Read Online The Surrogate by Henry Wall Judith - Free Book Online

bit and backed away. She held out her hand for him to sniff, and he took a tentative step forward, then she gently scratched his neck. And with great solemnity, the dog licked her chin.
    “I love him,” Jamie declared.
    The woman smiled. “He’s been with us for several months. Apparently he’d been fending for himself for some time when he was brought in. He was little more than skin and bones and had a serious case of mange. He’s about eight months old now, and I wouldn’t hazard a guess about his breeding. We’ve been calling him Ralph for no particular reason, but you can change that, of course.”
    “No, Ralph is fine,” Jamie said.
    She paid for his immunizations and neutering and was told that she could pick him up in the morning. “We’ll have him bathed and ready to go,” the woman said. “You’ll need to bring a collar and a leash.”
    Jamie knelt in front of Ralph and explained that she would return for him tomorrow. “We’re going to be a family, you and me,” she promised. “And I hope you like to walk. I plan for us to walk miles and miles every single day.”
    Jamie felt almost happy as she drove back to the motel. She would have a dog to keep her company during the strange journey on which she was embarking.
    Perhaps it was just as well that Amanda Tutt Hartmann and Toby Travis did not plan to fawn over her and make her feel like a member of the family, Jamie decided. That would be dishonest of them, and she really didn’t want to have any sort of lasting relationship with them. It was better that way. Tidier.
     
    She spent the following day getting to know her dog and taking him for his first walk at the end of a leash. He was smart and eager to please. “We’re going to get along just fine,” she told him. That evening she folded a blanket on the floor by the bed, and he dutifully curled up on it.
    The next three days went by quickly.
    She went shopping and bought socks, underwear, jeans, knit tops, hiking boots, a windbreaker, and a warm coat.
    Twice she drove to a nearby greenbelt and took Ralph for an extra-long walk.
    She visited the UT distance-learning office. The clerk told her that yes, the university still offered old-fashioned correspondence courses, although most of their students enrolled in online courses. Jamie left the office with a catalog of course offerings.
    She spent one afternoon writing letters. The first was to her sister, Ginger. “I just wanted you to know that I’m okay but will not have a permanent address for a number of months. Please remember me to my nieces. I know you are so proud of them.”
    Then she wrote to Charlene in California, two other high school friends, and her closest college friends, saying only that she had a “domestic” position with a wealthy family and would be living on their ranch and that she hoped to return to college next summer and would let them know when she had a permanent address.
    And she wrote to Joe Brammer’s grandparents, thanking them for years of friendship and their help during her grandmother’s illness. “Tell Joe I said hello,” she added at the end.
    She wondered what Joe would think of what she was doing. Would he be appalled? Or would he think she had made a sensible decision?
    And she wondered if Joe was married yet. If he ever thought about her at all.
    She recalled the day he stopped by the dry cleaner’s to tell her that he was going to get married. He had tried to make it seem like a by-the-way sort of announcement on his part and not something that he felt the need to tell her because there had been any sort of understanding between them. Which there hadn’t been. Not ever. But that was the last time she saw him, and if he thought of her as just a friend, wouldn’t he have continued to drop by to say hello when he was in the neighborhood?
    Of course, only a few weeks later, she had taken her semester finals and gone home to take care of her dying grandmother, so she never had a chance to