{ THIRTEEN }

A year or so later, in the spring, Smokey the cat got sick. He lay around moaning and didn’t protest when I put my nose down in his face to investigate this new behavior. Mom became very worried and took Smokey for a car ride. When Mom came home, she was sad, probably because cats are no fun in a car.

A week or so later, Smokey died. After dinner the family went into the backyard, where Ethan had excavated a big hole, and they wrapped Smokey’s body in a blanket and put it in the hole and covered it with dirt. Ethan hammered a piece of wood into the soil next to the mound of wet dirt, and he and Mom cried a little. I nuzzled them both to remind them that there was really no need to grieve, since I was okay and really a much better pet than Smokey ever was.

The next day, after Mom and the boy left for school, I went out into the yard and dug Smokey back up, figuring they couldn’t have meant to bury a perfectly good dead cat.

That summer we didn’t go to the Farm at all. Ethan and some friends in the neighborhood would get up every day and go to people’s houses and cut grass with loud lawn mowers. The boy would take me along with him but always tied me to a tree. I loved the smell of the newly cut grass, but I did not care for lawn mowing in general and felt this activity was somehow involved in us not visiting the Farm. Grandpa and Grandma did drive in for a week, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun, especially when Dad and Grandpa exchanged some harsh words when they were alone in the backyard peeling husks off of corn. I felt the anger in both of them and wondered if it was a reaction to the fact that the corn husks were inedible, something I’d verified by both smelling and chewing. After that day, Dad and Grandpa were very uneasy in each other’s company.

When school started again, several things were different. The boy no longer went to Chelsea’s house when he got home—in fact, he usually was the last one to arrive, smelling of dirt, grass, and sweat as he raced up the driveway after a car dropped him off in the street. And some nights we’d go on a car ride to what I came to understand was a football game, where I would sit on a leash at the end of a long yard next to Mom and people would yell and scream for no reason. Boys wrestled and threw a ball to each other, sometimes running down close to where I was standing and other times playing all the way at the far end of the big yard.

I could smell Ethan in the group of boys sometimes. It was a little frustrating to just sit there and not go out and enhance the game—at home, I’d learned to get my mouth around a football. One time I was playing with the boy and I bit too hard and the football collapsed until it was a saggy flat wad of leather, sort of like the flip. After that, Ethan didn’t want me chewing on footballs, but I was still allowed to play with them as long as I was careful. Mom didn’t know this and held me tight by the leash. I knew if she would just let me go get the football, the boys would have a lot more fun chasing me than each other, because I was faster than any of them.

Chelsea’s puppy, Duchess, grew up, and we became good friends, once I demonstrated to her how she was to behave around me. One day when the gate was open I trotted over to see her and she was wearing a plastic cone around her neck and seemed very out of sorts. She thumped her tail a little when she saw me outside her cage, but she didn’t bother to get up. The sight made me uneasy—I hoped no one was planning to put one of those things on me again.

When it snowed Ethan and I played with sleds, and when the snow melted we played with bouncy balls. A couple of times the boy pulled the flip out of the closet and stared at it while I glanced away in dread. He’d hold it up and look it over, feeling its heft, and then put it away with a sigh.

That summer was another one without a Farm visit, and once again the boy cut grass with his friends—I would have thought he’d gotten it out of his system, but he apparently still enjoyed it. That year, Dad left for several days and while he was gone Grandpa and Grandma visited. Their car smelled like Flare and hay and the pond, and I stood and sniffed it for several minutes and raised my legs on the tires.

“My goodness, you are such a big boy!” Grandma told Ethan.

There was more football when the days turned cool, plus a wonderful surprise: Ethan could take his own car rides! This changed everything, because now I went almost everywhere with him, my nose out the window as I stood in the front seat, helping him drive. It turned out that the reason he stayed out so late was that he played football every night after school, leaving me tied up by the fence with a dish of water. It was boring, but at least I got to be with the boy.

Sometimes when Ethan took a car ride he forgot me, so I’d sit in the yard and yip for him to come back. Usually when this happened, Mom would come to see me.

