
Derek didn’t radiate any particular affection toward Wendi, either, even though he hugged her as he was walking out the door. Whenever Al used to leave the house, the quick rush of love he felt toward Maya always made me wag my tail, but this man wasn’t like that at all.
Wendi’s love for me was instant but confusing, a jumble of emotions that I didn’t understand. Over the next several days she named me Pooh-Bear, Google, Snoopdog, Leno, and Pistachio. Then I was Pooh-Bear again, though she soon just stuck with Bear and its variations: Barry-Boo, Bear-Bear, Honey-woney Bear, Cuddle Bear, and Wonder Bear. She would hold me down and kiss me all over and squeeze me as if she couldn’t get enough of me, and then the phone would ring and she’d drop me to the floor to answer it.
Every morning Wendi rummaged through her belongings, her feelings wrapped up in a roiling panic, saying, “I’m late! I’m late!” She would bang out the door and then I’d be alone all day, bored silly.
She put newspapers on the floor, but I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to pee on them or avoid them, so I did a little of both. My teeth were so sore my mouth was watering, so I wound up chewing on a couple of shoes, which sent Wendi into a screaming fit when she saw it. Sometimes she forgot to feed me and then I had no choice but to dive into the trash can for something, and this, too, caused screaming.
As far as I could see, life with Wendi had no purpose whatsoever. We didn’t train together; we didn’t even walk together much—she would open the door and let me run around in the yard at night, but hardly ever during the day, and only then with an odd, furtive fear, as if we were doing something wrong. I became so frustrated, so full of pent-up energy, that I wound up barking, sometimes for hours straight, my voice ringing off the walls and back at me.
One day there was a loud knock on the door. “Bear! Come here!” Wendi hissed at me. She locked me in her bedroom, but I could easily hear a man speaking to her. He sounded mad.
“Not allowed to have a dog! It’s in your lease!” I cocked my head at the word “dog,” wondering if I might be the source of the man’s anger. I hadn’t, as far as I knew, done anything wrong, but all the rules were different at this crazy place, so who could say?
The next time Wendi left for work she broke the pattern, calling me over and sitting me down. She seemed completely unimpressed that I knew how to sit on command without being taught. “Look, Bear-Bear, you can’t bark while I’m gone, okay? I’ll get in trouble with the neighbors. No barking, okay?”
I could feel sadness at the edges of her feelings and wondered what it was all about. Perhaps she was bored all day, too. Why didn’t she just take me with her? I loved car rides! I barked out my pent-up energy all afternoon, but I didn’t chew any shoes.
A day or so later, Wendi opened the door with one hand and pulled a piece of paper off the outside of the door with another. I raced over to her, my bladder bursting, but she didn’t let me out. Instead she looked at the paper and then started shouting angrily. I had no choice but to squat on the kitchen floor, and she smacked me on the bottom with an open palm and then opened the door.
“Here, you might as well go out; everybody knows you’re here anyway,” she muttered. I finished my business in the yard. I was sorry I had made the mess in the kitchen, but I simply hadn’t had an option.
The next day, Wendi slept in late and then we got in the car and went for a long, long car ride. I was a backseat dog because of all the things piled on the front seat, but she did lower the window so I could poke my nose out it. We pulled up in the driveway of a small house with several vehicles in the yard—I could tell by the smell of them that they hadn’t moved in a long time. I lifted my leg on one of them.
An older woman opened the door.
“Hi, Mom,” Wendi said.
