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spotted me. This was the smell I’d been tracking! The thing was larger than me, with tiny ears that looked like they’d be fun to bite. I struggled to get down to play with this new friend, but Ethan held me tight.
    “Smokey, this is Bailey,” Ethan said.
    At last he placed me on the floor and I ran over to kiss the cat, but he drew his lips back from a set of really wicked-looking teeth and spat at me, arching his back and thrusting his puffy tail straight up into the air. I stopped, puzzled. Didn’t he want to play? The musty smell coming from under his tail was delicious. I tried to inch in and give Smokey’s butt a friendly sniff, and he hissed and spat and raised a paw, nails extended.
    “Aw, Smokey, be a nice cat. Be a nice cat.”
    Smokey gave Ethan a baleful glare. I picked up on the boy’s encouraging tone and yipped in a very welcoming fashion, but the cat remained unapproachable, even batting at my nose when I tried to lick his face.
    Okay, well, I was ready to play with him whenever he wanted, but I had more important things to care about than some snotty cat. Over the next several days, I learned my place in the family.
    The boy lived in a small room full of wonderful toys, whileMom and Dad shared a room with no toys whatsoever. One room had a basin of water I could only drink from if I climbed into it, and also had no toys unless you counted the white paper that I could pull from the wall in a continuous sheet. The rooms for sleeping were at the top of some steps that were impossible for me to climb despite my full-sized dog legs. The food was all kept hidden in one part of the house.
    Every time I decided I needed to squat and relieve myself, everyone in the house went crazy, scooping me up and racing out the door with me, setting me in the grass and watching me until I’d recovered from the trauma of it all enough to continue with my business, which earned me so much praise I wondered if this was my main function in the family. Their praise was inconsistent, though, because there were some papers they’d set out for me to rip up and if I squatted on them I was called a good dog, too, but with relief, not joy. And, as I mentioned, sometimes when we were all in the house together they became upset with me for doing
exactly the same thing.
    “No!” Mom or Ethan would shout when I wet the floor. “Good boy!” they’d sing when I peed in the grass. “Okay, that’s good,” they’d say when I urinated on the papers. I could not understand what in the world was wrong with them.
    Dad mostly ignored me, though I sensed he liked it when I got up in the morning to keep him company while he ate. He regarded me with mild affection—nothing like the berserk adoration flooding out of Ethan, though I could feel that was how much Dad and Mom loved the boy. Occasionally Dad would sit at the table in the evenings with the boy and they would talk quietly, concentrating, while sharp, pungent fumes filled the air. Dad would let me lie on his feet, since the boy’s feet were too far off the ground for me to reach.
    “Look, Bailey, we built an airplane,” the boy said after one of these sessions, thrusting a toy at me. It made my eyes water with the chemical odors, so I didn’t try to take it away. Making noises, the boy ran around the house holding the toy, and I chased after him and tried to tackle him. Later he put the thing on a shelf with other toys that faintly smelled of the same chemicals, and that was it until he and Dad decided to build another one.
    “This one is a rocket, Bailey,” Ethan told me, offering me a toy shaped like a stick. I turned up my nose at it. “We’re going to land one on the moon one day, and then people will live there, too. Would you like to be a space dog?”
    I heard the word “dog” and sensed there was a question, so I wagged.
Yes,
I thought.
I would be happy to help clean the dishes.
    Cleaning the dishes was where the boy would put a plate of food down and I would