Read Online Becoming Chloe by Catherine Ryan Hyde - Free Book Online Page A

moment I hear the rhythmic scuffling of his walker.
    Chloe comes running back with a blanket and throws it down like a nest on the carpet. “I’m putting it here by the fire, Jordy. You’ll have to light a fire.”
    I set Bruno on the blanket. Just for a second my back screams louder than it did when I was holding him. Why didn’t somebody put that dog on a diet?
    We look up, and Otis is shuffling across the carpet. His face doesn’t look like his face. It looks like the face of someone else, someone softer and more open. It takes him a minute or two just to cross the living room. Bruno watches his progress without even raising his head.
    “Oh,” Otis says. “Oh. Oh, Bruno. He is in bad shape, isn’t he?”
    “Light a fire, Jordy,” Chloe says.
    “Should I take him to the vet, Otis?”
    “No, don’t,” Otis says. “He’s dying. Vet hasn’t got a cure for that yet.”
    “No, don’t,” Chloe says. “He wants to be at home, Jordy. He wants you to light a fire.”
    Otis and I are having a moment. We’re sitting on the couch together, have been for hours. Watching Chloe and the dog.
    They’re on the other side of the room, by the fireplace. Every now and then I’ve been getting up to feed more wood into the fire. Chloe didn’t raise her head the last time. Maybe she’s gone to sleep. We know Bruno is sleeping. We can hear him snore all the way over here.
    Chloe dried him off with towels. Put another blanket over him. Me, I had to run around to our apartment in the rain to dry off and put on warm clothes. Then again, this isn’t my last night on the planet. She’s lying with him the way she sleeps with me every night. Draped over him like she’s looking for the doorway into his skin. I watch rain stream down the windows in the dark.
    It gives me a feeling that the whole world is taking a moment to be sad.
    Otis says, “Nobody ever loved my dog before but me.” He says it quietly. It’s a moment between us, one not designed to reach all the way to Chloe, who has better things to do anyway.
    “Nobody ever even liked my dog before but me.”
    “I like Bruno,” I say.
    Otis looks over at my face, a serious taking-in. It occurs to me briefly that Otis’s last night on the planet might not be a long way off, either. “I guess you might,” he says. “Yeah. I guess by now you do. He’s not the most likable dog who ever lived.”
    “He grows on you.”
    “I was wrong about you. You turned out to be all right after all. When I first met you, I had my doubts.”
    “Both of us?”
    “No, you. I always liked her. Granted, she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. Now, I can say that, because you know I love the girl.”
    “She’s funny,” I say. “Lots of things she can’t do as well as we could. But then other things she does better.”
    “Like what?” Otis asks. He’s sleepy. He’s a little boy past his bedtime. He yawns.
    “Music. Art. Other things. She’s the one who knew Bruno was sick.”
    “Not sick,” Otis says. “Dying. Call it what it is.”
    Just as he finishes that sentence we hear one last loud, strange snore; then the snoring stops. Stays stopped. Chloe picks up her head. Her face is all lit up, beaming. She’s looking at a spot in the corner of the room, high, near the ceiling.
    “Wow,” she says. “Bruno,” she says. “Good dog.”
    I look over at Otis and he’s watching her closely. Intensely, like he sees something he never saw before. I guess I could be wrong. If I’m right, he never says what it is he sees.
    In the morning, before anyone else is awake, I bring the wheelbarrow around to the front porch. Then I go into the living room and lift Bruno for the last time.
    “What are you going to do with him?” Chloe asks. I don’t know she’s awake until she asks that.
    “I’m going to bury him in the backyard.”
    “Is that what Otis said he wanted?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. That’s what Bruno said he wanted, too.”
    While I’m digging, Chloe squats with