Chapter 2
Laysha nodded. “I hope so,” she said. “I married basically after feeling rejected by somebody I really cared about. Threw myself into that substitute relationship and honestly don’t feel like I did Paul any service. The divorce was a relief for both of us. I did try to make it work, but you can’t force feelings that don’t exist.”
“Good point,” he said. After an awkward pause, he looked at her several times, as if wanting to ask a question.
She didn’t offer anything, focusing on the traffic instead. “How will you figure out where the dog went from here?”
“Well, that’s another reason I need wheels,” he said. “I’ll go to the last place he was and see what I can figure out.”
“And why would somebody take the dog?”
“Jealousy? There’s quite a vetting process to adopt a War Dog after it’s been retired from service.”
“But then somebody else could have just applied and been given another one,” she said.
“True. And maybe it ran away because it didn’t like something about the scenario. Don’t forget these dogs are highly trained, but they’ve also been through tough times. They can come back with PTSD, just like the human soldiers do.
“In some ways they need to be retrained to enter their civilian life of retirement, just like for me and others like me who were injured. I have his file, and I’ve read some of it, and he’d gone through several handlers before his retirement, after which several said he was difficult to work with. Mostly over his attachment to his one handler who died on the job. He was trained to find bombs and other chemical weapons.”
“So was Beowulf aggressive? Maybe he did something really ugly, like attacking the adopting couple’s children or something, and the owner shot him and buried him, thinking good riddance?” She shivered. “But I hope not. All dogs deserve a second chance.”
“The couple had no kids,” he said, “and Beowulf’s file doesn’t show any aggressive tendency, other than when called into action. However, that’s certainly a possibility, although it’s not the one I want to hear.”
“Well, we’re almost there, at home,” she said, as she switched from city roads to country roads, and finally turned on her signal to pull into her driveway.
“You sure you’re okay with me staying with you?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Why not?” she asked. “You’ve stayed with me lots.”
“I know, but I used to stay with my brother a lot of times too.”
“Well, you can stay with him if you want,” she said. “You know your ex-wife’s there.”
“True. That’s … that’s a good enough reason to keep me away.”
“But you do you,” she said. She hopped out, closed the truck door, and headed to her front porch. She knew he had come up behind her as she turned to open the door and let her dogs out. Three dogs raced outside, barking like crazy, as if they’d just been attacked, and headed toward him. He dropped his big duffel bag and bent down to say hi to them. Immediately they turned into the slobberiest pups ever. She shook her head as she watched them. “Every damn time you’re here,” she said, “you can make the biggest, strongest, baddest animal turn into Jell-O.”
He chuckled. “They know I’m a softy inside,” he said, trying to pet all three of them, as they wiggled in his hands.
“Says you,” she said. “Graynor’s inside on the couch.”
“You still got him?”
“Not for much longer,” she said sadly. “He’s fifteen and well past his time.”
He nodded in empathy. “And there’s nothing quite like losing our canine friends, is there?”
“Well, losing family’s worse, yet he’s furry family,” she said. She walked in and called out, “Graynor, somebody to see you.” She could hear the thump of his tail on the couch. She walked around. She had blankets laid out for him, and here her great big old German wirehaired pointer was stretched out on the cushions with his eyes open, not moving, except for his tail wiggling. She bent down, gave him a quick cuddle and a kiss, and then stepped back so he saw Caleb. Immediately he struggled to get to his feet.
Caleb stepped forward. “Hey, old man, stay where you are. It’s okay.” And he dropped to his knees to cuddle the huge dog that he had known since Graynor was a pup.
The two connected like long-lost friends, and it brought tears to Laysha’s eyes because she knew she would lose Graynor at some point, and she wasn’t ready for it. She would never be ready for that. He had been there for her through the thick and the thin, through fifteen years of her life. Half of it. Almost half of it. She would be thirty next month. And here that guy had been a birthday gift for her after she had rescued him, but then her parents had refused to let her keep him. She had cried for days and weeks after they took him away, and finally they decided that she could have him and brought him back to her for her birthday gift. She and Graynor had been inseparable ever since. But she knew that, even though he had had a good life with her, his time was coming to an end.
She walked into the kitchen, more to control the choking in the back of her throat, and she put on coffee, staring out the window to focus on something happier.
She had five acres of land here. The one thing that she had really prided herself on when she needed to buy a house was space. She had lived in apartments, small townhomes, and everything possible in a city that made her feel cramped and too close to her neighbors. When she finally bought her own place, she purchased a house just out of the city and managed to get five acres with it, although not a whole lot grew on it. It took the bulk of