“Want to go for a walk, Bailey?” she’d ask over and over until I was so excited I was dancing around in circles. She’d put the leash on my collar and we’d patrol the streets, stopping every few feet so I could mark the territory. Often we’d pass groups of children playing and I’d wonder why Ethan didn’t do that as much anymore. Mom sometimes unsnapped the leash and let me run with the children a little bit.

I liked Mom a lot. My only complaint was that when she exited the bathroom she would close the lid on my water bowl. Ethan always left the lid up for me.

When school ended that summer, Ethan and Mom took us on a car ride to the Farm. I was overjoyed to be back. Flare pretended not to recognize me and I wasn’t sure if they were the same ducks or different ones, but everything else seemed exactly the same.

Nearly every day Ethan would work with Grandpa and some men, hammering and sawing boards. I assumed at first that the boy was building another go-kart, but after a month or so it became clear that they were putting together a new barn, right next to the old one, which had a big hole in the roof.

I was the first one to spot the woman coming up the driveway, and ran down to enforce any needed security. When I got close enough to smell her I realized it was the girl, all grown up now. She remembered me, and I squirmed in pleasure as she scratched behind my ears.

“Hi there, Bailey; did you miss me? Good dog, Bailey.”

As the men noticed the girl they stopped working. Ethan was coming out of the old barn and stopped in surprise.

“Oh. Hi. Hannah?”

“Hi, Ethan.”

Grandpa and the other men were grinning at each other. Ethan looked over his shoulder at them and flushed, then came over to where Hannah and I were standing.

“So, hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

They looked away from each other. Hannah stopped scratching me and I gave her a little nudge to remind her to keep at it.

“Come on in the house,” Ethan said.

The rest of that summer, whenever I went for a car ride it smelled like the girl had been sitting in my seat. Sometimes she would come over and have dinner with us, and then she and Ethan would sit on the porch and talk and I would lie at their feet to give them something interesting to talk about.

One time I was awakened from a well-deserved nap by a little alarm coming off the both of them. They were sitting on the couch and their faces were really close together and their hearts were beating and I could sense fear and excitement. It sounded a little like they were eating, but I couldn’t smell any food. Not sure what was happening, I climbed up on the couch and forced my nose into the place where their heads were together, and they both burst out laughing at me.

The day Mom and Ethan drove back home for school, the smell of paint from the new barn was in the air and the girl came over and she and Ethan went down to the dock and sat with their feet in the water and talked. The girl cried, and they hugged a lot and didn’t throw sticks or do any of the things people normally do at a pond, so I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. There was more hugging at the car, and then we drove away, Ethan honking.

Things were different at home. For one thing, Dad had his own room now, with a new bed in it. He shared the bathroom with Ethan, and frankly, I didn’t like to go in there after Dad had been in it. For another, when Ethan wasn’t playing football with his friends he spent a lot of time in his room talking on the phone. He said the name Hannah often during these calls.

The leaves were falling from the trees on the day Ethan took me for a car ride to a place with big silver school buses full of people, and there, coming off of one of them, was the girl! I don’t know who was more happy to see her, me or the boy—I wanted to play with her, but all he wanted to do was hug. I was so excited at this development I didn’t mind that I was automatically a backseat dog for the return trip.

“Coach says there will be scouts from U of M and Michigan State tonight, to see me, Hannah,” the boy said. I understood the word “Hannah,” of course, but I also picked up a surge of fear and excitement from the boy. From Hannah there was happiness and pride. I looked out the window to see if I could figure out what was going on but didn’t see anything unusual.

That night, I was proud to stand with Hannah while Ethan played football with his friends. I felt fairly certain she had never been to such a place as wonderful as the big yard, and I led her over to where Mom usually took me and showed Hannah where to sit.

We’d only been there a little while when Todd came walking up. I hadn’t seen much of Todd lately, though his sister, Linda, still rode up and down the street on a bicycle all the time. “Hi, Bailey,” he said to me, really friendly, but there was still something very wrong about him and I just sniffed at his hand when he offered it to me.

“Do you know Bailey?” the girl asked. I wagged at the mention of my name.

“We’re old pals, aren’t we, boy. Good dog.”

