Read Online Giant George by Dave Nasser and Lynne Barrett-Lee - Free Book Online

never tried to dominate the other dogs; it was great to see he wasn’t being pushed around anymore.
    He also seemed to have a real intelligence about him, and had learned a new phrase he loved: “dog park.” All I had to do now was say those two words and he’d become real excited, alternately bounding around and watching me intently, until his enthusiasm was rewarded when I gotout his leash. I could barely open the truck door before he’d have scooted in.
    Still, both Christie and I were silent for a few moments as we took in the enormity of his incredible growth spurt, and the realization that he’d probably be growing
for at least two more years
. I parked the truck in a bay and switched off the engine. “Maybe he’s just a
really
fast developer,” I said. “Maybe this isit. Maybe he’s done with growing already.”
    It was so ridiculous an idea that it hardly needed saying: it was like saying the moon was made of green cheese. “Or, maybe,” said Christie, climbing out and pushing the door closed, “he’s just going to be one hell of a big dog.”
    It’s got to be said that most people don’t run around buying queen-sized mattresses in bed stores for anything other thanhumans. And it’s also true that when humans buy mattresses, they generally buy box springs and bed frames to go with them. But we just wanted a mattress—for our dog.
    The assistant in the bed store didn’t know this yet, so when he bounded up to see if he could help us, he naturally assumedthat the mattress we were currently lying on to try out was, as was usual, intended for us. And as it hadn’ttaken us long to choose it (it was big enough and cheap enough—job done), we got off it and I said to him, “Fine. We’ll take it.”
    “Certainly, sir,” he said, looking extremely cheerful. It was obviously a slow day for bed sales. “So,” he went on, noting down the details on the mattress ticket so he could go to his computer and check on stock, “have you decided on a box spring and bed frame togo with that?”
    “We don’t need either, thanks,” Christie told him. “Just the mattress.”
    “Just the mattress?” He looked deflated now.
    “Just the mattress,” I repeated.
    He looked even more deflated. We’d held so much promise, yet here we were letting him down, big-time. He tried again. “You sure you folks don’t want—”
    I shook my head firmly. “We only need the mattress. It’s not for us,” I explained.“It’s for our dog.”
    His eyes bulged. “For your
dog
?”
    He looked down at the mattress, then back at us, and back at the mattress again, his face a picture. “For your
dog
?” he said again, and you could see his mind working. “As in
a
dog? Dog singular?”
    “As in dog singular,” confirmed Christie. “He’s a big dog. He’s pretty much outgrown his single one.”
    The assistant took a last look at the mattress,and us, before going off to see if he had one in stock that we could buy and take with us right away.
    “From what I’m visualizing, does the word ‘big’ even cover it?” he asked us as he left.
    We exchanged a glance, then shook our heads. It probably didn’t.
    In the truck on the way home, George’s new bed strapped carefully in back, we laughed at the idea that our “baby” had grown, in less thana year, from a tiny ball who sat trembling in Christie’s lap on the way home from the Phoenix airport to an animal so big that he now needed an entire queen-sized mattress to sleep on.
    Perhaps now that George had it, we both agreed, gratefully, he wouldn’t need to spend a big chunk of every night curled up in
our
bed, which was a bonus, whichever way you looked at it. First it meant we mightall get some better quality sleep now, and second, though we were not really thinking about it quite yet, it might give us the space to put our minds to the business of making human babies without our canine one coming between us.
    But what was a natural transition as far as we were