Read Online Why They Run the Way They Do by Susan Perabo - Free Book Online

and bony,” he said over the telephone. “Stocky. Fat if you have one. Do you?”
    â€œSure,” I said. “I got all kinds.” They were barking out back as we spoke.
    â€œI’d like to see them immediately.” He talked swift and clipped like a military man, everything an order. “I’ll be there at three o’clock.”
    I hesitated, but not for more than a breath or two. I needed to place the dogs in a hurry, sure, but I had to stick to the rules. What did the dogs care about a little lump? All they wanted was somebody who’d take them and keep them. So I told this Jerry I would have to make a home visit first, and if he passed then he could come out and take his pick.
    â€œI’ll bring references,” he said. “There’s no need for—”
    â€œThis is the way it works,” I said. “No home visit, no dog.”
    He didn’t say anything for a minute, but I could tell he was still there. I could practically hear the spokes in his head creaking through the telephone line. Then he said, “Just you? Nobody else?”
    â€œThere is nobody else,” I said.
    And so he gave me directions to his house, up in Cornish, about forty miles from my town. We set a time for the following morning.

    One day last year I did a home visit in New London and I was walking through the house and I saw an old man sitting in an easy chair and I knew right off he was dead. His hands were droopy in his lap in a way only dead hands droop. So I said to the woman walking me around—she wanted a little dog, one that would sit on her lap while she did the crossword—I said, “Ma’am is that man okay?” even though I knew full well he wasn’t, but didn’t know quite how to say it. And she said, “Oh, Daddy always takes his nap around this time,” and instead of telling her that her father was dead as a doornail I just said “oh, all right.” And I guess a little while after I left she must have figured it out. I don’t know what exactly happened because she never did call me about getting a little dog.
    Lying in bed that night before I went out to Jerry’s, I started thinking of that old man and his droopy hands. I tried to imagine the way my body would relax when I went, in which direction my head would nod, where my eyes might be fixed before somebody had a chance to shut them. When my mother died, down at the hospital in Manchester, frail as a leaf, she gave a little gasp of surprise right before the end. I wondered if anything would surprise me, if I would think something different than I’d thought before.
    Then I pushed all that garbage out of my mind and went to sleep.

    There was a gate at Jerry’s driveway, with a little box like at Wendy’s. I poked the button and a crackly woman came on and I told her who I was and she sighed and said, “Come on up.” And the gate swung open and I pulled through. And right then an idea started coming to me that these were people who could take three or four of my dogs. There must have been ten acres of grass and trees from what I could see and every bit of it fenced. The house was just shy of a mansion, two stories with tall windows and long white steps leading to a front porch that was empty but big enough to hold twenty rocking chairs. I parked my car at the foot of those stairs and saw Jerry was waiting for me up on the porch. He was older than he’d sounded on the phone. He looked eighty, though he also looked like he’d be okay with a few big dogs, tall and spry and with those muscled forearms you always find yourself looking at a moment too long. He had a head full of gray hair that was going in a hundred directions and a rectangle chin. There was no sign of the woman who’d sighed into the box.
    â€œYou gotta lot of room for a dog to run,” I called to him as I got out of the car.
    â€œI don’t want a dog to run,” he