I did not need to be called good dog by someone like Todd.

“You don’t go to school here; do you go to East?” Todd asked.

“No, I’m just visiting Ethan’s family.”

“What are you, a cousin or something?”

The people in the crowd all shouted and I jerked my head around, but there was nothing happening but more wrestling. It fooled me every time they did that.

“No, just . . . a friend.”

“So you want to party?” Todd asked her.

“Sorry?”

“Want to party? Some of us are getting together. This game’s going nowhere.”

“No, I . . . I’d better wait for Ethan.” I cocked my head at the girl. I could sense her getting anxious for some reason, and I could feel Todd’s anger building inside him like it always did.

“Ethan!” Todd turned and spat in the grass. “So are you two a couple, or what?”

“Well . . .”

“ ’Cause you should know, he’s pretty much going out with Michele Underwood.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Like, everybody knows it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So if you’re thinking, you know, him and you, that’s not, you know, that’s not going to happen.” Todd moved closer to the girl, and when she stiffened I saw that his hand was touching her shoulder. Her rising tension brought me back to my feet. Todd looked down at me and we locked eyes, and I felt the fur lifting on the back of my neck. Almost involuntarily, a low growl emerged from deep in my throat.

“Bailey!” The girl leaped to her feet. “What’s the matter?”

“Yeah, Bailey, it’s me, your pal.” He turned to the girl. “I’m Todd, by the way.”

“I’m Hannah.”

“Why don’t you tie up the dog and come with me? It’ll be fun.”

“Um, no, uh-uh. I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not? Come on.”

“No, I have to take care of Bailey.”

Todd shrugged. He stared at her. “Yeah. Well, whatever.”

The force of his anger was so strong I growled again, and this time the girl didn’t say anything to me about it. “Fine,” Todd said. “You ask Ethan about Michele. Okay?”

“Yes, okay.”

“You ask him.” Todd jammed his hands in his pockets and walked away.

Ethan was pretty happy and excited when he ran over to see us an hour or so later. “Michigan State, here we come. Spartans!” he shouted. I wagged and barked, and then his happiness went away.

“What’s the matter, Hannah?”

“Who is Michele?”

I put my paw on Ethan’s leg to let him know I was ready to play with the football, if he wanted.

“Michele? Who do you mean?” Ethan laughed, but the laughter stopped after a second, as if he had run out of air. “What’s wrong?”

They walked me in circles around the big yard, talking, so intently involved in conversation they didn’t notice when I ate a half of a hot dog, some popcorn, and bits of a tuna sandwich. Before long nearly everyone else had left, but they kept walking around and around.

“I don’t know this girl,” Ethan kept saying. “Who did you talk to?”

“I don’t remember his name. He knew Bailey, though.”

I froze at my name, wondering if I was going to get in trouble for the candy wrapper I was stealthily eating.

“Everybody knows Bailey; he comes to all the games.”

I quickly swallowed, but apparently I wasn’t in trouble. After another circuit around the big yard, made uninteresting by the fact that I’d pretty much found everything edible, the boy and the girl stopped and hugged. They did that a lot. “You’re all sweaty,” the girl laughed, pushing him away.

“Want to go for a car ride, Bailey?” the boy asked.

Of course I did! We went home, and there was some more quiet talking, and they fed me and I was content to fall asleep on the living room floor while the girl and the boy wrestled silently together on the couch.

We had a new dog door now, from the back door right out into the yard, and no one ever tried to suggest I should have to sleep in the garage anymore. I was glad I broke the family of that habit. I went outside to relieve myself and was astonished to find a piece of meat lying in the grass by the fence.

The funny thing was, it didn’t smell right. There was a sharp tang to it, an odd, bitter odor. Even more strange, Todd’s scent was all over it.

I picked up the piece of meat and carried it to the back patio, where I dropped it, the bitter taste causing foam in my mouth. Then I sat and looked at it. It was a pretty bad flavor, but then, it was a nice hunk of meat. If I chewed it fast enough, I could probably swallow it without tasting it.

I poked the meat with my nose. Why, I wondered, did it smell so strongly of Todd?