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

of ginger ale on the tray table, and at least four or five socks flopped on the floor like dead fish.
    â€œThis is where it’ll sleep?”
    â€œI expect so,” he said. “It’s where I spend most of my time.”
    No kiddin’, I thought. But instead I said, “Are there others in the household?”
    â€œPossibly,” he said, taking a small step away from me. “But they won’t have anything to do with the dog. The dog will be my responsibility.”
    He said this like he was repeating something he’d been told a bunch of times, and I thought again that he was like a gray-haired boy. Here he stood, seventy-five, eighty years old, and I could imagine that crackly woman on the intercom saying to him, “I’m not feeding that dog, not walking that dog, not brushing that dog. You bring a dog into this house you better be willing to take care of it, buster.” And Jerry toeing the floor, like little Opie Taylor on TV, saying, “Oh yes, ma’am, I’ll take care of it, I promise.”
    â€œHere’s the thing,” I said. “There’s paperwork you gotta fill out, and there’s a form that needs signed by everyone in the household. I don’t want a dog coming back to me because someone here doesn’t want it.”
    â€œI won’t return the dog,” he said.
    â€œI know you’re thinking that’s true,” I said. “I know you—”
    â€œI won’t return the dog,” he said angrily. “No matter what.”
    â€œYou feel that way now,” I said. “But you might change your mind if there’s someone harping on you about it every time it makes a noise or sheds some fur. Everyone has to sign off on the form. Everyone. No form, no dog.”
    He scowled. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

    Here’s a fact: nobody wants a dog in November. Spring’s the best—no surprise there—and summer’s fine and early fall calls to mind pictures of happy dogs playing in leaf piles and even December brings out a few folks looking for a Christmas present. But nobody in the state of New Hampshire’s thinking about dogs those first weeks of bitter cold, leading up to Thanksgiving, when the threat of snow sits over every house big and small and it’s only a matter of time before simple things—getting to work, picking up groceries—aren’t so simple.
    Not that I didn’t knock myself out trying. I spent extra money for color ads in the local paper, taped signs in every store window, waived the twenty-dollar fee. This brought out a couple more people than usual, and after the home visits and the paperwork I was down to sixteen dogs by the middle of November. But I had to move faster. At this rate it would take well into the new year to find spots for them all, and I was pretty sure I didn’t have that long.
    My sister called, asking me to come down to Boston for Thanksgiving, but I told her I was too busy. I might have gone—there was something nice even thinking about it, a heavy meal and voices talking over each other and a football game on somewhere—but I was afraid if I went I would buckle and tell her about what was inside me, and I knew right where that would lead. By the time that turkey’s bones were simmering for soup I’d be in some specialist’s office and there’d be cousins and nieces and god knows who turning up with flowers.
    â€œSome day I’m just gonna come up there and kidnap you,” she said. “All alone in the old house with those dogs out back, it’s not right. You come live near me and we’ll go for lunch every day and play bridge with the other ladies on the block. Two sisters growing old together.”
    â€œWhat’ll Joe think of that?”
    â€œWhat Joe thinks of everything—that he should turn up the TV.”
    We’d thought, for almost a year when I was twenty-three and she